ILPC 2026

 An index measuring the utilization of online gig platforms suggests that their use is growing globally at an annual rate of 25 percent (Kässi & Lehdonvirta 2016). Such platforms seem to grant complete temporal flexibility to workers, as workers are formally free to choose when and how much to work on a day-to-day and even minute-to-minute basis. This is expected to allow people to combine work with a variety of life situations and choices, boosting productivity while enabling workers to achieve a better balance between work and other activities (Malone 2004, Gratton & Johns 2013, Sundararajan 2016).

We study how this flexibility plays out in practice in online piecework, a subset of online gig work where the work consists of standardized tasks paid on a piece-rate basis. Online pieceworkers are formally free to schedule their own work. But previous literature on flexible scheduling suggests that even in the absence of formal constraints, workers who are in a poor bargaining position may find that they must in practice work inconvenient shifts in order to secure continued employment (Wood 2016), which we refer to as a “structural” constraint. Furthermore, even workers who are relatively free of formal and structural constraints can still suffer from what we term “cultural-cognitive” constraints (following Scott 2014), such as overwork and procrastination, preventing them from managing their time effectively.

We use 30 worker interviews as well as managerial interviews and observation to compare time management practices and constraints across three online piecework platforms with different histories and designs: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that the platform with the fewest formal constraints presents workers with the greatest structural and cultural-cognitive constraints on effective time use. This is because formal workplace institutions such as regulated working hours are not merely fetters on temporal sovereignty, but also supporting structures (Jahoda 1982). We conclude that breaking down structured jobs into unstructured gigs and microtasks may exacerbate structural and cultural-cognitive constraints, paradoxically causing these flexibilized workers to experience less control over their time than in more regulated jobs.

That said, we also find that workers had developed a variety of sociomaterial practices to cope with the lack of formal supporting structures. Across all three platforms, workers used personal practices such as daily routines, quota setting, and mental timebanking to manage their time. Workers had also organized into online groups and networks in which participants traded advice and spurred each other on. Some workers also made extensive use of bespoke software code to help them in time management, for instance by removing distractions from the platform’s user interface. But some of the bespoke code were used as part of practices that essentially substituted for the missing iron cage of managerial control with a self-imposed digital cage; these workers delegated the scheduling of their work to an algorithm and undertook to be constantly available to it. Taken together, these new practices, communities and technologies can be seen as ‘new structures of working life’ that emerge as substitutes for older structures such as regulated working hours.