Much like the mountainous shaggy-mane wildebeest, I have been tagged, and my life is tracked down to the nearest half hour. When did everyone become so interested in how I spend my time?

A couple of months ago, the cc ditched their old way of tracking volunteer hours, which consisted of volunteers writing a line into a log book at the end of their shift, in favor of a new computer system with a touch screen. You log in and out at beginning and end of your shift with your volunteer ID number (I am no longer ScottMcJ. Call me 1154) and it automatically calculates the hours worked. It's clever, but I've found that now that a computer is tracking my hours, I care about every single one of them in a way I never did before.

I'll check my hours, verify that they match what I think I worked each night, and push to stay on-shift until I've filled out my full four hours. If a supervisor offers to let me go home early, I hesitate and waffle, knowing they're going to be ripping me off of a quarter hour of logged time. If time doesn't match what I think it should, I'll send in correction forms, to make sure I get my time logged properly.

It comes down to the fact that you perform to what's being measured, no matter how inane. We're volunteers! We get paid barely more than the Russian army! Why should I care about getting credit for every minute worked? And yet, now that it's being somewhat rigorously measured, I can't help but care about it. Some sort of bean-counting instinct kicks in. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it's environmental. I think it was that toy cash register we all grew up with, where you had to put the comically oversized coin in the right slot and push the right value lever to make the coin drop.

As an aside, they don't make that register anymore. The new one is a more modern register. I guess kids today aren't expected to remember the halcyon days of manual registers, and the original item would just be a foreign monstrosity to them. As if there aren't Little House on the Prairie reruns on all the time. I think it is just laziness. But anyway...

It's the same thing at work. Back at NW Fed, when I first started out as an hourly worker, we still had a physical, mechanical time clock. We'd line up the right day, slide the card in, hear that satisfying CHUNK-chunk sound as it stamped the card. We clocked in when we arrived for the day, clocked out for lunch, clocked in after lunch, and out when we left. It was just like the Flintstones, only without dinosaur garbage disposals. And then at the end of the pay period, calculating your hours worked was insane. Seven minutes rounds down, eight minutes rounds up to the nearest quarter hour. There were countless days where I would stay till 4:23 so I could round it up to 4:30 and get those extra fifteen minutes.

But was I paying attention to the right things? I was all about watching the clock instead of thinking about my job. Eventually we ditched the time clock (it broke, and we discovered a new one would cost money), but kept the timecards, just now writing hours by hand without the big brother clock validating that you weren't lying.

When I went to exempt status at NW Fed, it was actually a pretty significant pay cut not to get compensated for those extra hours I was putting in. But it didn't matter, because hours were no longer the thing being tracked. I happily put in sixty-hour weeks and didn't even think about it. I had a job to do and a company that was buying me all the techie toys I could ever want to play with. I would go home and grab a bite of dinner and then go back to work (the down side of living eight blocks from work. The worst part was that most of the time I would still drive. I was the embodiment of the archetypical guy who gets in his car, starts it, buckles up, puts it in reverse, and pulls out to the end of his driveway to check the mail).

At Airborne we had to track hours but they weren't used for anything related to our pay or performance, so it effectively didn't matter. If I had been asked to perform challenging or engaging work, I'd have been putting in the marathon hours in a second without caring that each extra hour was dragging down my hourly wage.

Now, at Saltmine, god bless and preserve them, we're getting paid for our OT again. It's an amazing and generous and kind thing to do; paying your exempt workers for their actual time worked. But the problem is that I have started caring about hours again. The right focus is on the job and the people and whether you're happy or not. Instead, I find myself watching how many extra hours I am tracking, wondering whether or not each bit of time is billable, trying to figure out at the end of the day how much of my time was productive, real work that I can get paid for versus time spent dinking around and daydreaming.

It's nice in the extreme to get paid for the time you work, but as soon as you start tracking it, I start paying way too much attention to it.

I think it's the control issue. I generally do a pretty good job of not worrying about things I have no control over. But if you give me a variable that I can affect that actually has an impact on my life, then yeah, I'm thinking about it all the time. When I am on salary, then I just worry about the company and doing the job and take the money for granted since it's outside my ability to affect on a day-to-day basis. But if you give me the power to change the actual dollar amounts on my paycheck, it becomes a major focus in my life, and it would feel irresponsible not to spend lots of time thinking about it.

Besides, money's one of the big three. It just doesn't need the added emphasis.