Summer Fridays Here I Come!

My mind was spinning with all the client work I’d suddenly acquired and the revisions I was finally once again serious about making on my novel when one of my fellow coworkers asked, “Do you have a minute to chat?”

Not really, I thought. “Sure,” I said, because isn’t half the point of coworking to have people to distract you with small talk instead of letting yourself turn into a recluse in your apartment?

What followed was a lively more-than-a-minute conversation about summer hours: four day work weeks, half-day Fridays, or any sort of idyllic schedule that allows one to enjoy a bit of extra leisure time when the weather’s lovely. We also discussed the types of companies that offer summer hours, fewer here than across the pond, because the idea of generous time off is counter-intuitive to the good old American “you can make it if you just work hard enough” work ethic. Why take vacation when you can work yourself into the ground instead? More work hours means more profits and more success.

I’ve struggled with overworking my entire life. I was struggling with it while having that conversation. Because right now I’m my own boss. I set the hours, summer or otherwise. And last year I had done half day Fridays, and loved it. But this year I’d let my stress make the decision that I wasn’t going to do that again. Because there was work to be done, and only so many hours to do it.

And yet, by the time Joe and I finished our conversation, I’d decided that half day Fridays were a go.

Actually, half the point of coworking is to swap ideas and help one another in unexpected ways.

The Expansion of Work

I had this theory in college. Gas expands to fit the container it’s in. Studying’s like that. The more time you have to study for a big test, the more time you will study (if you’re a dedicated student, that is). But more time studying doesn’t necessarily equate to a better test score. No studying is bad. Endless studying is probably not worth it. There comes a point when the quality of your studying’s diluted, just like the gas. You could have scored just as well or better with fewer hours of studying, and done something else with that time.

Work can be like that, too. Say you have three important tasks you NEED to accomplish. Completely undistracted, maybe they’d take you four or five hours to complete. But if you have an eight hour workday, I bet you’ll fill that time. With meetings and emails and “productively” putting off those couple of things that are important but hard, complicated, or unpleasant. If you don’t do those things first, you probably won’t even get to them all by the end of the day.

At one point during my last job, I was overwhelmed and staying later and later, trying to wrangle my endless to-do list. Then I attended a webinar on avoiding burnout that flouted a radical idea. Feeling overwhelmed at work? Leave on time.

Excuse me, but what? Work less? What kind of bunk is that? I need to work more! Haven’t you seen my calendar and my to-do list? (Sound familiar, anyone?)

And yet I was desperate. And exhausted. And curious.

So I decided to try it out. For one month, whether my work was done or not, I was going to leave at 5 o’clock every day. And then, after my experiment was finished I would assess whether I felt more or less burnt out by however tragically behind I now was in my responsibilities.

And wasn’t that perky webinar lady correct. After thirty days, I accomplished more than I typically did at work while also getting home earlier so I could rest or do things I enjoyed. Win-win.

I did more work in less time, and I felt significantly better about the state of my life.

So, years later, when Joe challenged me to give Summer Fridays another shot, I bit back my instinctive retort of, “But I can’t” and realized, “Yes I can.”

Priorities, Priorities, Priorities

I have to get my work done, though. That’s the key. I’m the boss now, so any dropped balls reflect on me and I can’t live with that. So, if I was going to take hours out of my already packed work-week, then I needed to find a way to make sure the important stuff got done.

What worked before was starting each day by making a list, not of every possible task or project that was hanging over my head, but of a few key actions I could – and would – actually complete that day. Then I had to tackle those tasks before I dove into the sea of distractions otherwise known as my overflowing inbox. (Your sea of distractions may be social media, your Slack channel, or anything that interrupts you with an endless stream of information and possibilities.)

Nowadays most of these tasks are articles I have to write or revise. They all take a significant amount of time to complete and most have clear deadlines. But they don’t have to take as long as they often do.

I’m not talking about rushing through something and doing shoddy work. But let’s be real. You can spend all day “doing something” when half the time you’re playing on your phone because you’re overwhelmed by the task and know it isn’t due until 5PM, or you can spend a few hours totally focused with no distraction and produce something excellent. The work expands if you let it. Time doesn’t equal quality.

Summer Fridays shrink the bottle in a controlled way. I need to respond by prioritizing the right tasks and improving my focus so I can do them as efficiently as possible.

Find What Motivates You

I have a confession, though. I’m kind of cheating. Because Summer Fridays aren’t really shrinking my bottle. If I leave work at 1PM every Friday instead of 5PM (ish), that could mean that I work four fewer hours each week.

But honestly, the goal is to work at least an hour more.

Cause here’s the thing. I’m not a morning person. And while I have a leisurely morning routine that I quite enjoy that includes a wonderful hour of reading for fun plus some more focused meditation/journaling/nonfiction reading time and a brisk twenty-four minute walk to work, the truth is my alarm goes off at seven but I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to get to my office by 10:30 every morning. That’s a good three and a half hours minimum between the time I wake up and the time I sit down at my desk. And no matter how I told myself and others I was going to get to the office by 10, it wasn’t happening. I felt bad when I got there late, but not bad enough to actually do anything about it.

But in those minutes I was contemplating Summer Hours, I made a decision. Alright, Aim. You want to take Friday afternoons off? Get your butt into work by 9:30 and that’ll make up the time.

Here’s the crazy thing. For the past seven work days I did!

I made a few little tweaks to my morning routine to eliminate time sucks between activities, but the biggest change I made was finding something that motivated me to not stay in bed and laze around or get distracted by anything on my phone before I left my apartment. Yes, I like not being rushed in the mornings, but I don’t have anything to show for that wasted time. I could get away with it, because just like in my last job, I could stay late in the office to do the work if I needed to. But Summer Fridays means I need to get all my weekly tasks done by 1PM on Friday. The work has no time to expand. Since focus and prioritization might not cut it, I needed an earlier start to replace those hours. This time I manage because the reward was appealing. It wasn’t just “getting to the office earlier” – how motivating does that sound on its own? The reward was reclaiming a few precious daytime hours to do whatever I want … lounge in the pool or read on my patio or make plans with friends or check out the consignment store I always walk past and never visit … there are endless lovely possibilities.

I’ll admit, my mind also went in all sorts of productive directions like running errands and making appointments and even working on this blog which I’ve sorely neglected because I’ve been too “busy” (truth: unmotivated) to bother with. I’m going to try not to use the time to do those things. As much as I like crossing tasks off a list, being more productive isn’t really a reward. I want my Summer Fridays to be about living and enjoying, not doing and accomplishing. That might be harder than getting to work on time, honestly, but I’m up for a challenge.

My Summer Challenge to You

I know most people can’t set their own work hours, and Half Day Fridays may seem like a cruel and unachievable dream. I’m sorry. It’s hard to fight entrenched systemic patterns and traditions, though the benefits of a four day work week are gaining some steam abroad.

But even if you can’t leave the office early, I challenge you to find some time to devote to ease and self-care this summer. Maybe you should leave at the end of the workday instead of putting in extra unpaid hours just because your sense of overwhelm says “you need to.” Maybe you need to look at a sprawl of unremarkable weekend or evening hours and carve out time to do something you really enjoy or find a way to actually relax. If your default setting, like mine, is do do do, I challenge you to find a way to slow down every week and take some time to just be. To experience and appreciate the world around you. To enjoy summer, with it’s long days and sunshine that not everyone appreciates as much as I do.

If you’re the kind of person who has too much ease, I admit I don’t understand, but maybe this summer is time for you to focus up. Not on doing for doing’s sake, but on finding what’s important or motivating for you and carving out some time to do that regularly.

Because a fulfilling life is a balanced one. Not all work, but not all play either.

Here’s to a marvelous summer!