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."

Comments

Obligatory...

[DarkBlackFox]

"You took 4 minutes of my life and I want them baaaaaack!! ....oh I'd only waste them anyway."

My time is my time

[RickL]

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.

Re:My time is my time

[wawannem]

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 I had a VP threaten to fire me on the phone for not coming in late one night, it was great, the threat was rescinded when I asked how the press would feel about their 'family-oriented' university giving someone the can because he didn't feel like coming into work at 11PM.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.

It's my time!

[phraktyl]

And I'll take it back when my boss and the schedule say I can!

Coincidence?

[uberdave]

That very episode was on last nigh... Oops, does watching Simpsons count as wasting time?

Not going to happen

[MacFury]

Get Americans to value non-material things? Are you out of your damned mind?

That's just letting the terrorists win...isn't it?

how to take back your time

[The Terrorists]

Quit surfing the web all day at work and at home. You rarely learn anything. In fact, you're rarely even truly entertained!

No one took your time in the first place.

[JusTyler]

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!

Re:No one took your time in the first place.

[indros13]

There's a great book on the issue of the American tradeoff of time for disposable income called The Overspent American. Basically, we spend so much time trying to keep our incomes up, we end up having less and less time to enjoy the things we buy (that we arguably don't need anyway).

Re:No one took your time in the first place.

[TwistedGreen]

Exactly. You make your own life, and you're no slave. This idea that people are somehow enslaved to the Evil Corporations are rather ignorant. Some people may like that corporate environment. Others may choose otherwise.

And calling this half-brained "Take Back Your Time Day" a 'movement' by any measure is just plain inaccurate.

Re:No one took your time in the first place.

[cubicledrone]

If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.

Boss: Come in on the weekend please.

Employee: Can't. I'm going on a picnic with my family.

Boss: No, I'm going on a picnic with my family. You're working or you're fired.

Employee: What time?

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!

How about a small house, children and a paid-for car? By the way, it was a given until people got fired every three months. Now they're lucky if they can afford to eat three times a day.

Don't try this at work, kids...

[feed_those_kitties]

At my former job I decided to go for a 32-hour workweek. I had simply decided that "my free time is more important than money." Talked it over with then boss, he thought it was a great idea. Took the 20% pay cut, worked Monday - Thursday, had every Friday off.

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!

Re:Don't try this at work, kids...

[DaveAtFraud]

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.

Here's how you value the intangibles:

[Matey-O]

Value the non-material parts of your life: Have kids. Well...if you're the right kinda person to have kids that is. I've never felt more moved on a genetic, propagation of the family name level, then when I held my boys for the first time. It's really an indescribable feeling. And after that, you learn a LOT of the $hit you thought was important isn't.

I tried taking my time back

[dogfart]

But my employer called security and had me arrested for theft.

Seems there was this clause in my contract concerning ownership of my soul...

No one's fault but their own.

[rosewood]

Someone call me the WAAAAAAAAAAAMBulance please.

20 Credit hours this semester, fall of my senior year in college.

I signed up for 1700+ hours for Americorps.

My fiance and I are planning a Spring 05 wedding.

I run a small IT consulting company.

Free time = 0

Rewards = Huge.

I have absolutely NO ONE to complain to but myself. If I want more time, I make more time. Same thing for everyone else. No one is making you work the job you are at. If you don't like the terms, renegotiate! If you don't like the job, quit. Not that simple because the cost of living is too high where you live? Move. Don't want to move because you like your nice house and nice cars and all that jazz? THEN KEEP WORKING.

No one is forced to work the coal mines 60 hours a week...

Good starts...

[Duncan3]

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 :)

Diminishing Returns

[ChuckDivine]

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.

Take back your time through grad school

[good-n-nappy]

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.

The real problem

[Psmylie]

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)

Take back your time every day...

[Anonymous Crowhead]

...by adding this to your /etc/hosts file:

0.0.0.0 slashdot.org

James Gleick

[skookum]

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.)

Re:Nine weeks more work? That's good!

[hondo77]

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.

Re:Nine weeks more work? That's good!

[cyranoVR]

America's also more successful than the EU and those who choose to work hard in America enjoy a higher standard of living.

Your argument is based on the potentially erroneous argument that "higher standard of living" equals "more happiness." Just because Americans have "more stuff" doesn't mean that they are happy. Basically - "Woo hoo, I have an Escalade, a Tivo and a 27" plasma TV - too bad I'm on my way to the hospital for my 2nd heart attack after my divorce."

Ref: This study by New Scientist. Note that Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world despite having a substantially lower "standard of living" than the US.

Also, I remember hearing that a survey showed a majority of Americans would rather have and additional week off from work rather than a raise of equal value, but I don't have time to look it up now.

Re:Think of rampant inefficiencies.

[Bendebecker]

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

My time is not free

[HyperHyper]

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

Re:Are we victims?

[M. Silver]

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.

Is it worse now?

[ShaggyBOFH]

This reminds me of a conversation with a good friend. He thinks that he's just so stomped on by big bussiness. He works and works and just barely makes ends meet. Oh poor Keith. I personally think most of his problems lay in the fact he lives in northern CA! Yes, Keith, it's fucking expensive to live there!! your rent (split between 3 people) is higher than my trailer trash 3 bedroom moble.

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.

-----

Re:Nine weeks more work? That's good!

[Reductionist]

Oh please! Quit being such a free market fanboy and stop viewing "quality of life" in terms of raw GDP.

This article from the Economist which pretty much debunks the notion that Americans are so much better off than Europeans.

The simple fact is a lot of the stuff we spend money on, such as excessive prisons and gold plated highways that foster urban sprawl, raises our GDP output, but not our general welfare.

Chasing the leader

Feb 6th 2003
From The Economist print edition

Are Europeans really so much worse off than Americans?

AMERICA has been the world's economic leader for over a century. Economic theory suggests that western Europe should be catching up. Yet average GDP per head in the European Union, measured at purchasing-power parity, is only three-quarters of that in the United States. A popular explanation is that European firms are less productive because they are hampered by labour- and product-market regulation. But European productivity, measured by output per hour worked, has in fact almost caught up with America's. If Europeans are so productive, though, why are they apparently so much poorer than Americans?

America's much-trumpeted "productivity miracle" in the late 1990s created the misleading impression that Europe significantly lags America in the productivity league. It is true that, since 1995, American GDP per hour worked has risen by an annual average of 1.9%, compared with only 1.3% in the European Union. However, over any longer period, up to half a century, Europe's productivity growth has outpaced America's. Since 1990 American productivity has risen by 1.6% a year; the EU's has risen by 1.8%. Since 1950 America's productivity growth has averaged 2%, Europe's 3.3%. According to figures from the Conference Board, an American business group, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands all now boast higher output per hour than the United States. Average productivity in the EU is still 7% less, largely because of lower productivity in Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal--but the gap has continued to close over the past decade.

The narrowing of the productivity gap has not, however, been reflected in living standards, as measured by GDP per head. The chart, taken from an analysis* by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, shows how Europe's productivity and GDP per head fell relative to America's from the mid-19th century until around 1950. Productivity has since rebounded, almost reaching American levels. GDP per head, on the other hand, rose sharply until 1970, but then flattened off at 77% of America's.

The surge in Europe's productivity since 1950 is largely explained by reconstruction after the war and the belated exploitation of electricity and the mass production of cars--40 years after America. The puzzle is why Europe's GDP per head has lagged so far behind productivity. Germany's GDP per man-hour is 1% higher than in America, but its GDP per person is 25% lower. The main reason is that average hours worked in Europe have fallen so sharply. In part, this reflects an increase in unemployment and withdrawals from the labour force; but it also reflects a preference for shorter working weeks and longer holidays.

A broader analysis of living standards, based on economic welfare rather than crude GDP, argues Mr Gordon, would place some value on Europeans' greater leisure time. But how much of the depressing effect of shorter hours on Europe's GDP per head should be ascribed to people's free choice to take longer holidays than overworked Americans, and how much to union pressure or government policies that try to spread jobs by compulsory limits on hours of work? Mr Gordon guesses that one-third of the discrepancy between Europe's productivity and its GDP per head, relative to America's, represents freely chosen leisure. Corrected for this, Europe's income per

Some tips for avoiding long hours

[SuperKendall]

1) Be very agressive about defining EXACTLY what is to be accomplished by working extra hours. That enables people to meet those goals before the hours actually start. I've been able to diffuse a number of "team must work the weekend" events down to a few people coming in for a few hours. Refuse to go to useless meetings if there is a time crunch that is pressuring you to work long hours.

2) Force peoples hands by being the most "extreme" worker around. If someone wants a meeting at 6:00pm, say "I would love to, but I really have to go do some stuff - I'd be happy to meet at midnight though" (or 5am for you early types). If you are serious and willing to go through with this few will call you on this and usually back off the semi-unreasonable timeframe. A bonus benefit is that if they do decide to go for it, you only loose out on sleep, which you them make up at work to prove a point about how they shouldn't take your time.

3) Be accomidating during real crises, it gives you more leverage when they want to use your time just for the hell of it. Just one overnighter can be pointed to for a year as an example of why you are not working THIS weekend/evening.

My time is my family's

[stangbat]

The birth of my daughter ten days ago makes me a stay at home dad that occasionally works as a project manager with a local software development firm. My wife is the breadwinner and it made sense for me to be the caregiver.

So what are the costs of this for me and my family?
- Or newest car is almost 6 years old and a new one is no where in sight.
- There is no way we can now afford to move into a bigger house, even though it would be nice.
- I can't afford a boat, personal watercraft, RV, vactaion overseas or pretty much anywhere for that matter.
- I don't have some fancy title or job to brag about to others. My business cards would say "Dad".

I could of course go on. But what I gain is the satisfaction of raising my daughter myself, not some stranger at daycare. I can take her to the doctor when needed, we can go on walks whenever we like, read a book, etc. I don't have the play money I used to and I won't have the "stuff" that that money could buy, but my stress level is SO much lower and I get great satisfaction knowing that I am doing the right thing. I might also add that this situation also makes things much easier on my wife as I can take care of the daily family tasks. She doesn't have to worry about anyting once she gets home from work.

I've taken back my time and I love it.