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."
I avoid being needed at 3:00AM. I've been there before. I've had the VPN software installed on my own computer so I could fix someone else's bugs in the middle of the night.
I have a Palm and a cell phone, but they are mine. Work doesn't have the cell number, nor will they. I no longer have the VPN setup on my computer.
I've refused to work at all hours and on my own time, and it has prevented me from advancing to a position that requires it. That is a feature, not a bug. I know in these days it is hard to be picky, and if I was faced with the prospect of carrying a pager or being unemployed, I'd suck it up, but I would start looking elsewhere.
I work with way too many people who see working as a programmer as a gateway into management. They don't understand why I don't want to "advance" (advance by their definition). It completely baffles them that I'd rather be happy than make more money.
Life is tradeoffs. If the coolest opportunity came round, but it required me to be on call now and then, I'd take it. Likewise, I'd rather not make the extra few thousand a year, but have my time be mine.
Interesting. Just yesterday i was fuming about how i get handed stuff to do at exactly the moment it is time for me to leave.
On average i put in 2-5 hours a week at the end of the day off the clock. I know i should raise a fit, but i don't.
Damn.
do() || do_not();
At this point we have the technology and know-how to reduce work to a quarter or less, with likely more production. Some serious social change is needed to make this happen--but it will.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Life was great!!
Then, I get a new boss. Classic 'Type A' personality. Worked 60+ hours a week, claimed it took her 40 hours a week to read her email.
Long story short, she fired me. Claimed I couldn't do the job that I had been doing for over nine years.
Former coworkers basically said she couldn't handle the fact that she worked 60+ hours a week, and I worked 32 to 36 hours a week...
So, try this at your own risk!
Glad to see this is moving along...
:)
A while back I got fed up, and got rid of my cellphone. That means alot less stress, even more then you'd expect. First, no more phone to keep track of, no more incoming calls, no more calling people when I don't really need to. I do my calls all at once. Oh and I save a forune by not having long distance on the landline (screened, never answeered) and using a nice 3c/min calling card. Anyone worth talking to can email me. And anyone I like can IM me (whitelist only of course).
I also tweaked all my OSX Mail filters to be very aggressive, and the mail to only check once every hour. Again, far less interuptions.
And more and more I'm seeing people I know also burn-out completely on the "time saving technology" and trash it all. And then they start to declutter the rest of their lives too, but that's for another subject...
Life has improved alot since the real-time email and cellphone days
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I went from a 80 hour work week to a 50 hour work week and from a place I really didn't like to the number one location on my list.
......
I used to work for a semi-conductor manufacturer in Devlopement (no hints--but its product was the P4) and they were nice enough to hire me staright outta grad school. Then they were nice enough to expect stupifying hours, no weekends and 24 hours on call. But it paid my internet bills to
Find a job!
But it took a lot of persistance and didn't happen overnight. I spent roughly 16 months send out app after app, resume after resume, searching and searching for the right job. And then it happened.
Benifits:
No more anti-depresents
No more anxiety medication
Weekends off
Evenings off
Hair growing back
Threw pager in trash (ok so I turned it in when I left)
Downside:
None
Moral of story--if you don't like it CHANGE.
Soon enough companies figure out that they are losing their best people becuase of stress and overwork. But Why wait yourself--you can find an eqaul paying job with less stress. It takes only time and persistance.
Cthulhu for president!
I am just finishing grad school. Some people assumed that I went because I had aspirations of being a professor. The more cynical people suggest that I went to avoid the real world.
In either case, I just want to say that grad school is a great way to take back your time. In computer science at least, they will basically pay you a reasonable salary to go to grad school (plus great benefits). More importantly for me, grad school has been a lot less work than most jobs. You also get to do interesting stuff rather adding feature bloat to the new widget for the local megacorp. Strangely enough, even though this is easy living, it is also very "prestigious" for some reason.
Once you are done, you are also eligible for a lot more jobs. I would suggest avoiding tenure-track professor jobs if you are interested in your time. But you can afford to be selective in finding a job since you are qualified for so many more jobs.
I will say that grad school is not necessarily the best way to get rich. If that is your goal then you may want to choose some other path. Of course, you could lose your money anyway. One nice thing about education is that you can't lose your it (other than through brain injury).
Also, I'm not saying there isn't hard work involved. But you are basically in control. You mostly set your own hours. And you can find (or at least look for) the work that motivates you.
Never underestimate the power of fiber.
Has anyone else read the book Faster by James Gleick? It's a really interesting study on how, as a group, our idea of time has been modified in recent years. It seems as if the pace of everything has gotten "faster, quicker, more efficient" and yet, at the same time we should be reaping the rewards of all this efficiency with more free time, which obviously hasn't materialized.
Anyway, the book is really good and I recommend it (in addition to most of Gleick's other stuff.) It explores all the different aspects of how we treat time management in the modern world. For example, take the case of someone buying a complicated PDA or other gadget and then spending a whole lot of time configuring it, wrestling with sync software, entering all their contacts into the device, keeping batteries charged, etc. -- when their old method (probably a little black book or rolodex) took a lot less effort when you sum everything up. And yet, they feel like they're saving time. This is just one type of example that the book tries to delve into, and I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. The book was a very pleasant read and makes you think about a lot of things we do in the "modern age" (whatever that is.)
Unemployment is an option. Joblessness is an option.
I went and opened a new account at a brokerage a couple of years ago and they wanted to know who my employer was.
I was actually rather taken aback by the question. It seemed an odd concept to me.
Employed? That's what I do with hammers and toilets. No one "employs" me, and I told him so.
He asked me if I were self employed.
Does a hammer employ itself? Does a toilet flush itself? (Well, ok, sometimes, if the flapper valve is wonky, but you get my point)
I am not self employed. I am. I live. I see to my survival. I'm no more employed than a sparrow.
He insisted that I list at least my last employer. That goes back over a decade, but it made him happy.
I took back my time. Then I kept it.
You can too.
KFG
I was a manager for a while (it was a dot-com so it wasn't like I was a real manager. They hired a VP who offered me a promotion (to Director or some such nonsense) but I'd be expected to work a lot longer because the VP was a workaholic. I turned down the promotion and went back to coding. I kept my life and soon his wife left his.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
All the food, wine and beer over there tastes better and most of the people you meet aren't self-involved assholes like they are here. You can talk about our "Higher standard of living" all you want to, but I'd have to contest the term "living". We're not living here in America. We're just keeping busy while waiting to die.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm working 40-50 hours a week, with 10 days of paid time off per year. That includes Days I Had The Flu (2), Days My Car Didnt Work (3). This would also include days I had to go to court for speeding tickets recieved while trying not to be late (0), but I just dont go to court. It would piss me off too much to think I could have saved that day for vacation. There are 2 months left in the year to take a vacation now, and since I left early one friday to beat the traffic (mistakenly, traffic was worse) I now have 4 1/2 days of vacation left after taking none.
I used to enjoy going on expeditions that would span months: kayaking, canoeing, hiking, biking, rock climbing, you name it. Now that I work all the time, I've spent a total of 2 days in the wilderness this entire year (illegal canoe trip on a polluted Illinois river). I'm completely burned out, have little interest in writing software anymore and have a bad case of insomnia.
All I have to say is you don't see people going postal too often in Canada. Or any other country for that matter.
TallGreen CMS hosting
I agree with this notion entirely... I took 4 months off work last year. I gave my last client 4 months notice before I left and they begged me to stay on for another month when it was time for me to leave. I said sure but I would only work 2 days a week.
During those 4 months I took off, I left chilly Ottawa in December and visited some friends in California for about 3 weeks and spent some time re-evaluating what I wanted out of life. I've been through work burnout a couple of times and I promised myself that I wouldn't let it happen again after I had a relationship fail as a result of it.
As for working for free, I don't agree with it. You are paid for a 37.5 hour workweek or whatever you sign for when you get hired. Any extra time you do should be rewarded somehow (and not with the promise of keeping your job either) because that is time taken away from your personal life.
I have some friends at Accenture who are fed the whole "Up or Out" crap speech at their town hall meetings. After putting in 60+ hour work weeks, for months, they were given a speech on how things have been going well but they really needed people to sacrifice their time at home to make the project succeed.
My friend then told me that several of her teammates were in tears because their family life was already suffering enough and then they were told that they need to sacrifice more (without pay of course). My friend is almost done the project she is working on there and then she is leaving because she doesn't believe in their attitude that family is last on the priority list.
Some people have noted though that it is your choice to work the 60+ hour work weeks. And someone mentioned that working for a workaholic who doesn't have kids or good friends is tough as well because they expect you to do the same. I agree, I've been there and you are made to feel guilty if you leave at 4:00pm even though you showed up before everyone else (7:00am) I used to get comments about "banker's hours" but I told them that I was at work while they were crawling out of bed.
Hopefully the article will turn on a couple of lightbulbs in peoples heads and make the world a better place because they will spend some more time with the people they love (and who love and need them in return).
Have a good weekend folks.
Hyperhyper
This statement makes it seem that we overwork so that we can have an abundance of material wealth. Sorry, wrong. Maybe I'm alone in this but I work my ass off just to make ends meet.
I don't think you're alone in it, but I don't think you're the target audience.
When we decided to have kids (or, as it turned out, "a kid" and stop there) we looked at our lives. My husband and I are both geeks (he's a Unix sysadmin, I an AS/400 sysadmin/developer, both with a side of Perl), both making pretty fair money (for flyover country, anyhow), and we didn't want our kid(s) raised by daycare.
So we sat down and looked at our budget, and figured out just how much money we were spending just to buy our time back... paying for everything from restaurant meals to lawnmowing. And we realized that if we stopped doing all that, we could cut our household income in half and it wouldn't lower our standard of living.
And so I quit. Now, it means I have to do a lot of housework and other "manual labor" instead of playing with "big iron" all day. But, you know, I still get to play with Perl and do the *fun* stuff that I want to do (and, obviously, read Slashdot in the middle of the day, just like I always did), and take on the occasional contract job to keep my resume fresh.
But I'm digressing: it's the folks that *don't* take that road that are dragging you and everybody else along into this work-and-consume cycle... there are kids in my son's playgroup who are playing soccer already. They're getting pushed into organized sports when they turn THREE. It's a nightmare trying to schedule something with parents of older kids... they're rushing from practice to game to tournament, and kids are going to out-of-town and out-of-state tournaments in freakin' ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. Grabbing fast-food in the drive-through, and working overtime at two jobs to pay for the health club membership they don't have time to use, and so forth and so on.
It's nuts. Maybe we're atypical, but I think we're better off now.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
While the sentiment of the movement behind this article makes much sense, I just don't think it is practical in a free market system.
Free markets are all about competition. The pressure to remain competitive by getting more for less in all aspects of business squeezes everyone...management, employees, and the entire supply chain...to capture and sustain market share. If legislative measures attempt to "take back employees' time", businesses will have no other recourse but to continue the pursuit of a competitive edge through other means.
In a business world where unemployment has risen to moderately uncomfortable levels (especially in the tech sector), the economy is recovering only through measures that do not create additional jobs, and trends toward international outsourcing of business functions are increasing...drawing a line in the sand will only result in businesses being forced to look beyond the US workforce to carry on. As long as there is a pool of workers who will do *anything* just to have a job (and those people will always exist), things cannot, and will not change.
Let's face it, the modern era workforce is depreciable capital in the same way buildings and machinery were in the industrial age. You buy it, beat it, break it, all with the firm understanding that someday you must replace it.
I think this is what is meant by the phrase, "victims of their own success".
I love free markets and the innovation brought about by competition, but to get the good, you must willingly accept the bad. It's a trade off.
He believe's things are sooo bad today.
So, I ask this question: Do you really want to go back to a time when everyone worked the farm, 4:30am-till dark, work. bed, repeat. every day for the rest of your life...which usually ended around 45 for men?
So yes, I work ~50 hrs a week which leaves 118hrs, I sleep 8hrs, leaving 62hrs to play with my son, work on personal projects, etc.
There's alot of professions in this world...maybe those that are unhappy should consider a new one.
-----
--- Just say no to negativity.
the Labor Movement
the folks that brought you the weekend
The 40 hour workweek and paid overtime were major victories of the labor movement in the US.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
More than anything else, you ignoring one fact about individual insurance: the cost. You can't get good and affordable comprehensive health insurance when you buy individually; you have no negotiating leverage. That's why the working poor are, for the most part, uninsured: when you buy alone, it's cheaper to self-insure with your own savings and risk catastrophic bills than to pay a fixed premium that almost certainly won't pay off.
That fact, in turn, is why advocates for the working poor keep pushing for state insurance pools for low-income working people. Such a pool would have vast leverage with the insurance companies. (It would, however, hurt the well-established. Many of us would lose our health benefits shortly after such a poll were established.)
I saw a program on Tv once (I know, timewasting again) where they took a couple with two kids and two jobs, and calculated how much 'extra' cash they'd gained by the wife working. Call it X.
:)
Then they worked out the costs of day care, days off to take the kids to the doctor, the extra petrol for running to & from daycare, the jobs, the other associated costs... Call it Y.
Imagine the reaction when they revealed to this stressed, harried, 'overworked' couple that X was less than Y. She could quit her job and spend all day with her kids, and be better off!
She cried, he cried, she quit - and they all lived happily ever after...
Mark
PS The only reason she quit, I recall, was that he earned more. That's a whole other thread though
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice