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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.
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!
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.)
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