Shorten the work week

I opted to pause writing for a while this summer after a successful #1000wordsofsummer, partly to take a break and partly because my partner was getting foot surgery in July. I didn’t see how I could maintain both the time and mental space to be creative on top of the day job demands, the dog, and whatever other responsibilities I had to pick up around the house.

Though the surgery itself was relatively minor (no physical therapy or anything like that needed), Chris had to stay completely off his foot for over two weeks before slowly, gingerly, putting weight back on it. Even though the pain was overall more achey than hurty, the most he could do that was use crutches to carry himself from the bed on one end of the apartment to the couch on the other. It’s frustrating, to be rendered suddenly helpless. 

I anticipated walking the dog would be my sole responsibility while he recuperated, as would preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, etc etc etc. I anticipated the extra time this would take. What I did not anticipate was how draining all of this could be. That worn feeling, not the kind of tired like I didn’t get enough sleep or I worked out really hard, but that feeling of being worn inside my bones.

It wasn’t just the physical labor that was so draining but the emotional and mental labor too. To constantly check in, to ask, to remember remember remember to do all these other little tasks, and ones that you’re not used to doing. None of this stuff was hard by itself (e.g. bringing him lunch) but they were just more that had to be slotted around all the other work and home and dog things. Together, they can crowd up your mind, like you keep shoving more and more stuff onto a shelf, and what was once tidy and organized is a heap of shit threatening to fall on your head. 

But as Pop said in Moonstruck, the greatest film of all time, everything is temporary.

That worn feeling passed after a couple weeks, once I recalibrated to a new rhythm, and Chris’s foot was healing well enough that he could start putting weight on it, and we could return to pieces of our old routine.

I can’t help but feel relief that we had no kids to also worry about, just a mouthy dog. Relief too that both of us could work from home, that we could afford to pay someone to clean the apartment, that we could order food. All of this eased the burden of both working a job and taking care of someone.

Friends, a couple, bought a house last year, an adorable brick one with a beautiful, huge backyard garden. They have a toddler and they both work fulltime. They want to cut back on work hours: maybe she goes part-time and he demotes himself from his leadership position so he can work four days instead of five. Caring for the garden and the house and a toddler, they said, is a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of energy. A weekend isn’t quite enough to manage all the tasks needed to maintain and sustain their life plus give them time to rest, pursue hobbies, spend time with friends, to not work.

You might have heard about that study out of Iceland last month, that showed the positive affects of a four-day work week? This prompted a question to the CEO of my company in a meeting, if we would ever move to a four-day week. He hedged, of course.

What my company has been doing is Summer Fridays, and by that I mean half days on Fridays, not this fake summer Friday thing some do where you have to “make up” the hours during the week. We get a full half day. (Not too big a stretch to go down to a four-day week?!?!?!) Even if I don’t take the full half day, shutting off my computer at 3pm instead of 6pm feels like a blessing. I’ve been given the gift of time! I take the dog for meandering walks without rushing through the park to get to my next meeting, I check on my plants, I start dinner a little earlier. Every once in a while I’ll schedule a massage, but usually that extra three-four hours is spent doing some kind of dog, plant, or home care.

A thing my friend with the big garden observed that’s been rattling around in my head: the labor of thinking about the home tends to fall to one person. I’d wager that in the majority of cis-het relationships, that role falls to the woman. And I certainly feel that, felt that more acutely as Chris recuperated. That time was really temporary, a handful of weeks, but thinking about, caring for, working on the home and the general business of running a home? That’s much less so. It feels like it never ends.

The discussions on shorter works weeks can focus on how workers (knowledge workers, office workers) can be as productive if not more so in four days instead of five. That argument might help the bosses feel better about not losing productivity (and therefore, money) with one less work day. But that misses the point that we work outside of the office too. We have children and pets to take care of, homes to maintain. Work is required outside the office so that when we show up to the office, we’re able to do that kind of work too. These spheres are not separate, as this past year and a half as clearly demonstarted.

The fact that a four-day week or even permanent Summer Fridays is being openly discussed at work, and that there was not a definite “no” signals that at least in certain corners, productivity is being re-revaulated, as well as what kind of demands a job can make of you and your time. Though the 4-day week dicussions can focus on that crew, we should remember the doctors, nurses, nannies, caregivers, service workers and every kind of worker. Burnout is affecting everyone, everyone needs time to rest and to have a life.

It would be so great, wouldn’t it, to have a permanent half day or one full extra day in the week to do things that you need to do, but without the rush and stress and sometimes half-assing it when you try to shove those chores around other chores, around other obligations?

I like my job a lot and feel lucky that I found my way to a career that is creative and challenging and pays well. But I do not want to spend all my time thinking about that work. I’m fantasizing about what else I could do with permanent extra time beyond the routine/home tasks: volunteering, working on art projects, seeing friends and family, and writing of course. All those things are deserving of care and attention, just as much if not more so than our paid work.

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Let me work from home forever, please

I am a person who craves solitude, who needs it in order to function, both in that fill up / replenish energy way and to actually do my work.

So I have not been sad about the forced working from home the past year+. Before, I’d feel a pinch of guilt, wondering how far I could push my boss before they subtly hinted that they “missed” me in the office and would I be in for that Friday meeting?

I hope this past year means I won’t ever have to go back into an office again, except maaaaaybe on occasion. This might not be possible; office leadership has started talking about “when we’re all together again” and re-opening offices in September. They haven’t used the word “family” but that’s the vibe I get. Is everyone desperate to go back to an office, to work among many other people, but me? 

I get missing colleagues, I do miss IRL facetime with mine, and the impromptu coffee breaks and chatter about what you watched last night, or plans for the weekend. For me, the benefits of working from home far outweigh missing that facetime. Not seeing my friends and actual family, the sameness of these walls, that is what is making my nuts, is making me sad.  Not working from home.

I get that some professions are better suited for in-person (teaching, arts, jobs at labs, travel industry jobs and so on) but a design and ad agency? To some, the answer is “yes.” My office prides itself on being collaborative, of different disciplines (the visual designer, the product designer, a creative director, a content strategist, etc) shut into a glass-walled conference room and attacking a whiteboard with sharp lines and loose squiggles. As a researcher, I am sometimes in on these “working sessions,” and I love them. I love feeling part of the process, of making my own squiggle lines, of batting ideas back and forth. It is a needed break from the solo hours I need in order to plan research studies and analyze data. 

But I also see that we can collaborate just fine remotely. Maybe it does work better to be in person. I don’t know, it all depends on you, your team. It still feels strange to me to hear someone in leadership talk in such glowing terms about “being together.” We are colleagues, not a family. And I’m fine in my quiet office at home, and so grateful I have this space. And yet, I felt the energy of being together. I too, am tired of Zoom. 

Where to go from here? Wherever it is, I hope there is flexibility. I hope this year has shown us, especially our bosses, that we need more understanding about our colleagues’ lives. We’ve seen the cats clomping over the keyboard, the babies sitting in laps, kids peeking over their caregiver’s shoulder, heard the dogs howling at the front door. Feeling supported is what we need, not an arbitrary demand on where we do our work. 

I wonder about control, and how much of the general push to go back to in-person work is about bosses wanting more control over their employees’ schedules and work lives. Productivity software already exists for this (and thankfully not something I’ve used). And it’s a ridiculous idea, right? Why do we have such a hard time trusting our colleagues? Trust that we’re all trying, trust that we’ll meet our deadlines. Shouldn’t that be the starting point, an assumed thing? The energy of monitoring could be so much better spent cultivating a supportive work environment, and seeing employees as people with messy lives. Not productivity machines.

Anyways, there are good reasons to work from home and work in-person and crappy ones for both. What I want is for that to be acknowledged and to be able to choose where I work best. That’s what most of us want, to be trusted to make the decisions that work best for us. 

This post was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study. Her newsletter is one of my faves for the interviews with fascinating people you didn’t know you wanted to meet and thoughtful takes on cultural topics as wide ranging as work, gender, and the Baylor influencer twins.

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