I started reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman. Only in the early portion of the text, I am feeling what Burkeman is laying out.
We have collectively permitted our employers (world-wide) not only into our homes but into every moment of our lives. Is work email attached to your phone? Do you toss and turn and wake up from the anxiety of unaddressed work because there is simply not enough time in a work day to accomplish the demands placed on you? Are you expected to make it work, to find the time, to steal the time, to do a little more, to go above and beyond...you know the language in your own field...
However one expands the time available for work...work will fill it.
Stay an hour longer? It will be scheduled for you.
Work over the weekend? It isn't really to catch up because something else will rush in and fill the space you made...so, one could theoretically work every weekend from home and never, ever, catch up so that the weekend is yours again.
When we whine and bitch that we do not have time at work to accomplish the basics of our work, we are essentially only aggravating ourselves. Time never comes back to you.
Time has been hijacked unlike anything recent, previous generations experienced. Well, maybe they experienced it, but the speed and tenacity continues to escalate to the degree that even when we are efficient at our jobs we expand the space for a greater flow of work to come out way (as in the case of email).
Why wouldn't a boss expect you to do more if you are able to tread water under the current conditions.
In every industry, if we work for someone there seems to be this embedded forfeiture of time outside of the workday...and a systemic structure of never, ever, catching up...of employees always being behind as more gets stacked on.
Unless, of course, we shift...reprogram...our mindsets....