The joy of being underemployed
As opposed to being fully or unemployed.
Imagine this dream scenario: a 25(ish)-hour work week, but with a satisfactory salary and a pretty decent quality of life. Or a four-day work week, same conditions. And when I say ‘dream scenario’, I mean it for mere mortals like us – we’re not talking the 1%, the fabulously wealthy, the Bitcoin or Dogecoin millionaires.
I’ve been thinking about this recently and I know that it’s not an original idea and with the reading I do I often forget where and when I’ve come across something. I was certain that it was Daniel Kahneman who mentioned this in his masterpiece of behavioural economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow. A simple search turns out I was right. And it was his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, who played a major role in Kahneman’s 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, who said it:
“[T]he secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
Think about when your best ideas come to you, those moments of inspiration, those ‘eureka!’ insights – is it when you’re worked off your feet, churning out emails, running around the office like a headless chicken, swamped with admin? Or is it when you have down time, time to kill, time to work out, time to walk, time to do nothing but sit and think. It’s when I’m out walking that my best, most profound revelations come to me – getting back home and putting them into writing is the challenge, but generating the ideas comes naturally and easily, but it also comes quite often in the middle of a busy working day, when there’s time to be introspective and reflect and let my thoughts drift in myriad directions.
This begs the question: do enough people have this luxury? And should it even be a ‘luxury’?
At this point I went back to the results of my [unnamed search engine] search, and the second article was from one of my favourite bloggers, Morgan Housel, who says this in his 2017 post, The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed:
‘The irony is that people can get some of their most important work done outside of work, when they’re free to think and ponder. The struggle is that we take time off maybe once a year, without realizing that time to think is a key element of many jobs, and one that a traditional work schedule doesn’t accommodate very well.
Not all jobs require creativity or critical thinking. But those that do function better with time devoted to wandering and being curious, in ways that are removed from scheduled work but actually help tackle some of your biggest work problems.
It’s just hard to do that because we’re set on the idea that a typical work day should be eight uninterrupted hours seated at your desk. Tell your boss you found a trick that will make you more creative and productive, and they ask what you’re waiting for. Tell them that your trick is taking a 90-minute walk in the middle of the day, and they say no, you need to work. Another way to put this is that a lot of workers have thought jobs without much time to think.’
That was from four years ago. I’d like to say that this thought has been floating around in my head since then, but it’s more recent, in the midst of all this working from home v back in the office debate. It’s fascinating to see how companies are rethinking their work policies and allowing for more flexible schedules. So many progressive organisations are taking this onboard and allowing for reduced working weeks or flexible arrangements.
Much of it comes down to this: what do you value more, your time or having [more] money? More time devoted to things and people you care about or more money to spend on things you probably don’t need and less good quality time – you read that right – with loved ones?
Read all of Housel’s post to get some background on where the idea of a conventional 40-hour, 9-to-5 workweek came from:
Not entirely convinced? Then read this article in its entirety. And after this, you’ll be begging your employers to give you a four-day work week:
And if they refuse?
Send them these links.
What I’m reading
Three really good, thought-provoking books on the go:
The Future of Humanity, Michio Kaku
Who Are We? How Identity Politics Took Over the World, Gary Younge
A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe
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