Personal Work in the Commonwealth

Part of the bulletin series of articles.

Summary

• Most workplaces in the Commonwealth set aside part of the working hours for personal work, which employees spend on work of their own choosing.
• It is almost universal, from mechanics and engineers to clerks and civil servants.
• Personal work uses the tools, records and facilities of the employer, but it is not directed by the employer.
• A lot of personal work is spent socialising, but the people who get ahead in Commonwealth society generally use it to pursue interests relevant to their expertise.

Read more: Ludic Productivity, Personalism

Personal work is a part of working week or workday that a Commonwealth person spends on work of their own choosing at their place of employment. It is usually taken during the afternoon of a workday, or about a fifth of working time. An employee doing personal work generally may use the workshops, tools, records, libraries and computers of their employer, but the employer does not set the work.

Personal work is almost universal, and applies to mechanics, engineers, teachers, clerks and civil servants alike.¹ A mechanic in an autopool garage may spend it rebuilding an old engine. Engineers at a car plant essentially have time for their own skunk works, to investigate technologies or designs they find interesting. At Avro, where most of the 1,600 employees work in design, testing and engineering, a good part of the company’s development work began as personal work, and the engineers at the Karu plant keep a shared workshop for it. In the civil service, personal work goes to projects, hunches and rabbit holes that an officer happens to find interesting, and the Bureau of Statistics has a reputation for officers who spend years on them.

Time set aside for personal work is also enjoyed relaxing and socialising. Many people spend it on tea, conversation and long lunches, and in some offices the afternoon is essentially a social occasion. It is a customary feature of Commonwealth working life and difficult for employers to restrict without losing staff to competitors.

Nonetheless, the people who get ahead in Commonwealth society are usually the ones who use personal work to produce something. It allows them to contribute in a way that is not mandated from the top down, and to use the resources and information available at their place of employment to produce important work. Competence in the Commonwealth is demonstrated, not guaranteed by certification, and so a reputation earned in personal work plays an important role in career advancement. Ministries elect their First Ministers from their own professional staff and bureaus expect their directors to be domain experts, and in both cases the candidates are often known for their personal work. Some interwork detachments were formed around a problem first found this way.

Example

Before he founded Adelectrics in 2044, James Bell spent twenty years in product development at National Machines. He built the first Adelectrics Lightfast, an electric lighter, as personal work in a National Machines laboratory, and the company let him take the design with him when he left. The Lightfast only found limited success, but its successor, the POCKETVOX, made Bell National Engineer of the Year in 2047.

In government, the republic codes printed on Commonwealth Post parcels began in the 1990s as the personal work of a sorting clerk at the General Post Office in Oslola. Many great inventions of Commonwealth society began during personal working time.