Well, color me naive

Doing the same thing all the time is boring. All my life, I’ve chosen jobs in part to ensure I’d have enough variety. But I never thought about the impact on pilots or doctors of the way their jobs have gotten routinized.

[T]here are many, many areas of life where routinization is imposed in order to lower cost and raise overall quality — and it often has a detrimental effect on the job satisfaction of the people performing the work.

Some examples: airlines moving from hub-and-spoke to shuttle models, so their flight crews now spend all day every day flying back and forth from Indianapolis to Chicago; hospitals insisting that one physician perform all of a certain type of procedure, in response to AMA findings linking quality to volumes; programmers forced to use frameworks and purchased third-party tools instead of writing everything from scratch.

Does all this stuff save money and improve the quality of outcomes? Absolutely. And it also takes even the most skilled individuals down a path of stultifying boredom and repetition.

(That’s jen in comments at 11D)

And of course, it’s not just people at the top of their professions — doing the same thing all the time is tiring for flight attendents and operating-room assistants, too.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ tagged productivity, random thinking

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