Back when I was a full-time employee I can distinctly remember, like many of us I assume, looking at my calendar and thinking: this cannot all be essential.
The client work was demanding, but it was real. Framing problems. Untangling clumsy journeys. Making regulated systems usable. That part didn’t trouble me. It was what I always wanted to believe I was actually being paid to do.
The Sunday night dread was never about the difficulty of the UX tasks I had to do; it was about the prospect of defending a button placement to three people whose job titles I didn’t fully understand.
That feeling was neither rare nor dramatic. It was simply ambient.
When a YouGov poll reports that 37% of UK workers felt their job didn’t make a meaningful contribution, and a similar Dutch poll finds it at 40%, it therefore feels somewhat familiar.
David Graeber called them “bullshit jobs.” His argument was broad. Mine is narrower. Most knowledge roles contain a necessary core wrapped in a layer of activity that grows over time. Reviews of reviews. Meetings about alignment. Artefacts written, designed and built to signal diligence in output. Essentially, as Clarkson used to say “I did a thing!“.
None of it looks absurd taken in isolation. Together, it grows.
For more than twenty years I worked five days a week in agency life. The rhythm was typically conventional: full calendars, visible participation, institutional choreography. It signalled seriousness. It was still frequently fun around the margins. It also created drag.
In late 2024 I left, and as I found my new life as a freelancer I was able to cut the week to <5 paid days.
I didn’t change the nature of the work but I have changed the size of the container.
The client conversations still happen. The user experience architecture still happens. The thinking still happens. What has (mostly) disappeared are the rituals that demonstrated I was thinking. Those pre-reads, two hour workshops on alignment. Status updates with no status updates. The sorts of meetings that PMs get all excited about or shitty with you when they can’t move their Trello/GANT along a notch.
The surprising part was how little of that missing activity altered the outcome.
On the other days I study human–AI interaction (more on this in the weeks and months to come) and I work at our allotment. Recently I completed the task of laying a hedge in a centuries-old craft. Laying hedge is slow and slightly brutal on the hands. You cut partway through the stem, bend it, weave it into the next. At the end of the afternoon there’s a line you can lean against. If it fails, you can see the weak point, and if you can’t, a sheep probably can.
There is no meeting about the hedge. It either stands or it doesn’t.
That contrast isn’t noodling pastoral escapism. It simply highlights something about knowledge work: when outcomes are abstract and time is fixed, activity expands to reassure everyone involved. AI now presses on that reassurance.
A large share of white-collar work involves drafting, structuring, summarising and formatting. My wife and brother are both lawyers and I can see it in the sheer volume of their workload. These tasks will become faster with machine learning and ai modelling. One person can carry more of them. That has and will create slack.
Organisations can therefore reduce the same container I did. Or they can preserve the container and invent new layers to supervise the tools that removed the previous layers.
The exact percentage (whether 40% or otherwise) is less important than the recurring personal question: “If we stopped doing this, what would actually fall apart?” Most people can answer that for at least part of their own week.
The difficulty isn’t identifying what’s surplus work. It’s that that surplus seems to underwrite role hierarchy, salary bands, and the whole shared fiction of the full week. Remove it and you have to redesign more than diaries.
Cutting my own week didn’t change the work I did. It changed what was visible. Once you notice how much of a calendar exists to justify itself, it’s difficult to stop noticing.
AI: Just a bit of Grammarly used to tidy up the copy and some ChatGPT to surface some references and generate a (rubbish) image because algorithms.
John Gibbard 