Jack’s Day

Jack gets up after his wife Helen has left for the day and has a very short commute in a run-a-bout (golf cart) to his work. Why spend too much time commuting when you won't be at work for very long. When he gets in he checks his email and reads his 3 messages, all of which are very curt, which is good for business and good for his productivity. A forth message was flagged by his reader as being too long and was automatically returned to the sender. 

Jack then begins his two hour morning intensive—no phone calls, no email, no chatting, no research, no wondering—just two hours of solid work augmented by various systems and technology. His job, like most others, is refined to point of pure decision making. All the tasks can be carried out through automation, both physical and analog. Also, the knowledge Jack needs to make those decisions and the time at which they come to him, have been optimized for efficacy as well. He rarely must make a choice for which the ground work has not already been made or information missing. In the first two hours of the day he accomplishes a staggering amount of work.

After his first intensive, Jack is physically tired and takes a short break, but not too long (because why spend more time at the office than you need to.) When he comes back he has his one and only meeting of the day. For fifteen minutes or less Jack meets with other members of his team. They check in, deiced what needs to be thought out further and then break to work individually.

Now half way through his work day, Jack begins his creative time. He takes the next two hours to do research, explore things that might be dead ends, take chances, work on what was discussed in meeting and otherwise do inefficient but necessary tasks.

With only 30 minutes left in his five hour day, Jack begins his afternoon intensive. Once again the value of the work done in that short time is astounding. As his time at work is winding down he wished he had a few more minutes to work but that is not an option.

Just before one o'clock his machines shut down and lock themselves. As he and his co-workers grab their things and leave, the walls of their cubicles flip over—hiding their personal workspaces and revealing those the employees of the next company that will be working in this Biz-co-share office. The employees of the afternoon company come in and the machines in the office unlock themselves and boot up with the appropriate data.

It is one o'clock, his work day is over, but he has no intention of going home, and most likely will not see Helen until later.

Yesterday he spent the second half of the day playing 18-man baseball, and tomorrow he will most likely go to a double feature with work people at the afternoon theatre. Today he has no specific plans. 

He takes his run-a-bout up the wide street—filled mostly with walkers along with other run-a-bouts and small bus-taxis zipping people off to more distant locations—stopping at one of the many and growing piazza in the city. The insatiable cafe industry requiring more and more space along with people's natural inclination to be outside more (after all they already spent 5 hours indoors at work) has lead to the city constantly creating more piazzas. 

Just as he was considering going to city hall to see what was being discussed today, possibly another piazza, when he is alerted by his autonomous personal assistant (APA) that there are tickets available for one of todays many football games. His assistant seeing that tickets are available had, already, bought the tickets and sent invitations to several of his friends, enough of his friends (or their autonomous assistants) had responded positively so he was notified and the tickets where kept and not returned. He had given his Autonomous personal assistant leeway in this regard, allowing it to buy items with "restocking fees" of up to 10%. His APA is similar too, but not the same as, the automated systems that make his job possible. While his work system optimizes work-flows for efficiency, never asking him to make a decision that he is not prepared to make, his APA is optimized for filling his free time. It ensures he divides his time between his many friends, schedules time for less selfish endeavors and encourages him to try new things. 

The stadium is not far so he walks and leaves his run-a-bout here to be retrieved later. He meets his friends outside. They and thousands of other attendees enter the stadium under the watchful eyes of one ticket agent, who with both digital and analog efficiencies does the work that would have required scores of workers otherwise.

The football game ended exactly on time leaving him time to catch the end of a BBB baseball game happening in the same stadium, one field over. After that he returns to the piazza for his runabout and heads home to his wife Helen.

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Helen’s day

Helen gets up before Jack, dresses and walks to their neighborhood church. The Priest is giving the first of many masts for the day. People of many faiths now attend church everyday. While some other religions have struggled with creating seven times as much content, the Catholic church has had a few thousand year head-start in that regard and are doing well. Helen finds the morning mass refreshingly inefficient and slow—the two reasons Jack uses for not coming. 

After mass she heads to her own job and has a work day nearly identical to Jacks. It is what they do with there afternoons that separates them. Not that the dis-approve of the others activities but they would never choose it for themselves. 

Helen leaves work and goes to meet a friend for lunch. They go to McDonald's for some of the worlds best hamburgers. As todays extreme efficiencies came online, business models based on price where challenged. When a new local startup and a global mega corp can each produce products with the same efficiencies and for the same price, value propositions had to change. Quality arose as the dominate dimension of the competitive marketplace. Of course quality, taste, and style are all wound together. Which leads us to Helen’s second job. Her friend lives in town three days a week and lives in a rural suburb the other four days of the week. While in-town she works eight hours a day and stays in a tiny time shared apartment. In the country she has a larger house where she spends time with her family.

Helen unlike Jack finds it hard spend her afternoons on leisure activities. She likes having many friends, but not so many that they can only be kept tracked of with the help of an APA. She likes relaxing, but she gets restless easy, and only truly feels like herself when she has spent the day working hard. People like Helen are considered a risk to society. They threaten to undo the progress that has come with extreme efficiencies; to use efficiencies to increase production instead of quality of life. No one wants Helen to work ten hours a day when they work five or less. No one, except Helen.

She has sought help for her condition. Workaholics Anonymous had offered support and introduced her to many potential hobbies to fill her time; but, none of them had helped. She had try expert volunteering but could not find an agenda that she agreed with and that fit her skills. A frustrated councilor had seriously suggest an affair, but she doubted its long-term efficacy. As a last resort, and only begrudgingly, they had helped her focus her energies into a home business. 

Helen, returning home gets to work as taste editor. When Helen decided to take on a second job the only choice was to work out of their home; true second jobs being outlawed. She and Jack had moved to a mixed uses apartment in a shopping district. On the ground floor she sold a selection of exquisitely crafted objects she had found from suppliers around the world. The business was not doing as well as she had expected. While she had many window shoppers, she had underestimated the amount of backlash she would receive for having a second job. Most people where content to see her selections and then buy them elsewhere, not wanting to encourage her. Jack had encouraged her to become a style writer but she was insistent on making the shop work.

Jack is coming home from the game now and they close up the shop together and head upstairs to their small home. Because why have a large home when you are never there.