The "That's All She Wrote" Edition

Dec 18, 2022

Dear Folks,

Here’s to a lovely holiday season. Enjoy your first night of Hanukkah tonight and your Christmas festivities next weekend!

I am off to other regions, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, the “this” being some sun, hopefully, and the “that” being some snow. It’s going to involve a fair bit of travel.

I am reading that post-Pandemic travel is different. While it’s true that holiday weekends and traditional vacation periods are still super busy, there aren’t as many sharp peaks and one-day nightmares (the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, anyone?) as there was pre-Covid. The common wisdom is that because people can, let’s say, travel any one of several days before the holiday and work from wherever their destination might be (pool side, Mom’s house, wherever), there’s no need to wait until the clock strikes 3pm on the previously highly valued “half day” before the holiday to bolt into traffic and airport lines.

With all the holiday parties and work-socializing back in semi-full force, and the Covid and flu rates to prove it, I’ve had a chance to hear from a lot of bigwig execs. They are telling me that they are dismayed that their teams just won’t come back to work. It’s one perspective: “how do they expect to get ahead if their boss can’t see them?” and “our business is a high touch business, they need to be here,” and similar. At the bottom of it all, it seems to me, they just cannot believe that they are telling their employees to do something and they just. won’t. do it. Like when you have a kid and, at some point, they just. won’t. do. what. you. want. It takes a long time to really, truly understand where your power, if you ever had any at all, ends.

At a basic level, I think folks are failing to realize that while the first wave of office flight was mandated health and safety (Covid) reasons, but the mandate to return to the office isn’t. Covid might be on the wane, but it ain’t the Covid. It’s the commute. The expensive, shitty salads for lunch. The toil of email. The open plan office that’s supposed to be so great, except that none of the executives ever come out from their offices. The unfair deal that everyone has to work well into the night answering emails from home but running out to a doctor’s appointment from the office is still something you have to ask your boss for time to do and is imo low-key seen as slacking off. The genie is out of the bottle and the stopper ain’t going back in.

Instead of really thinking about how to transform the modern workplace for the next century (well, this century, but we’re already 20+years late), most people are just stuck, pining for the old days. Aren’t there any lessons to be learned? From farming and agriculture to the industrial revolution? From physical factory labor to desks in offices? Can we learn from those mammoth employment shifts to help usher in the next wave?

I think there are some lessons to be learned from my business, the good old fashioned media biz. We have transformed from them telling us exactly when to watch and where to watch it— Thursdays at 10pm, in your living room chair. To us telling them exactly when and where we want to watch— any damn time, any damn place. Imagine trying to put that genie back in the bottle.

At work and at home, broadly, the deal was getting less and less fair. The proverbial user interface of the office sucked, and it was expensive, and there was no one to complain to. Cable TV? Same.

Work: Email taught us to “time shift” our work. Hey I can cut out a little early and answer these emails tonight? Cool!

Home: VCR’s (and then DVR’s, and then Netflix) taught us to “time shift” our TV. Everyone was like hey, wait a minute, you mean I don’t have to sit down at the stroke of 8pm on Thursday night if I want to watch this?? Then I won’t. Amazing!

But then came the real implosion. In entertainment, we went from time-shifting to “place-shifting.” The ability to watch stuff not only whenever you wanted, but wherever you wanted, thanks to little tiny tvs called iPads and even tinier TVs called phones. It took a good app to bring down the end of the traditional television media era.

The end of the traditional work era? Well, it took a worldwide, deadly pandemic. You could move to…Austin? Vermont? Wherever? , and still “work” in Manhattan? Cool!

Folks, noone’s going back. Well maybe you’ll go back to the movie theater once or twice a year, and maybe you’ll go back to the office once or twice a week, but it just won’t go back to the way it was. Easier? Cheaper? Similarly efficient? Most people will, um, opt for that.

Thank you for reading today’s lecture. If you want to see one of my other ones, you might enjoy it, too! That was from the dawn of all this so-called media transformation, so you will see that I have been thinking about it for a long, long time.

I figured out a long time ago I can’t tell you what to do. I try to make it easy. The real point is all the stuff AFTER I finish spouting off on one topic or another each week. I just want to deliver all this fabulous news straight to your inbox! Free! The only commute is to your kitchen for your cup of coffee. Here is just a healthy dose of news by, for, and about women, delivered straight to your inbox. The best in the week’s Politics, Business, Health, Pop Culture, The Arts, Sports, and more.

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I will be back sometime in 2023. I’m not sure when. Maybe I will go from weekly to monthly, like many magazines have. We’ll just have to see.

I am going to use the time on my Fridays and Saturdays normally devoted to this to work on some other projects that I’m a bit behind on. They take the same sort of creative energy and actual time, and there’s really no other place to take the time from. Before you ask— no, it’s not The Book I Am Likely Never GoingTo Write, the one about my trials, tribulations, and triumphs at work and in life. It’s a different one.

So anyway, see you next year. Thank you for the week in, week out support, sense of community, and vibrant feedback. Have a fabulous Holiday and an amazing start to the New Year!! I hope you get some up time or down time or whatever you are craving.

Gratefully,

The LZ Sunday Paper

The "That's All She Wrote" Edition

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