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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.
And I'll take it back when my boss and the schedule say I can!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
That very episode was on last nigh... Oops, does watching Simpsons count as wasting time?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
That's just letting the terrorists win...isn't it?
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
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!
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.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Seems there was this clause in my contract concerning ownership of my soul...
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
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
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
...by adding this to your /etc/hosts file:
0.0.0.0 slashdot.org
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.)
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.
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.
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
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