We’ve Got It All Wrong. We Need 5-Hour Work Days.
Or to focus on an entirely different metric.
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I used to work with a chain-smoking father. We became good friends, although his life-ending habit was visible through his deathly red eyes, deep cough, and constant flu-like symptoms.
He’d arrive at work at 9 am. Getting coffee was his first work task. This required going down the elevator twenty floors to the lobby cafe, waiting in line, ordering, waiting for the order and then walking outside to have a smoke with the coffee. After coffee time it was easily 9:45 am. He’d then come over and chit-chat to the rest of us. After he got tired of that, he’d muster up the little energy left in his body to open his email inbox. It’s as though the universe’s creator knew how to piss him off. The first email was almost always designed to mess with his brain. He’d be sure to let us know, too — more time down the drain.
Pretty quickly, it was 11 am, and he’d sent two emails that produced zero revenue. 11 am became 12 pm, fast, and that meant a long lunch and more smoke to darken his lungs. 1:30 pm was the usual return to work time. Thankfully, that’s when the team meeting occurred. All he had to do was go to the fridge and grab a coke, then find the meeting room and sit down … to complain. What could have been a 60-minute meeting became 90 minutes because of his Hollywood performance from Fight Club. 4 pm came thick and fast. 4 pm is 60 minutes away from the knock-off time of 5 pm (in case you didn’t know). So the packing down event occurred long before 5 pm to ensure not a single minute was wasted.
What we think of as a workday is often a lot less in actual work time when we break it down. Not all of us waste time like my chain-smoking friend, but time does fly when you’re at work — especially if you hate it. And after a stressful period in human history, due to a pandemic, many of us have worked more than our fair share of hours. We’re burned out and looking for different ways to work. Going back to an office where we’re watched like a hawk and judged on when we enter and leave the office is a thing of the past.
