The Friendly Anarchist

Why You Should Reduce Your Working Hours

The sea is like work: There’s enough for everybody.
—Farin Urlaub, Am Strand (“At the Beach”)

The term transition originates in the 16th century and is derived from the Latin verb transire, “to go across”. On the one hand, this seems adequate as I “went across” to live on an island this summer. On the other, it describes pretty neatly what I’m talking about when using the word transition in the context of this series: It means going across from one point in life to another.

Specifically, you enter a transition when you experience a fuck it moment. You decide to quit your life’s default mode and not seek the easy way out anymore. Take your work: You opt out of a stalled career, a dull profession, a bad workplace. Broader, you step away from a credo, a conviction, a belief system. Then, you start building something better. ((Yes, all of this is closely related to my first book, Beyond Rules, and may well result in a new edition at some later point.))

But why is work my focus when writing about the transition? Couldn’t it be just as well about something else? Why not focus on the transisitions in personal relationships, health, or travel? Where does this obsession with work and jobs and productivity come from?

Why work is the decisive factor

From an idler’s perspective and someone living life at his own pace, the focus on work is by design. Work (as in drudgery, not self-directed work that happens, as they say, in the flow) is the crucial factor in most transitions – not just when you’re making one that concerns your work directly, but also when you aim for other changes in life.

The reason for this is simple: For many people, work dominates their life, eating up about half of the time they are awake – maybe even more, depending on their commute, the emails they write at the breakfast table, and the time spent on things like shopping for workwear.

The thing with our daily time is that we’re stuck in a zero-sum game: Wins on one side will directly lead to losses on the other. We’ve all got only got 24 hours in a day. This leaves us with three options whenever we need more time to pull off a transition:

Cut back on sleep.
Cut back on leisure (or become more “leisure-efficient”).
Cut back on work (or become more “work-efficient”).

The first two options are bullshit: Cutting back on sleep is unhealthy, cutting back on fun makes us miserable. You’ve probably heard about the guy who decided to stop eating food in order to save time. While I applaud his drive to experiment, that’s exactly what I mean with “leisure efficiency”. By the same logic, we could all become high-speed masturbators in order to avoid “losing time” with making love. I’d rather not to. In my world, time spent on good sex, good conversations, good novels and good food is never wasted. Becoming an efficiency nazi is not the answer, especially during leisure hours. Which leaves us with option number 3: Work.

Here’s the thing with work: We can optimize it and become more efficient, provided that our employer or client isn’t concerned with face time. But: No matter by how much we manage to reduce its share, we always win. Any hour that we can free up (and spend on leisure, sleep or the kind of work we care about) is a step into the right direction.

This is why the transition series is about work, even though lessons from it may be applied to other areas in life.

As I decided to create this series as an experiment in public thinking, I’m always open for suggestions, questions and ideas. This post was inspired by some questions I got, and we’ve had some great discussions on the posts so far in the comments and by email. Please keep them coming and feel invited to think along.

Rewriting GTD

David Cain discovers “an interesting fact about our to-do items: they often don’t really need to be done at all.” He goes on to explain why a complex system like Getting Things Done can be tough for members of the Idler’s Guild:

Procrastinators and other people without a track-record of steady productivity will have trouble with GTD, for a particular reason: the system is unsympathetic to your emotional state. If you have any problems with procrastination or motivation, the system will fall apart quickly for you. Slag off one weekly review or let your inbox pile up for a whole week even once, then resuming the system becomes daunting enough that you wait to do them until you have a clear three-hour stretch, and very quickly your workflow system is back to a react-as-it-comes basis.

Interestingly, David’s way to get on top of things is very close to starting with GTD for the first time, with a healthy dose of Ruben Berenguel’s task bankruptcy mixed in: Delete your lists and and start fresh. Put only those things on a new list that matter now. ((In GTD, that’s basically what a review is for – only that the (supposed) regularity of it should prevent your list from growing too large and cumbersome in the first place. Honestly, though, I don’t think anybody out there really does it as diligently. So even more power to Ruben’s concept of task bankruptcy.))

Three thoughts on this:

Hell yeah is GTD off-putting for normal people. David Allen’s system looks way too complex if you see it for the first time, especially considering all these paper folders and perforators and staplers it involves.
The system is genius nonetheless. As many prejudices as I had against it, GTD is extremely well-thought. And while it’s easy to fall off the wagon, it’s just as easy to get on again.
If you still struggle with it, though, maybe it’s because you need to rewrite it.

Own Your Work (and your lists!)

If the method itself is great, it’s the concrete implementation that might cause trouble. It starts with many of you not getting all that many faxes these days, nor being employed by a corporation with 20.000 colleagues. You can still benefit from GTD, though – if you dare to make it yours.

To illustrate this, back to David Cain:

I’m taking a much simpler approach now. Keep all the same inboxes, go through them once a week and put them on a big, single-category list. No more subcategories and priority rankings to get lost in. Look at the list every evening and decide what to do the next day. If I need time-specific reminders I’ll set them up in Google Calendar on my phone. A cabinet for files. A regular day weekly to get up to date.

Good approach, you might say. But you might also think: Way too complex. Or: Way too simple.

So what now?

[¶]

From all I can see, every GTD user has to find her own approach to owning it. Some might need 43 Folders, others just one plain text file. Some might love to organize their life with Moleskines and hipster PDAs, others might prefer a tight digital organizer like OmniFocus. My very own approach currently works with one Taskpaper list, iCal, and a couple of tools that improve my iCal use (QuickCal and MenuCalendarClock).

What always stays the same is this:

Put everything into your list(s) in order to relax your brain.
Define your next actions clearly in order to beat resistance.
Review regularly in order to stay on top of things.

Somehow, the fact that this looks almost too simple to be true makes it all the more trustworthy.

Your Strategy Becomes Your Story

Disclaimer: This post is thinking in public. Feel free to discuss it, append it, rip it apart, or just enjoy it as it is.

Last week, I suggested to trick yourself better in order to succeed in a transition. Whether your transition is about building a business, converting from Star Trek to Star Wars, or moving to a new country, it’s always related to a longer time perspective. This is where story and strategy become relevant.

Story is strategy in retrospect. A well-crafted strategy results in a great story, just as a flawed strategy easily turns into a bad story. “The moment you aim for results, you are in the realm of strategy,” as Robert Greene puts it. This makes strategy uniquely relevant for anybody in a phase of transition. If there’s no strategy at all – the default mode for most people – all you’ll get is mediocrity, ending up somewhere around the top of the bell curve.

[¶]

First things first: What is a story? Here’s Donald Miller’s take, from his (wonderful) A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

According to Miller, a story can help you live a better life. On a personal level, the character from his definition is… you! The thing you want is some kind of goal, and the conflict describes the obstacles you have to overcome to get it. This is relevant on any level from getting simple tasks done to realizing a larger transition. But it’s especially relevant for the latter. After all, you could spend your whole life on smaller tasks and errands, without ever getting to the juicy parts that matter. This is why you should care about strategy.

So, what’s strategy? Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

Strategy is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve these goals are usually limited. ((This definition of strategy isn’t without controversy. Lock a dozen of self-proclaimed strategists up in a room to agree on a collective definition of the term outside of warfare and they’ll rather starve to death than to come out with a result. While that strikes me as both tragic and surprisingly unstrategic, the Wikipedia definition seems to reflect at least some kind of consensus, and it suffices for my look at strategy from a transition perspective.))

For the scanners, what have we got so far in terms of strategy?

Make a high-level plan.
In order to achieve a goal.
Using available resources.
Under conditions of uncertainty.

Isn’t that strikingly similar to Miller’s definition of story?

If you want to “achieve a goal” you’re basically Miller’s character who wants to get something. As you operate “under uncertainty” – the future isn’t written yet! – you’ll most likely encounter conflict on your way. In order to overcome that conflict you must “use your available resources”.

Interestingly, there’s one thing missing from a strategic point of view: The plan! And this is exactly what I’d like you to do if you follow this blog series with more than just academic interest: In order to succeed in a transition, embrace strategic planning.

Stories and Strategies

The problem is that people like me (and maybe – just maybe! – people like you) tend to eschew strategy. I strongly dislike planning everything, and I hate getting caught up in worries about a future that hasn’t arrived yet. Unfortunately, eschewing strategy comes with a price. The price is that you end up marking time for weeks, months or even years. During this time, a lot of things will “happen” – but they will rather happen to you instead of you making them happen.

At the same time, people like me (and maybe – just maybe! – people like you) tend to be into stories. I certainly am. Stories are intriguing. Stories are captivating. Stories are motivating.

So here’s my reasoning: If you use strategy as a tool to live a better story, thinking about strategy could actually become interesting. From this point of view, strategy is about adventure and exploration instead of warfare and domination. Thinking about the story you want to live can be a great trick to get you into developing a strategy.

[¶]

To be sure, you’re aiming for a high-level plan here. Strategy isn’t about the minutiae. It’s not about foreseeing how every single detail of your life is going to unfold. Rather, it’s about preparation and positioning. To quote Wikipedia once more:

Strategy is […] about attaining and maintaining a position of advantage over adversaries through the successive exploitation of known or emergent possibilities rather than committing to any specific fixed plan designed at the outset.

Strategy is a constant effort to position yourself in order to mitigate the negative events in your life and to take advantage of the positive ones. The term “positioning” itself connotes the continual character of strategy: You make a plan to pursue a goal, but you never achieve it irrevocably. ((As intriguing as this may sound to an idler.)) As long as you’re alive, any greater goal requires you to keep moving – either to maintain it, or because reaching it opens up new goals to pursue.

Robert Greene quotes Helmuth von Moltke:

[Strategy] is more than a science: it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of thought capable of modifying the original guiding idea in the light of ever-changing situations; it is the art of acting under the pressure of the most difficult conditions.

According to Moltke, “no plan survives the first enemy contact”. For you and me, I hope that your life won’t be full of enemy contacts. What you can take away, though, is that strategy requires constant reassessment and adjustment. In the transition, this means that your actions should be directed by an overarching principle, but they shouldn’t be inflexible.

Embracing strategy means getting out of reactive mode, choosing what to focus on, and also “choosing what not to do” (Michael Porter). It means adopting a higher perspective, a “vantage point outside and slightly elevated” from “the day’s swirling events”, as Sam Carpenter describes it in Work the System.

These are just pointers, but they should be enough to get you started.

[¶]

To recap my public thinking on story, strategy and making a transition so far:

A great story is a great strategy in retrospect.
Consequently, use strategy to live a better story.
Prepare and position yourself: What’s your goal in the transition, what’s your overarching principle, what are the likely obstacles you’ll encounter?
To succeed, embrace high level planning – but be flexible to adjust on the way.
Use all available resources.
Also choose what not to do.

More on this (and the respective tactics) over the course of this series. For now, I’d be delighted to hear your take on story and strategy in the comments.

Link: Can We Make Ourselves Happier?

Sure can. Few surprises in this article (even in the “surprising findings” section), but maybe a few things to comment on:

“In order to lead a happy life, a rewarding life, you need to be active,” says Veenhoven. “So involvement is more important to happiness than knowing the why, why we are here.”

Good to highlight this every now and then when talking so much about idleness: Most idlers I know are actually quite active. They just aren’t necessarily active in the way society prescribes. The idler’s ideal is to sovereignly decide upon the things he does, all while retaining enough time to simply do nothing (or enjoy life).

Supporting this argument is an anecdote from the same article. It explains how a pensioneer felt happier after consciously seeking more activities that pleased her, opposed to merely doing the things she was expected to do (like the never-ending household chores):

“You can make everything clean and tomorrow it’s dirty again, so why do it? Or don’t do it too often. I like to read. So now I just pick up a book I want to read and leave all the other things.”

One last quote from the piece:

People who drink in moderation are happier than people who don’t drink at all.

Just as above, no suprise here. While – at least in Germany – the soft drink world seems to be catching up a bit, ((In case it’s different where you live, a growing market is emerging here for artisanal/alternative soft drinks, often based on organic or uncommon ingredients; some even manage to significantly reduce the use of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup). Much better than Coca-Cola.)) most of the finest cold beverages ever created contain alcohol. Enjoying these in good company certainly raises the spirit (and occasionally leads to interesting stories, too). For starters, I’d recommend a glass of Zacapa 23 after a good meal.

How To Trick Yourself Better

The magic of a dream often collapses during the day because even the aptest dreamer cares more about the outer world than he should when he is awake. The insane are much better at this: They declare themselves emperors and their cells as their castles, and everything is wonderful. Being able to magically transform the outer world without going crazy, that is our goal. It’s not easy but, on the flipside, there’s little competition. –Hermann Hesse

We have been tricked into this. We have been tricked into putting on these fine jackets and pantsuits. We have been tricked into spending our most precious hours of warm and wondrous daylight in neon-lit rooms. We have been tricked into showing up at 9 in the morning and staying until the early evening.

We have been tricked into looking at screens everyday, in order to fill out spreadsheets we don’t care about, attend meetings we don’t care about, work on projects we don’t care about that produce results… we do not care about.

We have been tricked into accepting a 30-minute lunch break as if it was even akin to a fair deal.

[¶]

There are probably two main reasons for ending up bored at a job: A lack of guts and a lack of vision.

The former is getting more attention in the blogosphere, but I guess the latter might be more common. The lack of vision is revealed when people automatically choose certain careers without really considering their options. There are many reasons for this, but I think two are of specific importance:

Many get tricked by the money: You need it to fix your expensive lifestyle, and so you work. You need it to improve your expensive lifestyle, so you work more. You work more until the lifestyle you aimed for becomes a workstyle.
The rest gets tricked by a more subtle promise: If you take the safe way, you might have a hard time when starting out. But wait for it. Pay your dues. Be patient at the bottom of the ladder. In the long run, you’ll get promoted. You’ll get responsibility. You’ll get more powerful and influential. And then you’ll receive the reward of working on stuff that matters.

Honestly: Does that ever really happen? Do you ever get to that point? More importantly: Once you get there, are you still the same person? Can you still relate to the ideas and the ideals that made you enter the rat race in the first place? Or will you fall into overconformity and operate in the spirit of the bureaucracy you were raised in, without reflecting on your former dreams anymore?

If you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with, where are you going to end up? The hippie wave in the 60s was probably caused by the same phenomenon as the yuppie wave in the 80s. Choose your allies wisely. ((And your enemies, of course.))

You want to be fooled

So how do you counter this situation? Waiting for your midlife crisis to change the world is risky. “Follow your passion” may not be enough. ((It may even be dangerous. Not all of us can be writers and singer-songwriters. Not all of us even want to be writers and singer-songwriters, if we think about it.)) Cal Newport calls the lack of vision “a stunted vocabulary when it comes to discussing career aspirations”. He advocates building a deeper career vocabulary that allows you make better choices.

For Newport, this involves considering the value of craftmanship, your lifestyle preferences, and also your personal ethics. These are good starting points and part of what I call a broader understanding of costs and resources. ((I’ll first cover higher-level considerations (mindset and strategy), but more on this topic later in this series.)) But what about the other tricks we fall for?

[¶]

In magic, the best tricks work even when you know you’re being tricked. Take Apollo Robbins, the master pickpocket: Even when you’re aware that you’re about to get cheated – even when he explains to you what he’s doing – you still fall for it.

As John Cutter says in the magician movie The Prestige:

Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because, of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.

You want to be fooled. The most successful tricks in life work exactly this way. You want to be fooled into believing them, just as you fool your kids into believing in the tooth fairy. You want to be fooled because it makes life easier. Fighting against convention costs a lot of energy that could be used for other things. Is it even worth it?

The Case for Dropout Counselors

Moxie Marlinspike has it right when he analyzes how we plan our careers within conservative support structures that always lead to the same place, just as a funnel:

Highschools have “college counselors” (not “dropout counselors”), scholarships and financial aid packages lead in a single direction, and university overlaps with internships — which then culminates largely in a series of “career fairs.”

There is a tremendous amount of support for these decisions, and very little support for making any deviating choices.

When we arrive at the ends of these funnels, it’s possible that the direction we’re facing is more a reflection of those structures than it is a reflection of ourselves.

At some point in our lives, we need dropout counselors, not college counselors. Is there any chance we can become one on our own?

[¶]

As a first step, what if you started to play better tricks? What if, instead of letting societal expectations and personal anxieties trick you, you would trick yourself from a position of sovereignty and empowerment? What if you followed Hesse’s advice to “magically transform the outer world without going crazy”?

Here’s how I see it: If we understand that we’re tricking ourselves no matter what, we may as well trick us into living a better life. We may trick ourselves into doing fulfilling work, despite the societal smoke and mirrors. We’re free to invent new tricks that serve us better.

Don’t care about what they say, as long as they don’t lock you up. Become consciously self-delusional and see what happens. That sounds weird, I know. But it’s a good first step in the transition, whatever it is that you’re aiming for. If you know about tricks, you can use them to your advantage and live a better story.