COVID has had some very interesting effects on society. One of the most obvious and most beneficial is the sudden increase in people working remotely. This trend had been slowly building for some time. A variety of companies had begun offering more work from home options or more flexible working hours that allowed employees to set their own schedules. COVID took that trend and kicked it into overdrive. Suddenly almost anyone who did the bulk of their work on a computer was doing it from home. While not everyone has been in love with this development (people like being able to both leave and come back to the house), by and large it seems to be a good thing.
One of the consequences of accelerating the work from home trend is a corresponding rise in many tasks being performed by artificial intelligence. You might be wondering how that could possibly be a good thing. After all, that represents a machine taking a job that belonged to a person. However, the tasks that AI takes on are usually mundane tasks that don’t require a lot of thought. These are largely tasks that involve just crunching numbers or are the equivalent of sorting or moving forms from point A to point B. Other things like chat bots where a person would do nothing more than follow a script anyway are generally taking the place of people. Still, how is this good? People are still out of work aren’t they? Not necessarily.
One of the benefits of having AI take over a lot of the mundane tasks is that people are freer to do work that is more creative in nature. If they don’t have to concern themselves with the more mundane tasks of the workday they can spend more time problem solving, or researching new projects. In short, there is more time for more meaningful work. Such work provides more of a sense of purpose for those doing it and people tend to be happier when they have more purpose in their lives.
What of the working at home aspect? Aren’t people tempted to spend more time goofing off, to not get as much work done? After all, there are good reasons companies have IT departments that monitor employee activity online.
Yes, there is certainly some danger of that. Working from home is the kind of situation where you find out who people really are. While some do take advantage of being unsupervised, you might be surprised that most people might actually work harder when working from home. When given the opportunity, many, if not most people are eager to manage their own schedule through the day. In a dull office building surrounded by cubicles doing monotonous activity without even the comfort of your favorite tunes to keep you going, you might be tempted to steal a few minutes to check the college football rankings, catch up on movie trailers or just the latest news. Then that few minutes turns into an hour.
At home, the dynamic is different. Without big brother watching, people tend to become their own best monitor. Especially when they know they have a certain amount of work to do before they can call it quits for the day. Suddenly, rather than trying to reclaim a few minutes people will actually stop to ask themselves if they are making the best use of their time. What that leads to is people working for less time, allowing them more freedom to pursue their own interests, once again leading to people being more satisfied.
Then there are the people who genuinely love what they do and are passionate about their work. Those fortunate souls tend to actually work more, though it is probably spread out throughout the day, into manageable pieces. That will rankle some who are used to the 9-5 model of work. If that’s you, stop to consider if it matters whether a person works a straight eight hours or six in two or three blocks but all the work gets done anyway? Especially if that latter option leads to happier and more motivated employees? That seems an easy choice.
Though as things eventually head back to something like normal, there will be a temptation to turn the remote work/AI work trend around. Given the many advantages though it is more likely that these trends will only continue, eventually becoming cemented as the new way we do business. TARTLE is already ahead of the curve on this trend, allowing our team, most of whom work from home a great deal of flexibility in hours that helps in their personal lives. It’s all part of the trend to getting power and choices back to the individual.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
One of the most obvious and most beneficial is the sudden increase in people working remotely. This trend had been slowly building for some time. A variety of companies had begun offering more work from home options or more flexible working hours that allowed employees to set their own schedules. COVID took that trend and kicked it into overdrive. Suddenly almost anyone who did the bulk of their work on a computer was doing it from home.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Tartle Cast with your hosts Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:25):
This feels good, working from home.
Jason Rigby (00:28):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (00:29):
Working from home is nice.
Jason Rigby (00:30):
Yes. There's pros and cons to it though.
Alexander McCaig (00:33):
There are pros and cons to it because...
Alexander McCaig (00:38):
Here's the rub, when COVID hit people were like, "We've got to get people out of the office." Well, all the processes and activities and everything were siloed, they were centralized. And then when you spread out your labor force it all became decentralized.
Jason Rigby (00:57):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (00:58):
So you want to make sure that you begin to transition your tools, the tools and the processes that people had, into a decentralized manner. You want to make sure that things are efficient and secure and really all of the work, the risk that could be managed in a centralized format, you have to have something step in and now manage it for you in a decentralized format. And there are some AI algorithms put into analytical tools and workflow processes that can actually benefit a lot of companies to do that.
Jason Rigby (01:33):
So whenever we look at data specifically, and I want to stay with the work at home because I know there's a lot of people that listen to this that are having to work at home now, and some of them are enjoying it, some are not. I know that they're wanting to, once the vaccine comes out, maybe even create a hybrid model.
Alexander McCaig (01:50):
People like to have a place to go.
Jason Rigby (01:51):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (01:52):
People like to be able to go home.
Jason Rigby (01:55):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (01:55):
People like to be able to go to work and like leave it there. And now you begin to blend those things? So that hybrid model is a little bit more of like a hybrid life.
Jason Rigby (02:03):
I think, I don't know how the culture has been Tartle, but you know Google in a lot of these places, Adobe is doing it, Twitter just announced that they're all at home now. I know Snapchat is doing it, all these different tech companies, but it's this ability to be able to self-manage yourself-
Alexander McCaig (02:21):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (02:22):
... and take 100% responsibility. You know I work at home, you work at home, and we work a lot, but that's something internally inside of me.
Alexander McCaig (02:31):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (02:32):
But if I didn't have a passion for Tartle and want to see it grow, if I was just an employee how much taking advantage of that?
Alexander McCaig (02:42):
Of being at home because you... [crosstalk 00:02:46]
Jason Rigby (02:46):
I always talk to my friends that retire and they're like, "I'm more busy now than I was." You know how things can just consume your life?
Alexander McCaig (02:51):
Of course.
Jason Rigby (02:52):
And you have to be careful. I have to be careful with that.
Alexander McCaig (02:54):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (02:54):
It's like, okay, well, you know I was busy for this afternoon so I've got to make it up tonight. You know what I mean? [crosstalk 00:03:01]
Alexander McCaig (03:00):
Yeah, no. I absolutely hear that. There's a lot of self-reflection with working from home.
Jason Rigby (03:07):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (03:08):
And the question is, can you hold yourself accountable when no one's watching? If you're going to the office you're always feeling like oh, hey...
Alexander McCaig (03:16):
I put that on do not disturb.
Alexander McCaig (03:18):
... you feel like big brother is there or someone is watching the IT network and so I can't be doing this or going on this website. Well, now you have the freedom to do it and when you're doing it you're wondering, is this the best use of time?
Jason Rigby (03:33):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (03:34):
You know? And so I think that what we find is that when we do work from home or that sort of workforce, is that there's going to be a transition with the companies by using a lot of automation now so that the only thing that's left is no longer the monotonous process of moving a document from here to here.
Jason Rigby (03:56):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (03:56):
All that sort of stuff that can be automated, you're going to see it being automated. So the effective time of people being at home, working from home, is going to be focused more on the creative aspect of work, the more scientific, intellectual thinking part of doing work rather than 85% of the work day just be moving documents around.
Jason Rigby (04:24):
Yeah. And when you look at, and they use an example in the article, a consumer bank with the stimulus checks.
Alexander McCaig (04:31):
Yeah. So instead of having a whole office of people to field calls, asking if someone got a stimulus check, there're computer systems that are analyzing what you're saying and then just checking in for you and so that monotonous task that might've taken somebody eight hours over the course of the day, that labor of that individual can now be focused on things that are really important.
Jason Rigby (04:53):
Yeah. I know we're seeing, especially with support and they were talking about this and then everything shifting to the cloud, is chatbots.
Alexander McCaig (04:59):
Yeah. Chatbots are really helpful and when you use AI and the more people that begin to interact with chatbots, the more accurate they become in their responses.
Jason Rigby (05:07):
Yeah. I know we just set one up for a dealership and it allows you to be able to put your VIN number in, I'm going to ask you questions and then you can put your VIN number in or your year, make, and model of your trade in.
Alexander McCaig (05:20):
Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of cool.
Jason Rigby (05:21):
And then it gives you a quote and then tells you what other places are...
Jason Rigby (05:25):
So now you just got an answer to put a puzzle piece together.
Alexander McCaig (05:29):
Yeah. And it's doing it for it. And then to make that become full circle, a lot of people that go to work, it's like, okay, I have to be here from nine to five. You're not doing something from nine to five.
Jason Rigby (05:43):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (05:43):
You know, the day is broken up. So when we look at that sort of hybrid model and when AI begins to kick in, now that work is becoming decentralized, now it's like, well, how much time do I actually put in towards working? It opens up the availability of you doing other things for your life, other freedoms, and then you have actually now a concentrated three or four hours of doing something that requires an intellectual concentration rather than just a monotonous task. And I think that's the interesting change in the dynamic is people start to see where the value sits in their labor and how much time really needs to go in to effectively get something done rather than just say, I have to be here from nine to five-
Jason Rigby (06:24):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (06:24):
... and so I'm just thumbing around doing something.
Jason Rigby (06:26):
Yeah. Because they say that the average person going to a nine to five job, they averaged like an hour and a half worth of total work.
Alexander McCaig (06:34):
That's exactly what I mean and the majority of the stuff is monotonous.
Jason Rigby (06:37):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (06:37):
And if we can take AI to continue to push forward in these decentralized systems and take care of these tasks that we really don't need to be doing we really can focus on things that are more important and I think that companies, as they begin to adopt very data forward tools and workflows, they're going to see great benefits in creativity, happiness of the workforce, and also productivity in general. People will be working less hours, but they're going to be more concentrated and effective.
Jason Rigby (07:09):
So do you think whenever you see people and you see this, do you think this will be even once we get past the pandemic? Because here's what I'm worried about, I think the world is better off with people with a hybrid model or working at home or whatever.
Alexander McCaig (07:24):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (07:25):
I think it creates a better balance for life, especially in our industry, the tech industry.
Alexander McCaig (07:30):
Yeah. You know there's people that say work-life balance.
Jason Rigby (07:33):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (07:34):
It should be life-work balance.
Jason Rigby (07:36):
Yes. Yes.
Alexander McCaig (07:37):
You should invert how that's actually said, it's all about quality of life.
Jason Rigby (07:41):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (07:41):
And if we can have a higher quality of life by passing off things that machines should be doing to a machine I think that's a really good way to look at the hybrid model for how work should be done in the future.
Jason Rigby (07:55):
Well, I know at noon you're fixing to go climb.
Alexander McCaig (07:59):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (07:59):
You're a climber and so you're going to go to a climbing gym and climb a wall. At 1:30 I'm going to a gym.
Alexander McCaig (08:03):
Yup.
Jason Rigby (08:04):
So I would have to schedule this after 5:00, you know what I mean, if I work nine to five at a place. So I think the quality is a key word especially when employers are looking at once we get the vaccine or we have herd immunity or whatever should I go back to the old ways of doing things? And I say, "Why?"
Alexander McCaig (08:26):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (08:26):
Why have the traffic? Why have the environmental impact?
Alexander McCaig (08:29):
The world is moving decentralized.
Jason Rigby (08:31):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (08:31):
You know, all of your systems, workflows, tools, it's all becoming decentralized. Why would you then come back and centralize people? What is the point of having people in and office?
Jason Rigby (08:45):
Right. Well, philosophically it doesn't match with, like you said, the decentralized world. Amazon will bring a package to my door.
Alexander McCaig (08:50):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (08:50):
I don't have to go to the UPS store to pick my package up.
Alexander McCaig (08:53):
No, I don't. They'll just do it. And so it's like, why would you step backwards?
Jason Rigby (08:57):
Even though I work for you, my mind shift is why do I have to go to your office?
Alexander McCaig (09:04):
To get stuff done.
Jason Rigby (09:06):
It's that old mentality.
Alexander McCaig (09:07):
If I've been getting it done at the house, why do I need to go do it here?
Jason Rigby (09:10):
And I think when you hire in, like Tartle, when you hire great people to do an amazing job and they have personal responsibility inside themselves and they're passionate about what they're doing because they see the future, then no issue with this.
Alexander McCaig (09:25):
No, there's no issue. We know at Tartle in our culture, there's a job that has to be done. We've got to go do it.
Jason Rigby (09:33):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (09:33):
If you need to take time off, take it off. I don't need you to sit around nine to five and try and like do something.
Jason Rigby (09:39):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (09:40):
It's like, here's the effective job. Let's go attack it.
Jason Rigby (09:42):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (09:42):
And we know when we've got to get it done by.
Jason Rigby (09:44):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (09:45):
So whatever you have to do with your personal life, go do it. If you need to go work out to make yourself feel better, go do that. If you've got to take two days off fine, but we know what our deadline is.
Jason Rigby (09:53):
Yes. Yeah. And I think a great book that will help people out, one that helped me out, I think the guy's name is Cal Newport, I'm not for sure, but the book, if you type it in Amazon, it's called Deep Work.
Alexander McCaig (10:02):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (10:03):
And it's a really good book book about plugging your phone somewhere else, putting on some music that doesn't have words in it.
Alexander McCaig (10:12):
Trance.
Jason Rigby (10:13):
That's what I use, but EDM type music. But for me, it's being able to get at least two hours of focused work where I'm just hammering it away for two hours and then I take a break. Some people use timers, there're websites for that.
Alexander McCaig (10:27):
I just know I have like an internal clock. I'm like, I am done right now.
Jason Rigby (10:31):
Yeah. That's how I am, too.
Alexander McCaig (10:33):
That's it. I've got to go do something to reset and then I can go back to that workflow.
Jason Rigby (10:36):
Yes. Yeah. So I broke my day up. I have a morning time where I work and then I take a break usually at lunch or whatever.
Alexander McCaig (10:45):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (10:46):
And then I work in the afternoon, then I work in the evening. So I mean, that works for me. I'm single. But in between that I'm doing things to reset myself.
Alexander McCaig (10:53):
And think about all the systems that you use.
Jason Rigby (10:55):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (10:56):
We at Tartle use a ton of different systems and we're trying to do what we can to automate that stuff, our processes, so that it becomes effective and then your two hours of focus are on things that need to be focused on rather than a monotonous task.
Jason Rigby (11:10):
More of a macro than a micro. Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (11:11):
Yeah. That's exactly right. And so I think AI and machine learning algorithms put into these tools, having computers take over when they should, I think what we're going to find is that it's essentially going to make work more effective.
Jason Rigby (11:28):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (11:29):
And I think it'll actually make people a lot happier rather than having to do those, I'm going to move this paper here to here, this thing to here, to here, it's going to make a big change. And I think what we've seen in 2020 with those tools that afford artificial intelligence and a decentralized systems are going to only expand further into 2021 and we're going to see an increase in the quality of life through that work-life balance.
Jason Rigby (11:52):
Speaking of quality of life and effectiveness, our sponsor, Tartle.co, our only sponsor.
Alexander McCaig (12:01):
Because this is Tartle.co.
Jason Rigby (12:02):
Because this it. It's so funny, whenever I put the podcast in to get it out to all the areas you always have the author as Tartle.
Alexander McCaig (12:13):
That's what it is. You know?
Jason Rigby (12:14):
It's like, yep.
Alexander McCaig (12:15):
We self author, we self site. We do all these different things.
Jason Rigby (12:18):
So our one and only ever sponsor is Tartle.co.
Alexander McCaig (12:21):
... is Tartle.co and you can sign up at tartle.co, get started, and you can start sharing your data towards causes you care about and then you can get compensated for doing so. Phenomenal.
Jason Rigby (12:34):
That's amazing.
Alexander McCaig (12:35):
Yeah. Very good. Thank you everybody. [inaudible 00:12:44]
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Thank you for listening to Tartle cast with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
