The 9 to 5 is completely mad
How is it the whole world manages to require 8 hours a day to do their work? And how is it they manage to do all this in same allotted time (give or take an hour)? Coincidence?
The 9 to 5 was actually introduced by Henry Ford in 1922 to ease labour unrest….apparently it used to be worse!
We rush through our day, constantly checking our phone for the latest bit of interruption in the form of email or worse, some social announcement that someone has had another really bad day and is desperately seeking another night in oblivion via a glass of vino.
Is this what life is meant to be about?
I recently read Tim Ferris’s book the “Four hour work week” and in it he suggests we can literally work as little as four hours a week! Hard to believe I know.
After reading the book, a section of it really got under my skin. How much of my daily work could I get done by 11:00 am if I really concentrated and didn’t get interrupted?
The answer is A LOT! When I started to take note of the interruptions that I had when I had a shitty day or a busy day, I realised that it wasn’t the work load that was bothering me, it was the constant interruptions that cost me my attention and cost time to get back on task. A lot of these interruptions came in the form of email (I have since decided that emails are the devils work). All someone has to do is have a thought, write that thought or question in an email (usually because they are feeling “productive”) and send it to me.
Right there, that person just fucked me out of an hour of my time.
This brings me to time analysis. I drive, A LOT. My business is situated on one side of England and my daughter is on the other, my home is in the middle. It is basically shit.
I worked out that I spend 3 hours a day in the car and before you say that isn’t so bad, let’s work what that means over a year:
3 hours a day for 5 days = 15 | 15 hours a week x 4 = 60 hours a month | 60 hours x 12 = 720 hours a year.
Do you know how many hours there are in a month? 730! So for a full month and for 24 hours a day in that month I sit in my fucking car!
That is just 3 hours a day, and I started noticing how much time emails or requests and questions in emails cost me in time and it is on average about 2 hours a day. I won’t bore you with the math this time but basically it is 20 days a year (this is not directly related to my role, it is just bullshit email!).
So I work from home and put the auto response on my email to say if it’s urgent, call me. Then I can take 50 days off a year!? And we won’t even go into how much I will save in diesel.
The point to all this really is that the world we live in, bores the hell out of me. The rigid schedule basically means we find ways to fill that time by interrupting others with nonsense and in return they do it to us, causing work for works sake as Ferris put it.
List the important stuff you need to do, turn off your phone and your email (trust me you will not die) and do it first thing in the morning. Then look up, breath in and see what is going on around you.