Four Is Not Enough

You know how it is: the night before the morning after, you’ve been up too late nattering and drinking (and in my particular case breaking picture frames with your arse). In some cases your vision hasn’t quite returned and it’s still an hour or so until some idiot suggests plunging into the Buckinghamshire countryside in search of semi-imaginary woods. But at this moment you have strong coffee and a heart attack inducing breakfast sandwich and you’re flicking through the paper and everything’s pretty good.

Then you stumble across this twonk:

http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/sunday-review/living/former-desk-slave-tim-ferriss-on-why-you-only-need-to-work-a-fourhour-week-804276.html

A smart-alec sitting with his feet up telling us all how we work too much. How we’d all be happier if we just (bought his book) cut back on work. Just did the essentials. He suggests (buying his book) just checking your email a couple of times a day; only answering the phone if it’s a recognised number and then being brusk (“I’m busy selling books, what do you want?”) and focus on a single task each day.

Tim Ferris feels that there’s no need to work more than four hours a week.

I’m sure this is dead-easy if you’re self-employed as the managing-director of a on-line vitamins company (whatever the hell that is) but for the rest of us, in the real world, it’s kind of impossible. To simply cut-out unpaid overtime, to pare down to the essentials - everything’s essential to someone - and to ‘negotiate’ the right to work from home.

I’m sure working from your spare room’s a doodle for ambulance drivers or coppers or engineers involved in the implementation of new road layouts. Picking three of my friends there, not randomly at all, but helpfully making a point.

I also suspect that somewhere in India there’s a half dozen poor sods working twelve hour days for £1.21, doing everything Mr Ferris has delegated downwards.

Here’s the interesting question though: We do, generally, probably, all work a bit too hard. Our leisure time is important and what we do with that time, whether we sit drooling in front of flickering images with the lights down low or whether we find ways in which to improve our body and mind depends on how knackered from work we are. I, personally, find the latter more deeply relaxing. If I’ve, for example, spent the weekend hiking then on the Monday I’ll be more productive.

But instead I tend to spend my time getting wound up by newspaper articles and writing this sort of thing.

The work-life balance is important. To suggest, as the article seems to me to do so, that work is a curse is, frankly, crap. I know plenty of people who work hard because they love it, they’ve trained hard to get there and they’re ambitious to do more. They still find time for friends and the rest of life even working fifty hours a week. I don’t necessarily mean the Beck-type-model of people who have incredible passion for their career of choice, but rather that most people want to feel useful, they want to feel as though they’re contributing something to society, they want to feel as though they’ve earned the things they buy.

(Feel free to disagree.)

There are, of course, exceptions. I know a few of them too. There are those who prefer to sit around eating wotsits and sponging off wealthy parents or turn up to over-paid jobs and put in the bare minimum. But I genuinely feel that most people want to work - if not in the job they’re actually doing at the moment. Why do you think levels of depression are so high amongst the long-term unemployed? It’s not just worries over money; it’s boredom.

Working long hours can be a means to an end. It can - occasionally, but regrettably not very often - mark you out to your superiors. It can get the job finished which enables to relax more at home. In my case it brought financial benefits. I’ve never been paid for overtime (well, not as a sales-rep anyway), but the theory ran that the longer hours I put in the more sales I was likely to make and consequently the more commission I’d bring in. So I’d get up at four-thirty and drive to Manchester not only because I was being paid to do a job, so I’d do it to the best of my ability, but because if I made enough sales I could go on holiday.

At some point.

The French, a few years ago, considered shortening the working week to four days. The reasoning was that the service-based economy would benefit from people having more leisure time and people would be more productive in the time they did spend in the office because they’d be more relaxed.

This was a stupid idea for two reason. Firstly it’d be virtually impossible to persuade private business to pay the same wages for twenty percent less work, even if the government hiked the minimum wage up. So spare cash to be spent in cafes or on the bowls green or down the winery or visiting the Eiffel Tower (struggling to think of typical French leisure activities and have descended into spiteful mockery here. Oh, well). Also, how were all the poor souls working in the service-economy going to work less days? Not exactly the spirit of fraternity there, guys.

I think it comes down to quality rather than quantity, for both work and leisure, but I’m happier putting the hours in at work and spending my free time doing something exciting.

Besides, what else would you do with the extra thirty-one hours? Other than write a smug self-help book, obviously.

(David yawns and stretches out his fingers. He saves the document and then wanders downstairs to watch Bargain Hunt.)