20-hour work weeks for all!
Earlier in my career, I could rock a 12 hour day, 60-hour week, answer emails at night, work the weekend. All that shit that we do to make sure our bosses see that we’re wildly committed. It’s 1am and I just banged out the baddest ass email ever, bro. Send it! Yeah, I look like a hero and my eyes hurt like shit from the blue light of my screen. I had caught the busy bug. The busy bug is contagious as shit. The pre-busy version of yourself walks up to someone in the hallway and asks them how they’re doing…
“Hey, what’s up? How’s it going?”
“Oh crazy. I’m slammed with meetings. I don’t have time to talk. I gotta head to one now.”
“Oh cool, well I wanted to chat with you about…”
“…oh yeah, why don’t you put something on my calendar? I think I’m open next month.”
“Ok” (nope)
The first feeling that you should have in this situation is…Dude, sucks to be that person. They sound miserable. How’s it possible that they’re booked back to back for the next 3 weeks? Should we do an intervention?
But that’s not how you feel, or at least how I felt. My instinct was to wonder why I wasn’t busy. Why am I not booked out a quarter in advance? Am I not that important? I should be blowing people off in the hallway cause I’m taking care of so much fucking business it hurts. I go back and look at my calendar. One meeting. Jesus, what kind of loser only has one meeting? Hmm. I can solve this…
So I’d go and sign up for more than I can handle. I wouldn’t ask for help because I can fucking work this shit out. I stayed late. I answered emails while I’m putting the kids to bed. I thought about work all weekend. I had dreams about it, no nightmares. My adrenaline pumping. How can this person ask me this? I’m so busy. I’m too busy. I wouldn’t listen to Sarah cause I’d be thinking of some conflict at work or project that wasn’t going as well as I’d like. Then I’d complain to Sarah about work. She’d get sick of me complaining. I’d burned out. She’d burned out. I’d quit my job. Ouch.
I’ve had really fulfilling jobs at great companies. I’m thankful for those jobs and the teams of people that I’ve worked with. They’re all great. I’ve let myself burn out because it’s easy to catch the busy disease and once you catch it it’s easy to let yourself spiral out of control. At least it had been easy for me.
I’ve been a stay at home dad for about a year and half but there was a 6 month period where I did some contract work with a university here in Hotlanta. One of the limitations that I was able to put on the work was that I wasn’t going to average more than 20 hours a week. Some weeks I did more. Some weeks I did less. Overall, I did about 20 a week which apparently is something you can do as a contractor. I’d typically work from 10am to 2pm so I did all my standard dad stuff before and after. I did drop-off and pickup, went to the playground, cooked dinner, etc. It was the most balanced and manageable life schedule I had ever had. My work quality was higher. My happiness was higher. Did I still complain to Sarah? Yes. Did she still not want me to do that? Of course.
The key was the balance of priority that I felt under the conditions. At 20 hours a week, I could prioritize family well above work. At 50 hours a week, it was work over family. It’s just a math thing. Subtract working and sleeping time from the total hours in a week and you can see where you stack up.
At the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, I was hopeful that companies would realize they have a massive opportunity to help their employees and help themselves. There were two problems that needed to be addressed. The first was obvious. If you can work from home, do it. And yes, it’s wonderful that Google and Facebook can let their employees work from home until July 2200. They are almost entirely made up of people that work 10+ hours a day in front of a computer so it’s honestly not that big of a sacrifice.
The second problem was the kid thing. I mean come on. Oh you’re going to let me work from home? Thank you overlord. But what in the fuck am I supposed to do with these monsters asking me for apple sauce and Paw Patrol every 3.5 minutes while I work through setting a background on my Zoom profile that accurately reflects my quirky personality?
You know those people that still come into the office everyday even though your company has a wonderfully flexible work from home policy? Yeah, they have a shit ton of kids. Or just one kid which is arguably harder to deal with since they don’t have siblings to bother. Either way, they are coming in because they can’t do work around their kids, even when their kids are only home after 3pm on weekdays. That’s right. It’s so hard for them to work from 3pm to 6pm with a kid around that they sacrifice the remaining 6 hours of the day by coming into the office. Not to mention the commute.
Companies had a real opportunity to offer up something that could have solved problems for their employees and themselves. Ask your employees if they’d be willing to accept reduced pay for reduced hours. Don’t lay people off. Retain the talent. Give them some time back and maybe people would be willing to get paid less which reduces some of your overall costs to run the company.
I haven’t really researched to see if there were companies out there that did this but nothing showed up in any of my social media feeds so I assume it hasn’t happened (this line of thinking is probably ruining the world BTW).
But this got me thinking. What if a 20-hour work week was the norm? What if a single job couldn’t require more than 20 hours of an individual’s time per week, on average?
Are you a workaholic? Is this idea of your freedom to work 60-hour weeks being taken away from you causing you to fume right now? Relax you crazy bastard. You can always work multiple jobs.
I’m having a hard time finding a negative with this idea but I’m hoping this can cause some dialog on the subject. Here are some potential positives…
More time — Time is more valuable than anything else. Pick up an old hobby. Hang out with the fam. Read. Take a class. Get a degree. Do nothing at all. It’s your time. You own it. Do whatever the hell you want with it. That’s the beauty.
More jobs — If all the jobs right now were doubled you’d open up a huge hiring opportunity. Many people would work multiple jobs. Some definitely would not, including me. Could unemployment drop to zero?
Diversity of experience — Anyone working 2+ jobs is getting double the experience.
Diversity of workforce — As people get more experience their contributions to our workforce increase.
Focus on training — Companies would now have to train more. Our government would have to educate more. Private companies could spawn out of the opportunity for training and job placement.
Legal immigration increases — Some people won’t like this but I do. Get talented people from other countries to come and make our country better. This is the American way. Lean into it. We don’t have Amazon, Google, Apple, eBay, Tesla, AT&T, and Big Lots (can’t live without them, right?) without immigration so you can thank immigrants of children of immigrants for your 401k not being total shit right now.
Okay, so what do you think? Are you up for a 20-hour week? Individuals have power to change things only through consensus. Make your voice heard below…
Thanks and as always power to the people!
Chris
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