Some of my thougths about counting time.
Since when is money more sacred and personal than time? JW's boast that they don't keep a record of how much money individuals contribute. But, then they have this rigid system of rewards built around how much time a person says they spend in field service. I think this is inconsistent. The excuse they give is always that they want to track the world-wide work. But this could be done with annonymous reporting.
The other thing I hate about reporting time is that it is almost always used as a club to beat up on people. You don't automatically become an Elder or Ministerial servant because you put in 20 hours of field service. But you definitely are disqualified if you put in less than 10. Anything below 5 hours tends to be referred to as "token" field service. This is a way of judging that is very upsetting. They seldom really look at a person as an individual - after all they are faceless "publishers".
The nice part about this , is like all bureaucratic systems, you may not get bit in the groin but you get bit in the behind. Here is how this works. The presumption is that the less time you put in the less "mature" you are. The other side of this coin of presumption is that the MORE time you put in the MORE mature you are. The consequence is that they ignore these MORE mature people thinking they have no personal problems. The truth is that probably most of the apostates come from the ranks of the so-called "mature" ones.
When you see someone sacrifice family for field service you know that is a ticking time-bomb. How many times have you seen people on assembly programs talk about their personal sacrifices to pioneer only to hear later that they left the organization or had to be disfellowshipped for some indiscretion with one of their "pioneer" lovers. Of course I don't have figures for this because no one is reporting the number of pioneers that have been casualties of this fanatacism.
Another problem with setting goals like 10 hours per month is again the flip side of the bureacratic coin. Many who might be quite comfortable with 5 hours per month push themselves to get 10 hours per month. But many who have the capability of putting in 30 hours per month will stop at 15 hours because after all they have exceeded the quota by 50%.
This bureaucratic nonsense will not end. Bureaucrats are afraid that no-one would go out at all if they didn't make field service the coin of the realm.
