Hello Reader,

On Thursday I walked home with a copy of Grand Theft Auto VI. It actually arrives Thursday, November 19, and a lot of people have already spent the past couple of days getting ready for it.

That’s the part I keep thinking about. Rockstar opened preloading on Thursday (which is why I walked home with a copy), so the game files would already be sitting on consoles before the servers went live. Millions of people downloading at the same moment would have buckled the network, so they spread the work across the week. The heavy lifting happened early, which leaves launch day free to be launch day.

The other story is about the cost. One economist estimates 1.5 million US workers could be out that day, roughly a billion dollars in lost output. The Wall Street Journal reports some people banked vacation days for it, and some employers built the date into year-end compensation. Take-Two’s own CEO predicted plenty of sick calls.

We’ve seen this before. When Grand Theft Auto V launched in 2013, an IGN survey of 11,000 readers found 46% had taken the day off on purpose and nearly 20% planned to call in sick. March Madness gets the same treatment every spring. Challenger, Gray & Christmas puts this year’s cost to employers above $12 billion, with 40.3 million working Americans following along.

Look at how those numbers get made. Challenger’s 2023 estimate was $17.3 billion, built by multiplying minutes spent on brackets by an average hourly wage, using surveys from 2018 and 2019. Some economists dispute the GTA figure too, since workers mostly rearrange when they take leave. Even Challenger’s advice is to embrace it for the human connection. So it’s an estimate. A useful one, but still an estimate.

Productivity has one column, output, so a day spent on something you chose looks like a loss. Productiveness asks something else. It sees the person who banked a vacation day months ago and decided what that Thursday was for. Then it asks about the person who wakes up that morning and calls in sick: which of the two made a decision, and which is scrambling?

My son has a chemistry midterm scheduled in launch week. He knows it’s a bummer, and he’s going. That’s the other half of choosing: keeping a commitment you’d rather skip, with your eyes open.

The Final Flicker

Productivity counts what the hours produced. Productiveness asks whether you chose them.

See you later,
Mike

P.S. On Tuesday, November 17 at noon ET (9 AM Pacific), I’m running The 1 Hour Holiday Action Plan live, open to everyone. Think of it as a preload for the weeks ahead: an hour to look at what’s coming, the game launch included, and decide what the time is for. If a copy of GTA is on someone’s gift list, I’d guess it won’t last until the 25th, so it’s worth planning around. You can save your seat here.

Thanks for reading. Your time is valuable, and I don’t take it for granted. In a world pulling us in all directions, thanks for choosing The Lantern.