On the other hand...

I think there's a real difference between being non-productive at work and non-work activities that are important and restorative.

This guy, Todd Hodgkinson, has a book you may have heard of by now called How to be Idle. I'm going to paste some bits here from an interview he gave to Mother Jones magazine because I really strongly agree with them (please note, I have been heavy-handed with the virtual scissors, i.e. I encourage you to read the entire article for context, but these are the bits I wanted to emphasize). If you're interested, he was on Talk of the Nation recently, too. I have decided to butt-in my comments (in italics); I wasn't really there at the interview.

What would happen, Hodgkinson asks, if we did embraced, say, a four-day work week, or decided to work three hours of the day? One possibility is predicted by the idler’s golden rule: one creates in inverse proportion to the time one spends working. Hodgkinson spoke with Mother Jones from his seaside farm in Devon, England, after an afternoon spent puttering about the garden.

Mother Jones: We stay late at the office, we don’t take our vacation time, we neglect our families and our interests. Where did we go wrong?

Tom Hodgkinson: What seems extraordinary is that the richest countries in the world, in terms of economic output, are the ones where we work hardest. You would have thought that the end of all this innovation, technological advancement, and financial wizardry should be to create less work, not more of it. I think you have to put it down to, particularly in the case of America, Benjamin Franklin and the whole idea of a new attitude to money: “Time is money.” He invented that idea. Before that, time wasn’t money in the same way; in the medieval age it was regarded as sinful for money to be the object of your life.

Me: I think this is part of the paradox of Americans spending more time at work but being less productive than their counterparts in certain other countries. We spend time being uncomfortable and in unpleasant environments and somehow that justifies what we get paid, instead of having the reward being tied to productivity without mandatory amounts of time spent in the office. It's not true that if you spend 8 hours at work you will do 8 hours of work; [most] human beings aren't regularly able to sustain that sort of thing for more than a couple of hours at a time (then you can take a break, recharge/do something different, and go back to it). The hours you're spending at work not working and not taking care of yourself are wasted for you, your employer, and the country. I do think it's possible to do more than 2-3 hours of work in a day, though. The type of work and your relationship to it also makes a difference.

Tom Hodgkinson: ...If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That’s because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.

I realized I’d rather work hard for two or three hours in a day—which was the only real work I was doing—and then bobble about the rest of the time, in the park or whatever. I’ve found that there isn’t any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out.

TH: For most of us, the opportunity to become creative is being squeezed at both ends. We think, “Well, I’ve been doing all that work, and now I’m going to reward myself by doing a lot of spending.” What would happen in the days before time was money and money and machines weren’t quite so dominant would be you’d have all this other time when you’d do what turned into hobbies. Little things like making clothes, baking bread, cooking, even useless things like bird-watching, sketching flowers, playing guitar in the home--that sort of time is gone. And the time we have? We’re so exhausted, we want to let ourselves get sucked in to the escape world of TV. I’m speaking from experience; I’m not above all this.

TH: Part of this individualism is you feel this pressure that you alone have to conquer the world, and if you don’t work all the hours God gives then you start feeling really guilty. If you can stop feeling guilty, then I think it’s easier to start doing what you want to do.
...
There are a lot of little tricks you can do to inject a bit more time into the day. Most important is limiting yourself to a 40 hour week, not working 50 hours or 60 or 70. It’s just crazy. It’s actually irresponsible to you and irresponsible to your family and friends. Why should your employer’s profits be more important than your own family? You’re not even going to get any of the profits—all you get is not losing your job. It’s a very negative system.

MJ: And idleness and hard work aren’t mutually exclusive; there's just a more balanced way of approaching hard work, right?

TH: Yes. And I had that approach right from the beginning. It wasn’t exactly the old “do nothing all day,” it was just that you appreciate the value of a good portion of doing nothing in your day—for your mental health, your physical health, your relationships, that sort of thing. But also you appreciate the importance of getting out of this wage-slavery thing, more or less, and try to look after yourself, and that’s the anarchist side of it. People say, “Aren’t you going backwards?” or “You’re a Luddite.” But I think it’s good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

Me: I guess there are only four other things I would add. 1)I do think that slogging away is sometimes important. For example, when I was writing my thesis, I would put in maybe 8 or 10 hours of work in a day with only minimal breaks for food, sleep, hygiene and fresh air (and towards the end, let me tell you that sleep and hygiene were below my normal standards--which are pretty high). But that's a sprint--a short burst of a lot of energy with a clear goal (deadline) in sight. You can't be sprinting all the time. The pace for long-distance has to be slower in order to be sustainable. Where I disagree with him is that I think that craftsmanship does take work and re-working and refinement: you might have the initial idea or inspiration for a song in a few minutes, but to bring that to fruition requires many hours of work. 2)I think it's important to spend some (but not all!!) time every day or every week doing something that's not really for you and that you may find unpleasant. It might be as noble as working at a soup kitchen (as long as you don't develop a hero/savior complex), as lowly as cleaning your bathroom (esp. if you share it--otherwise it's just for you), or as mundane as a mindless or irritating task in your workplace (even if you get paid for it). I think unpleasant tasks with little tangible payoff are important because they let you enjoy enjoyable things more, and you realize that there's an intrinsic reward in getting something done, even if you don't directly benefit from it, and also it can help you learn to have a good attitude about tasks, which you can then apply to pleasant tasks, so you can actually get more of those done. You gotta have some fiber in your diet. 3) Well, I think 2-3 hours is a low-end estimate. I think 8 hours at one stretch is too much, but maybe 4hrs-(break)-3hrs is doable. Again, it depends on the type of work (data entry, manual labor, writing a novel--all very different) and your relationship to it (you want to do it/you have to do it and in between) 4) I think his use of the term "idleness" is misleading because a lot of what he suggests, e.g. gardening, playing guitar, even walking or exercising, are active, and I think it's important to stay active. Neither he nor I seem to be advocating slothful idleness!

- posted by k @ 2:04 PM