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Workload and Rest

Cal Newport brought up a few studies that looked at the four-day work week to show that productivity barely decreases, if it decreases at all, when you reduce work by an entire day. But Alex Pang spent two books examining this idea.

Rest is all about how we spend so much time worrying about how to get work done well, that we put no effort into figuring out how to rest well so that we can in fact do good work when it’s time to work. Rest would encompass time away from screens, brain downtime, and sleep.

Shorter looks specifically at 4-day work weeks and how they work, because they do work.

In many ways the discussion around the 4-day work week seems to me like the discussion around universal basic income. Lots of studies have been done showing that it works. Most people keep working, and improve their situation. A vanishingly small percentage of people stopping working and are lazy, but women get out of abusive relationships, the lowest wages increase because people won’t do shitty jobs for far too little money, kids to better in school. The benefits far outweigh the issues, yet we still have to discuss if UBI works.

Buying Less Books

I buy lots of books too, far more than I can read in a year. I’ve heard the theory that books are such a low marginal cost that if you’re interested in it you should just buy it. But the stacks of books that I don’t have on shelves because there is no more room tells me maybe I need to slow down.

Reading the comments on the video there is one from a librarian wondering why you simply don’t get books from the library. I’ve found that most of the book titles I get interested in are not available at my local library. I’m sure there are similar books, and certainly there is a lifetime of interesting reading at my library.

My second issue with the library is that if they have the book I have to wait for it, which isn’t the problem. The problem comes when suddenly 3 books I was interested in become available at the same time and I can’t read all 3 in the time allotted and I can’t extend them because someone has them on hold, so some of the go back. I could always put my name back on the hold list and wait again for the ones I’m really interested in.

I think this struggle of buying books you’re not reading, and may never get to, is a constant struggle for readers. I’m not sure there is a resolution either.

3 or 4 hours of good work

This as a great short article from Oliver Burkeman with two quotes I want to highlight.

As I’ve written before, it’s positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn’t just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point).

and

The other, arguably more important lesson isn’t so much a time management tactic as an internal psychological move: to give up demanding more of yourself than three or four hours of daily high-quality mental work. That’s an emphasis that gets missed, I think, in the current conversation about overwork and post-pandemic burnout. Yes, it’s true we live in a system that demands too much of us, leaves no time for rest, and makes many feel as though their survival depends on working impossible hours. But it’s also true that we’re increasingly the kind of people who don’t want to rest – who get antsy and anxious if we don’t feel we’re being productive. The usual result is that we push ourselves beyond the sane limits of daily activity, when doing less would have been more productive in the long run.

I know the first thing, that 3 – 4 hours is the max I can get good hard work done in the day. The hard part, especially the last 6 weeks as I’ve watched customer support while my co-worker takes time off for his new babies, is that in the middle of my hours interruptions will come. My wife or oldest child will text with nothing important. Slack will pop up some notification that doesn’t matter.

Once an interruption happens it’s very easy to hit up r/BudgetAudiophile or check out Facebook Marketplace to see if some interesting stereo stuff is available for a good deal. Then I’m one click away from a big tech algorithm backed by hundreds of behavioural scientists that want to take as much of my attention as possible.

The second quote speaks more to my weekends, where I’ll do a bunch of chores and then have time to sit in my hammock but feel like I’m not doing “enough” most of the time I’m trying to relax in it. I should try and spend the summer getting out of the productivity mindset.