Slashdot Mirror
Take Back Your Time!
pycnanthemum writes "Today is national Take Back Your Time Day. Boston.com has a story about it, it's a Seattle-based movement to get overworked Americans to value the non-material parts of their lives. When I read the article I thought of a lot of techies I know."
Quit surfing the web all day at work and at home. You rarely learn anything. In fact, you're rarely even truly entertained!
The dearth of recreational and family time in America is nothing new, although work hours have been increasing decade by decade leading to mini 'revolts' like this. However, who actually took your time away in the first place? You did. If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
"But I won't be able to afford the mortgage on my $500,000 home!" many will cry. A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so! A lot of people have escaped from the 'rat race' to start farms out in the boonies, backpack around the world, or live as a family out on the ocean waves.
Living in a 60-80 hour workweek society is your choice, and if you're too blinkered to do something about improving the quality of your life, fine.. but it's YOUR CALL!
Web Hosting Reviews
This movement touches on one of my central concerns. People are urged -- even required -- to spend more and more time at work.
Not only does this take a toll on life outside of work, it exacts a price at work. Exhaustion increases the likelihood of making mistakes. Perhaps more importantly, it also limits our ability to learn newer and better ways of doing things. It also affects our ability to discover new things.
As far as I can tell, this trend began during the 1970s and accelerated to the present day. What's interesting to me is the fact that the rate of productivity growth -- high in the quarter century after WWII -- dropped precipitously in the 1970s. This rate stayed low until the dot com bubble in the 1990s when productivity apparently soared. Now we're busy restating that productivity burst -- downwards.
Summing up, exhaustion carries a real price not only for society as a whole, but also possibly for business in particular.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
I think a lot of this is relative. Before I had a wife and kids, I didn't care what time I had to deal with a problem. I only cared when a company didn't reward me for the extra effort.
I worked for a small IT department in a large foster care organization. One that in-took kids 24 hours a day across the country. I didn't mind coming in if the systems went down at 3 AM, mostly because they paid me well.
My next job was at a University. Same scenario, lots of systems, few IT people. After I was denied a raise at my first annual review, I told my boss not to expect any more late hours fixing problems. After a few problems that just had to wait until 8AM the next day, I think they realized why I felt cheated. I had a VP threaten to fire me on the phone for not coming in late one night, it was great, the threat was rescinded when I asked how the press would feel about their 'family-oriented' university giving someone the can because he didn't feel like coming into work at 11PM.
I agree with the parent poster, Life is tradeoffs you have to take the good with the bad.
Type-A management. These people see a group of employees working 40-hour weeks and getting all their work done, and to their overheated little minds, it seems inefficient.
So they cut staff. If the work is still getting done on time, they cut more. Then, when deadlines start getting missed, they say things along the lines of, "well, the work still needs to be done. We all need to pitch in."
Then you get employees working 50-60 hour weeks to meet the deadlines. Then the boss gets a huge bonus for cutting costs and making the business line more efficient, and then goes on to "improve" another business line.
The only solution is to shoot them all (kidding! I'm just kidding! But not by much)
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Actually, you probably threatened her value system on a number of different levels:
1) You valued personal time more than the material posessions working longer hours would bring.
2) You were content with a job that was sufficient to meet your needs instead of climbing the career ladder.
3) You organized the work you were doing to fit within the time you allocated for it instead of letting the work organize you.
And you demonstrated that it was possible to do this and be happy (probably happier than she was by doing the opposite). Bummer your old boss left.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
America's also more successful than the EU and those who choose to work hard in America enjoy a higher standard of living.
I think the definition of success is open to debate. Eight weeks of vacation sounds pretty successful to me.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I wouldn't count on it. A french philopsher in the mid 1800's computed that the amount of work we actually need to do is only 2-3 hours a day and yet we still work our asses off. The problem is progress and the overly rich. All our life styles require x amount of work per day to sustain. However, the problem is that some people's life styles are so outrageous that there are simply not enough hours in the day for that person to possibly sustain there life style themsleves. Guess who makes up the difference. You see Aquilera acting like a whore and living like a king, remmeber, omeone has to do the necessary work to produce stuff so that she can do that. In our society, we call it money. We buy a cd. We pay way more than what that cd is actually worth. Assuming the time they each spend wroking to create that cd is equal to the time spent of alll the people that purchase that cd, and that the peopel who created that cd is equal to the number of people who purchase it, then the amount you would have to pay woudl be equal to the amount that you worked (aka your total income for that time.) In other words, the amount they work should equal the amount you work and (in a perfect soiciety) the cd they created would be worth the amount of work your equivalent group did. So wahts' wrong? It isn't. The amount you spend to purchase that product is far more valuable than the actual work and effort put into that product. Quite simply, your paying them more than the work tehy are doing for society is worth. Hence, they are using taht extra wealth to consume more of societies overall wealth than they are contributing to it. Someone has to make the difference up. [The actual argument would be a lot more complex tahn this of course but you get the general gist of what I am getting at.] In addition to this, there is the mater of progress. In order to stay as we are, we could work only a mere fraction as much as we do now. However, if we want to progress, we have to put in a little more time beyond what is required to sustain us. Now look at progress over the last 1000 years. As the amount of work we do increases so does the speed of progress (though not as much as it could and should be increasing due to the amount of work we put in.) By working more we also create more wealth and hence raise our standard of living (ie. progress.)
The question we have to ask ourselves is when is enough. When do we have enough material goods that progress can slow down to a more comfortable level? The problem is we don't. That's is what they thought in the fifties: taht certainly by now we would have all we could ever want and so we could move to sustaining ourselves instead of trying to aquire more and go farther. And quite simply our greed is unquenchable. No matter how much we have, we want more. 100 years ago they thought we would be able to settle for the heaven we live in (and many of us do live in a fantasy land - especially the gated community types) but the fact is we are starting to reach the phyical limits of what can be achieved. The world can't support 6 billion Americans. There isn't enough resources on earth. The question is can we even sustain the level of living at we are at now? By using sweatshops and taking advantage of the third world, are we actually as an entire scoiety taking mroe than we contribute (even though we contribute a great deal - and if the answer is yea than there is the matter of europe who has the same standard of living and works even less which would mean they are contributing less but taking the same amount as we are.)
We need to stop looking at the world wealth and the work done through symbols like money an start looking at the actual wealth. We need to start rewarding ppl for the work they actually do. Aquilera does not deserve the life style she has. Probably neither do any of us. We have to stop being greedy. we cannt maintain a ridiculous standard of living. If we try the number of poor will increase, whether you see it or not (when every family in india goes with one less meal it isn't so obvious as
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy