What if we organized our work around life, rather than the other way around?

Out of Office — an antidote to overworked office life.

The pandemic has changed our perception to work.

2020 was dramatic, people were on their edge. But even before that, they have been on their edge for a while. As a modern society, we are trying to be more and more efficient, but with that, burnout is at frighteningly high levels. Our obsession with work is a phenomenon that I have previously elaborated on in my thought-platform and newsletter Out of Office. It is a human invention that grew out of the Industrial Revolution and has developed into a capitalist system that values work above all else. But as anthropologist James Suzman highlights, “…for more than 95% of human history, people enjoyed more leisure time than we do now. Generations of hunter-gatherers subsisted on 15-hour workweeks. When we started treating humans as machines, we began confusing time spent with value created.” He also points out the dangers of over-work in a post-industrial economy, where both the work available and our ambitions have become effectively infinite.

For many of us (I’m mainly talking about knowledge-worker in this article), Covid turned our working-lives upside down. It untethered many of us from the office, and many of us experienced new forms of flexibility.

This taste of freedom left us hungry for more. Our generation started rethinking how we want to be working and what we want out of work. As Adam Grant puts it in this recent post:

“For generations, we’ve organized our lives around work. Our jobs have dedicated where we make our homes, when we see our families, and what we can squeeze into our downtime. What if we reversed that, and started planning our work around our lives?”

The rise of remote work during the pandemic highlighted and accelerated a generational shift that has been developing for some time. Over the past decade, researchers have started to document a shift in priorities and found that Millennials were more interested in jobs that provided leisure time and vacation time than GenXers and baby boomers. Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live report stated, millennials “are not willing to sacrifice life for work anymore. They look to companies that enable them to integrate the two.” Or as Time puts it: “today’s younger workforce is increasingly focused on the ‘life’ part of ‘work-life balance.”

And as we start to increasingly rethink the role of work in our lives, millennials rethinking whether climbing the corporate ladder is really worth it after spending their early careers burning themselves out on limited opportunities, and resigning from jobs that don’t help them thrive (great resignation), we are also questioning present-ism and “butts in seats” mentality, and start to think about how we can re-design the way we work to allow our self-identity, values, social system and community be designed around our life, rather than work — and build work around our lives, rather than the other way around.

Get out of office!

There are a lot of reasons why we should be re-thinking the traditional office-life and butts in seats mentality, think about new ways of working, that allow for more flexibility and freedom, and spend more time away from our desks. Whether it’s a 4-day workweek, non-linear work schedules, hybrid, or fully remote set-up. Apart from the obvious ones (enjoying life — duh!), here is a list of profound reasons that will have an impact on the quality of our work and life:

• Working less actually improves our productivity: Almost two-thirds of businesses with a four-day week report improved productivity, according to a study from the University of Reading. Other experts suggest 35 hours as the optimal work time before productivity begins to decline, while one school of thought says we should only work six hours per day.
• Changing our perspective — from “busy work” to effectiveness: Having less hours per week to do our work, work-futurist Alex Pang argues, that it might just change our perception to work as well. Instead of focusing on hours worked, it has the potential to shift our perspective to focus on productivity to work more effectively on the tasks that we need to get done during the day, in order to finish on time and focus on other things outside of work.
• More non-work time allows us more time to invest in our communities 🧡👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
• Sustainability — consuming less energy: Another fascinating insight from Alex Pang is that, apart from the energy and emission spent by commuting, by giving people back time, and taking time for things that take a little more time, such as cooking for themselves, we reduce emission. A contributing factor to this is that less time makes us decision-fatigued: when we have a reduced capacity to think and plan, we tend to go for the option that’s at hand. More time makes us build choices and build healthy habits, which is better for ourselves and the environment.
• Work-Life balance: spending less of our waking hours working, might actually be a step towards creating a more equal balance between work and life outside of work. “There is absolutely no doubt that when people have a good work-life balance and get enough sleep, time with their family and leisure time, they work much more productively and effectively,” says Jim Stanford, an economist and a director at the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute.
• Allowing time away from our desks boosts creativity and innovation: Giving ourselves time to play, provides a creative portal for us to imagine, experiment, restore focus and energy. Creative hobbies have been shown to enhance performance and problem-solving abilities, and make us more likely to come up with creative solutions.
• Health and wellbeing: We know that working long hours takes a toll on well-being. But shorter hours, that allow people to feel more rested, come with a health and wellbeing boost as well as keeping workplace maladies like burnout, boreout, and depression at bay. A 2021 study that followed Swedish workers for a decade, showed that reduced working hours reduced stress, exhaustion, and negative emotion.

So how do we start?

• Shorten meetings — (set up Google “speedy meetings” default option default to shorten 30min meetings to 25min)
• Reduce unnecessary meetings — been having meetings that you felt were completely useless? We got you — together with Dropbox I worked on a Virtual First Toolkit, check out the Reduce unnecessary meetings exercise which helps you filter through those meetings.
• Reduce distractions — check emails and slack only at certain times during your day e.g. twice a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon.
• Time for deep-work —prioritize your tasks, and block time, whether it’s the Pomodoro technique or whatever you find most useful for you, make sure to have blocks that allow you to get into a state of flow (every interruption costs you 20mins to get back into it).
• Set healthy boundaries — Remote work means that work and life are blended like never before. Setting appropriate boundaries isn’t easy — and respecting others’ boundaries can be equally difficult. Check out this personal exercise I designed with Dropbox this exercise to become a better steward of your personal time and fully unplug when your workday is over.
• Making it a company-wide initiative — making it a company-wide initiative, and having leadership role model these changes is key. If you don’t, it might be really hard to implement, might create competition — some might want to get ahead of the game and work extra days — or evoke a sense of guilt. Make sure these tactics are a common project you’re venturing on and it’s something you’re in together.

I want to close this exploration, with a quote from Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness:

“Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CVnQvO-LsR-/

Sources + further reading:

• The Real Meaning of Freedom at Work
  This wonderful article by Adam Grant highlights some interesting experiments around 4-day workweek, 36h, workweek, trading time for money (Retire-A-Little program 🧡) and job crafting.
• Could a 4-day week ever work? with Alex Pang
• https://experience.dropbox.com/virtual-first-toolkit
• Out of Office network