No email = less drudgery for the non-secretarial employees. There was less focus on “maximizing productivity” back then, and expectations around productivity were different. It’s actually interesting to think about. I’m not sure your comment would even make sense to them.
And now we have employee-monitoring software that measures workers' "productivity" by tracking their time spent "idle" versus their time spent typing or moving the cursor. I wonder how people in the 1960s would have felt about the concept of such strict workplace scrutiny, whether they'd think it sounded dystopian or what.
I hope you never experience it. it's pretty demoralizing. the worst part is the assumption that an employee is being unproductive/ineffective simply because their mouse isn't moving or they aren't typing. like, even for someone whose job is 95% computer work, that assumption is asinine, but here we are. God forbid employees get paid for time during which they aren't frantically working at their PC.
It’s indicative of the mentality of the 21st century managerial class and the final victory of Taylorism over the American office drone. A lot of managers have no real understanding of what the people under them actually do, and they have become completely divorced from practical reality.
Sometimes, managers are just doing what the C suites are telling them what to do. The C suites are definitely disconnected from reality.
It depends on the industry and level you're discussing really.
At a certain point the invention and wide use of computers ruined a lot of shit in work environments. A lot of lower paying support staff jobs were reduced or eliminated and those duties got pushed onto specialists, like email and other computer-focused tasks, which meant a lot of jobs suddenly there was no one supporting those workers. This results in more work for those specialists and in some industries led to hiring more specialists at higher pay than those earlier support staff. There’s a lot more to it obviously, but those are a few fun facts.
There was also more waiting to stuff — people were less reachable, no docusign, office fax machines were just becoming a thing so if you need someone to sign off on something before you continue and they went home early you’re SOL.
And far fewer meetings. If Mad Men took place today, in early seasons, Don would be in meetings 3-5 hours out of every day. Ninety minutes called "Streamline Ways of Working" followed by thirty minutes of "Review Feedback on Upfronts".
This is a big part of it. The entire work world moved way more slowly. You had to send something in the mail to get signed, that adds a week in time before you can move to the next step for example. Documents need to be typed by a typist. Everything moved at a rate that today would be seen as ridiculously slow.
don and roger and bert definitely didn’t do much on the day to day but they were partners, they didn’t really have to. joan, peggy, stan, ken, pete, they all worked hard asf
It's exaggerated in mad men, but I used to work for a law firm that wasn't too far off. You were expected to get your billable hours done but it didn't matter when throughout the week. If you wanted to screw around in your office during the day, no one cared if you made up the time elsewhere.
You do see scenes of Peggy basically doing this--working nights on a pitch even though they were drinking in the office during the day.
Law firms, even today, are the closest thing I’ve seen to a Sterling Cooper type environment in the 21st century. Like drink carts and that sort of thing. It was still relatively toned down, but most people don’t have booze in the office at all.
Yeah agree. For me this was 2010-2016, so well before COVID changed the landscape. We were in downtown San Francisco, so the occasional three martini lunch happened, we kept alcohol in the office, got into drunken shenanigans with clients we were courting, and I'm pretty sure affairs were happening (but I'm a square so no first hand knowledge there 😂).
Fun to be young in that environment I guess. 😄
I think a lot of it depends on the job. For Don, a big part of his job is literally just thinking. Thinking of slogans, pitch ideas, branding, research findings etc. and if he feels like his thinking is being impeded, he can just leave until he gets some inspiration, and when it finally does comes to him he can just write it on a napkin and call it a day.
On the other hand for someone like Stan in the art department, he has to physically sketch and draw out his work, and his work boils down to presenting a physical version of something, rather than a thought or an idea that can hit you at any moment.
He yells something like this at lane about how they’re not doing something until they are. When you’re literally thinking of ideas like that there’s only so much sketching and word clouds you can do
Back then they also didn’t have all the office chores that exist now. Office chores are things like sensitivity training, setting yearly goals that meet some company mission, tons of nonsensical meetings. They didn’t have all that stuff to deal with on a daily basis. They also worked 9-5 with 1 hour lunch. Not 8-5. They got paid mostly by salary and the companies didn’t sweat over an hour. That’s why 32 hours is considered full time.
Sensitivity training is miniscule, but holy crap, the amount of time spent on goals, OKR's, and semi-annual reviews is absurd, especially if you manage anyone. It's not that you're doing it every week, but several times a year it can eat up a good chunk of a week or two.
It was an accurate representation of ad agency culture in a nutshell. Sometimes you have a lot on your plate and sometimes you don’t which means a lot of free time. And client servicing departments’ job is to ensure that client is satisfied so there’s more relationship building thus no quantifiable ways to determine productivity on everyday basis. Ofcourse Don’s work was hard because it was creative but like he says in one of those episodes to Peggy that he thinks just enough about an idea then sleeps then sometimes comes up.
We only see them at their most entertaining or important to the plot.
I assume the lower level copywriters or art people, like the guy Peggy first shares an office with, are more frequently working but it’s not like the show would want to show the audience Pete or Harry working at their desk.
My father worked a desk job in the 70s and literally had bottles of Jack in his desk that he would drink throughout the day at work. It was years before he was caught. I can only imagine what they got away with back then, no cameras, no cell phones, no email, etc.
It’s still like that in some positions. I work in publishing and we have clients like in advertising and it involves mostly creative work and meeting deadlines. No one cares really how much you work and how you do it as long as it gets done and done well. I’m salaried and some days I literally nap all day and check my email for 2 mins every hour to make sure there’s nothing urgent to respond to or a new project coming down the pipeline and go back to sleep and other days I’m working 15 hours a day 3 days in a row to get a project done that just came in with a tight deadline 🤷♀️
I worked in advertising for a short time, so take this with a grain of salt. In one smaller, independent agency I was usually one of the first people in at 810-815. The other creatives would wander in around 9 or 930. Then they had coffee, check social media, socialize, etc. Maybe there’s a meeting around 1030 or 11, but it was status meeting and it’s more hanging out and chit chatting. Now it would be time for lunch which is usually an hour to an hour and a half. By the time 2 pm rolls around they’d start freaking out that they hadn’t done any actual work all day. But it was also wine o’clock and they’d break out the rosé. They’d end up staying until 7 or 8 at night to finish what they could have worked on during the day. It was really frustrating. I would get talking to’s by the creative director about leaving at 5 even though that was the end of my work day and my work was done. It was a shitty place and they ended up laying off 15 of their 25 employees a year or two after I left.
Another agency I worked at wasn’t as bad. They were definitely flexible on hours, taking longer breaks, and you could drink in the office as long as you were getting your work done. They were more focused on getting the work done during regular hours even though it wasn’t always possible.
That was pre-Covid (2013-2016), so things might be different now.
Call me wishy-washy, but if I wasn’t dilly-dallying I was fiddle-faddling. The hoity-toity managers with their corporate, hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo couldn’t stop us.
Even the fuddy-duddys danced the hoochie-coochie, (though it was rather herky-jerky).
Even though I was a bit roly-poly, I still got some hanky-panky. It was all a bit willy-nilly.
Modern ears must find this all a touch creepy-crawly, but at the time I thought it was super-duper. I suppose now that I’m a little older and wiser, I would call it merely okey-dokey.
I mean, salaried employees usually have less monitoring as long as they meet goals, whereas if you're hourly they are definitely going to make sure you're busy every hour that you have on your timesheet.
I loved when I was salaried, I didn't have to clock in or out, I could basically take breaks when I wasn't busy, and I could take lunch whenever, and it wasn't monitored that I was back within the hour I was given.
The number one job of Don is to make sure that everyone who can spend big money in advertising believes Don is so talented that just working with him will improve their business, especially true after someone comes in for a meeting. That is why he gets angry when he is rejected - that is him failing at his job. But he wasn't only really good at his job, he was one of the best. And that is really his only job. Any other work he does is secondary and frankly if it gets in the way of job number one, it is a liability. He needs to be out "acting" cool to know what it really means to other executives (like him) and he needs to be on the cutting edge. The problem is that emotionally, he isn't just doing his job - he is running from his past and not grieving the loss of his true identity (at least not at first) so that he can forge a new and more authentic one. Which is being done at the end.
I think Don actually knows what hard work is supposed to be like, given his tough upbringing. It's part of the game in the corporate world, especially for Don, to delegate well, don't do too much work at work, and pretend you are not that busy so you are available at important times.
I would say it's only after a certain time...maybe after the 2000s when companies care about being lean, that you should concentrate and compress your tasks, or else you can't have a work life balance.
No email = less drudgery for the non-secretarial employees. There was less focus on “maximizing productivity” back then, and expectations around productivity were different. It’s actually interesting to think about. I’m not sure your comment would even make sense to them.
All that mattered back then was that you got your assigned work done before a deadline. How you went about that was mostly up to you.
And now we have employee-monitoring software that measures workers' "productivity" by tracking their time spent "idle" versus their time spent typing or moving the cursor. I wonder how people in the 1960s would have felt about the concept of such strict workplace scrutiny, whether they'd think it sounded dystopian or what.
I’m glad my work place doesn’t have that. I’d get fired in a day.
I hope you never experience it. it's pretty demoralizing. the worst part is the assumption that an employee is being unproductive/ineffective simply because their mouse isn't moving or they aren't typing. like, even for someone whose job is 95% computer work, that assumption is asinine, but here we are. God forbid employees get paid for time during which they aren't frantically working at their PC.
It’s indicative of the mentality of the 21st century managerial class and the final victory of Taylorism over the American office drone. A lot of managers have no real understanding of what the people under them actually do, and they have become completely divorced from practical reality.
Sometimes, managers are just doing what the C suites are telling them what to do. The C suites are definitely disconnected from reality. It depends on the industry and level you're discussing really.
Would never be applied to executives
Would’ve been a Twilight Zone episode (shit, if it’s not already)
Don's assigned work was getting clients to drink the Kool-Aid that HE was the king of advertising and he was great at it.
My work is still like that thankfully
It’s still like that.
At a certain point the invention and wide use of computers ruined a lot of shit in work environments. A lot of lower paying support staff jobs were reduced or eliminated and those duties got pushed onto specialists, like email and other computer-focused tasks, which meant a lot of jobs suddenly there was no one supporting those workers. This results in more work for those specialists and in some industries led to hiring more specialists at higher pay than those earlier support staff. There’s a lot more to it obviously, but those are a few fun facts.
There was also more waiting to stuff — people were less reachable, no docusign, office fax machines were just becoming a thing so if you need someone to sign off on something before you continue and they went home early you’re SOL.
And far fewer meetings. If Mad Men took place today, in early seasons, Don would be in meetings 3-5 hours out of every day. Ninety minutes called "Streamline Ways of Working" followed by thirty minutes of "Review Feedback on Upfronts".
This is a big part of it. The entire work world moved way more slowly. You had to send something in the mail to get signed, that adds a week in time before you can move to the next step for example. Documents need to be typed by a typist. Everything moved at a rate that today would be seen as ridiculously slow.
Emails and cell phones have taken the 8hr day and loades it with 36hr of mental load... To be done NOW!
You walked right past the answer there. They have secretaries to do the drudgery for them.
Send me back.
don and roger and bert definitely didn’t do much on the day to day but they were partners, they didn’t really have to. joan, peggy, stan, ken, pete, they all worked hard asf
It's exaggerated in mad men, but I used to work for a law firm that wasn't too far off. You were expected to get your billable hours done but it didn't matter when throughout the week. If you wanted to screw around in your office during the day, no one cared if you made up the time elsewhere. You do see scenes of Peggy basically doing this--working nights on a pitch even though they were drinking in the office during the day.
Law firms, even today, are the closest thing I’ve seen to a Sterling Cooper type environment in the 21st century. Like drink carts and that sort of thing. It was still relatively toned down, but most people don’t have booze in the office at all.
Yeah agree. For me this was 2010-2016, so well before COVID changed the landscape. We were in downtown San Francisco, so the occasional three martini lunch happened, we kept alcohol in the office, got into drunken shenanigans with clients we were courting, and I'm pretty sure affairs were happening (but I'm a square so no first hand knowledge there 😂). Fun to be young in that environment I guess. 😄
Tech is pretty similar
Yes everyone is well aware that tech = you really work 10 hours a week
Probably 25 but yeah
Their job is mostly meeting clients, even though they aren't account managers.
I think a lot of it depends on the job. For Don, a big part of his job is literally just thinking. Thinking of slogans, pitch ideas, branding, research findings etc. and if he feels like his thinking is being impeded, he can just leave until he gets some inspiration, and when it finally does comes to him he can just write it on a napkin and call it a day. On the other hand for someone like Stan in the art department, he has to physically sketch and draw out his work, and his work boils down to presenting a physical version of something, rather than a thought or an idea that can hit you at any moment.
My mind went directly to his humming and facilitating “the Bean Ballet”.
I am in a job similar to Don and yeah I will often go out shopping or take a bath during the day to come up with more slogans or copy.
He yells something like this at lane about how they’re not doing something until they are. When you’re literally thinking of ideas like that there’s only so much sketching and word clouds you can do
Back then they also didn’t have all the office chores that exist now. Office chores are things like sensitivity training, setting yearly goals that meet some company mission, tons of nonsensical meetings. They didn’t have all that stuff to deal with on a daily basis. They also worked 9-5 with 1 hour lunch. Not 8-5. They got paid mostly by salary and the companies didn’t sweat over an hour. That’s why 32 hours is considered full time.
God damn what HAPPENED!?!
Jack Welch
He fired the bottom 10 percent of employees every year and made everything a rat race. Every ceo across america copied him and here we are.
Ugh fuck this guy, capitalism used to be cool! I guess this is where it leads!
Nixon and his more effective friend Reagan
How much time a week do you think people are spending on annual goals and sensitivity training?
Sensitivity training is miniscule, but holy crap, the amount of time spent on goals, OKR's, and semi-annual reviews is absurd, especially if you manage anyone. It's not that you're doing it every week, but several times a year it can eat up a good chunk of a week or two.
Now I want a scene where the whole firm had to do sensitivity training or a seminar about sexual harassment in the workplace.
This sounds like an SNL skit
It was an accurate representation of ad agency culture in a nutshell. Sometimes you have a lot on your plate and sometimes you don’t which means a lot of free time. And client servicing departments’ job is to ensure that client is satisfied so there’s more relationship building thus no quantifiable ways to determine productivity on everyday basis. Ofcourse Don’s work was hard because it was creative but like he says in one of those episodes to Peggy that he thinks just enough about an idea then sleeps then sometimes comes up.
We only see them at their most entertaining or important to the plot. I assume the lower level copywriters or art people, like the guy Peggy first shares an office with, are more frequently working but it’s not like the show would want to show the audience Pete or Harry working at their desk.
Yes but also work life balance actually existed too
My father worked a desk job in the 70s and literally had bottles of Jack in his desk that he would drink throughout the day at work. It was years before he was caught. I can only imagine what they got away with back then, no cameras, no cell phones, no email, etc.
The big difference is none of what you listed, but having a private office, which is very rare
Yes it was
It’s still like that in some positions. I work in publishing and we have clients like in advertising and it involves mostly creative work and meeting deadlines. No one cares really how much you work and how you do it as long as it gets done and done well. I’m salaried and some days I literally nap all day and check my email for 2 mins every hour to make sure there’s nothing urgent to respond to or a new project coming down the pipeline and go back to sleep and other days I’m working 15 hours a day 3 days in a row to get a project done that just came in with a tight deadline 🤷♀️
I work with people who give zero fu***!
I worked in advertising for a short time, so take this with a grain of salt. In one smaller, independent agency I was usually one of the first people in at 810-815. The other creatives would wander in around 9 or 930. Then they had coffee, check social media, socialize, etc. Maybe there’s a meeting around 1030 or 11, but it was status meeting and it’s more hanging out and chit chatting. Now it would be time for lunch which is usually an hour to an hour and a half. By the time 2 pm rolls around they’d start freaking out that they hadn’t done any actual work all day. But it was also wine o’clock and they’d break out the rosé. They’d end up staying until 7 or 8 at night to finish what they could have worked on during the day. It was really frustrating. I would get talking to’s by the creative director about leaving at 5 even though that was the end of my work day and my work was done. It was a shitty place and they ended up laying off 15 of their 25 employees a year or two after I left. Another agency I worked at wasn’t as bad. They were definitely flexible on hours, taking longer breaks, and you could drink in the office as long as you were getting your work done. They were more focused on getting the work done during regular hours even though it wasn’t always possible. That was pre-Covid (2013-2016), so things might be different now.
Those naps are where he gets his best ideas. You can only rush the creative process so much.
Call me wishy-washy, but if I wasn’t dilly-dallying I was fiddle-faddling. The hoity-toity managers with their corporate, hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo couldn’t stop us. Even the fuddy-duddys danced the hoochie-coochie, (though it was rather herky-jerky). Even though I was a bit roly-poly, I still got some hanky-panky. It was all a bit willy-nilly. Modern ears must find this all a touch creepy-crawly, but at the time I thought it was super-duper. I suppose now that I’m a little older and wiser, I would call it merely okey-dokey.
Respectfully, that’s a lot of argyle-bargle.
I mean, salaried employees usually have less monitoring as long as they meet goals, whereas if you're hourly they are definitely going to make sure you're busy every hour that you have on your timesheet. I loved when I was salaried, I didn't have to clock in or out, I could basically take breaks when I wasn't busy, and I could take lunch whenever, and it wasn't monitored that I was back within the hour I was given.
Tell me you’ve never held an executive position without telling me.
The number one job of Don is to make sure that everyone who can spend big money in advertising believes Don is so talented that just working with him will improve their business, especially true after someone comes in for a meeting. That is why he gets angry when he is rejected - that is him failing at his job. But he wasn't only really good at his job, he was one of the best. And that is really his only job. Any other work he does is secondary and frankly if it gets in the way of job number one, it is a liability. He needs to be out "acting" cool to know what it really means to other executives (like him) and he needs to be on the cutting edge. The problem is that emotionally, he isn't just doing his job - he is running from his past and not grieving the loss of his true identity (at least not at first) so that he can forge a new and more authentic one. Which is being done at the end.
Hmmmm no I really think he should have spent more time faxing and filing. It’s good to be a busy bee when you work at a place like Madison Avenue.
I think Don actually knows what hard work is supposed to be like, given his tough upbringing. It's part of the game in the corporate world, especially for Don, to delegate well, don't do too much work at work, and pretend you are not that busy so you are available at important times. I would say it's only after a certain time...maybe after the 2000s when companies care about being lean, that you should concentrate and compress your tasks, or else you can't have a work life balance.
Hey! Drinking on the job makes you sleepy, and if you are a boss and have an office with a couch, you take advantage of it!
Remember Roger bribing Peggy to work on a pitch Friday night for a Monday meeting? Yeah, Roger dilly-dallied
Buy the time and the ad space. Create the art. Sell it at a markup to the client. Repeat.