Greedy work is work that is greedy of your time. In his novel The Firm, John Grisham describes it when he writes of the life of Mitch McDeere, a new member of a large law firm, working 12 or 14 hours at a stretch, 16 or 18 in crunch times, when all you can do at the end of the day is have a cold dinner and maybe sleep in the office. Jack Ma, the head of Alibaba, extols it, in the form of a 9– 9– 6 work culture: work from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week. For a lot of people who work in WeWork premises, the slogan is “Don't stop when you’re tired, stop when you are done”. Work is where we produce things, and in greedy work it seems as if a lot is being produced. For Mitch McDeere it might be wills or contracts. For people at Alibaba it might be a functioning cloud computer. For freelance people at WeWork it might be pieces of computer code or podcasts.

Seeing work as being about the production of things and services is the conventional view. Governments and economists track the productivity of a country's workforce, the monetary value of what the average worker produces in a year; when companies try to make their workforce more productive they are trying to get their workers to produce more monetary value per person. Automation increases productivity when it replaces some workers with machines so that the same amount is produced by fewer people. Jack Ma does this simply by having the people at Alibaba work longer each day.

We recognize another way that work is about production. It is motivated, in the sense that it expresses an intent to achieve a goal, and the act of production and what is produced help to achieve it. For organizations such as Mitch McDeere's law firm and Jack Ma's Alibaba, the things produced are intended to be sold; when they are sold they generate money income, some of which goes to Mitch McDeere and Ma's employees as pay. Of course, money income is not the only reason that people work to produce things.