In Defence of The 9–5
The disabused key to higher productivity
Last year, I left my job for a career shit. And as hard as it’s been, I believe that I will always be grateful. New drops of energy have rippled through my stagnant waters, reverberating through venues I failed to notice for so long.
Taking command of my life by choosing the path it follows meant not only investing time into avenues that feed into the larger picture but also becoming its absolute director. After all, the picture is mine — I choose how to paint it, what colours to use, and which shades to immerse myself in.
But as joyous and fruitful this time in my life has been, it soon became a task — albeit welcomed — to maintain a structure while I still enjoyed myself. I realised that my streams of energy needed to be structured so they could be canalised into proper growth channels. Dwindling canals become overrun, to break and soon run dry.
Despite this being a time where I have objectively learned the most things, it has also become a time when I was the least productive. My failure to maintain a structure and my free-forming attitude began to make me anxious.
So I looked back at my years working as a full-time employee, hoping to utilize its design. It was a difficult movement, to look back into the void I scraped myself out of. And accepting the 9–5 structure is as hard as it gets when you just escaped the tyrannies that accompany it.
It's hard to find any joy within when the 9–5 is reminiscent of waking up at obscene hours to toil for something you don’t believe in, for someone you believe in even less. Shuffling onto sweltering boxes, worrying about sweat stains, and concepts of personal space long forgiven. Presently bumping back into the cold; face set on burn, eyes to boil. With elevator lines dripping aborted daydreams and dejection miasma. Brilliant greys and prized stoney blues. Docking and re-docking to the static rhythm of lives and nods passing by. All to clamber back to your suns already set and life already asleep, to eat from a pan and falling; life wasting tranquilly to the abandoned TV.
No wonder our adversity to such a concept when we decide to live life on our own terms, when we take the chance to do what we want to do. But as convoluted as the idea has become, there is some sanity to the concept of a fixed work schedule:-
Limits Breakage in Concentration
By limiting transitions from work to play, it limits your breakage in concentration. If you start breaking your goals up too much to tackle their aspects in short intervals, your focus on those goals becomes diminished. You will start breaking up your tasks into too many small bits of the full task, just to accomplish something quicker. This will not only hurt the quality of the work you put into it (cursory at best) but your concentration on the larger picture becomes blurred, like looking from the wrong end of a telescope.
If you work in the morning and then very late in the afternoon, a 4 hour break would do exactly that — it’ll break your concentration and by the time you come back to it, you’ve already forgotten ideas that were swimming in the front of your mind before which you took for granted.
Easier to Attain Set Hours of Work
If you break up your schedule too much, it makes you susceptible to putting those work hours off. For example, if you decide to work 6 hours each day: 2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, you might end up putting off the last 2 hours until late night. And even if you do manage to get those last 2 hours in, the hours in between only impede your free time as your mind agonises over the tasks still to be completed, and you spend the day in worried anticipation.
Your goals and tasks for the day start pilling into the following day when your disarrayed schedule leads to odd hours of the night. This means more work in re-organizing your daily tasks and goals.
Better Brain Functionality
By making sure you’re getting enough consecutive hours in every time you sit down, your brain functions better at building ideas. If you’re only spending 30 mins or even only an hour at a time sitting down, sitting down to work isn’t only going to feel as difficult as it always did, but you might not even attain full concentration.
According to a study published by Harvard Medical School, it can take up to 52 minutes for us to become fully focused. So even if you’re sitting down for an hour at a time, you might be spending almost 90% of that time still building towards full concentration.
Your brain doesn’t start properly functioning on the task at hand, especially a creative task, after the hour mark. That’s when your mind and body fall in groove with your work.
I will say that at the start when you are just trying to get the hours in, any which way will do, but switching over to a fixed schedule is like switching from a knife to a shovel to dig your canals.
A fixed work schedule is one of the keys to higher productivity. It not only boosts our focus, but it keeps us accountable. The toil typically associated with it has muddied its essential idea, but if we can break through those corrupt influences to implement it on our own terms, we can guide our streams to the sea view.
