Surviving the Daily Grind Bartleby’s Guide to Work

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The world of work wasn’t always what it is today. Just a few thousand years ago, all the necessities for life could be collected in 15 hours a week, with the rest of the time set aside for leisure. How did we go from hunter-gatherer society to white-collar rat race? Today, many people work in jobs with titles that would have baffled our ancestors: creative director, logistics coordinator or social media curator. Based on his immensely popular Bartleby Economist column, Philip Coggan rewrites the rules of work to help ordinary workers get through the week, filled with such sage distillations as “80% of the time of 80% of people in meetings is wasted” and “Jargon abhors a vacuum”. But this book is also designed to help managers by pointing out some of the obvious traps they fall into, like corporate waffle or the hierarchy of fleas. Incisive, original, and endlessly droll, this is the guide for beleaguered underlings and harried higher-ups alike. As Rousseau might have said: “Man was born free, but is everywhere stuck in a meeting.”

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