Deconstructing Empoyment

About six weeks ago I came across the Authors@Google presentation featuring Tim Ferriss and Marci Alboher, where they discussed their lives and respective books The Four Hour Work Week and One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success, and promptly devoured Ferriss’s book. It focuses on two major points: Lifestyle Design (building a life with intent rather than deferring happiness to retirement) and strategies to build a business that supports you, but doesn’t take 60 hours a week to run. Cutting out the advice he gives that, rather than making everyone happy, is instead more a path to become like him, and achieve those things that he finds satisfaction in, there are still buckets of great perspective, inspiration and strategy.

I took a few weeks to experiment with the 80/20 Principle (or the “Pareto Principle“) at the core of Ferriss’s business and personal success/satisfaction. Basically, 80% of your productivity/production comes from 20% of your time. 80% of your stress comes from 20% of the stressors in your live. So, to maximize productivity and time, look at ways to cut down. An obvious place to apply this is work. Ferriss asks “What are the odds that every job in America is designed flawlessly to take 8 hours a day, 5 days a week?” Impossible, obviously, so we find ways to fill the time. Yes, plenty of people are very busy during their 8 hour shifts, but of those 8 hours, how many are actually producing 80% of the work?

I started working on my writing projects from coffee shops when able, instead of going into the office. Creativity has always been elusive at work, and when there’s a big project due it’s (I’m lucky in this regard), not a problem to do it away from your desk. These were smaller projects, but I got permission without much trouble, and found that I was turning over pages of content (I’m doing world design for a new property, and getting the backstory settled) in significantly less time than it would have taken at my desk. Yes, I was starting my days later, but my daily personal production goals were getting checked off in no-time.

Sadly, but inevitably, my experiment was ordered to a halt. It’s tough to be away from the office for several reasons: Pick-up meetings, knowledge-sharing, getting in on new projects and (I think this is the biggest reason): Comparative Self-Sacrifice. That’s what I’m calling the phenomenon that’s probably just as human as it is American these days, where we really don’t care who is producing the most, we only care how much someone is suffering compared to us. If Johnny in the office next to me isn’t in his chair from 8-5, my first thought isn’t “he must be slacking on his work”, but “that’s not fair, I’m here on time every day”.

So I don’t fault my coworkers for calling me in more (and they still offer tons of freedom which is awesome). It’s very tough to defend a coworker that works out of the office most of the time, even if his production is up. It takes a lot of time to ease into that style of work, and a lot of cooperation and backing from management. Companies like Google, apparently (since they hosted a conference about working from home and doing more with less), recognize the enormous value in this. Not only are their employees happier, more productive, more loyal to the company in exchange for the lifestyle boost, but the company saves on electricity, IT, phone, desk and floor space, etc. It takes some huge thinking to break this cultural standard. Startups have been doing it for years, but the fact that one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world is picking up on it says a lot about them, and the hope for a cultural shift in time management/production maximization thought.

All of this has made me question the value of my time. Ferriss pointed out the idea of relative income, that is, how much money you actually generate for every hour of work. People place far too much value on salary, ignoring the fact that someone who makes 30,000 a year working a few hours a day on a personal business, let’s say 15 hours per workweek (=$38.46/hr) makes twice as much relative income than the person making 60,000 and clocking 60 hours per week in an office ($19.23/hr). From there, the question of scalability arises, that is, how many $38 dollar hours can I put in at that value? Then the bigger questions: How much do I want to work vs How much do I want to live?

This is the foundation of my re-examination of all things work. Next, I’ll lay out the foundation of my re-examination of my spiritual life, then the nature of the self and beyond. From there we’ll dive into taking action.

-Jake Bales.