The 7-Day Workweek

How to Pitch a 4-Day Workweek to Your BossAnd how to make the most of that extra dayforge.medium.com

I have seen several articles like the one linked above describing how one can go about bargaining with their workplace for a shortened workweek. While I take no issue with the desire to “work” less, I dislike the dichotomy it implies between “work” and everything else in one’s life. For myself, and no doubt for a great many others the differentiation between work and home has become so blurred as to be almost meaningless. I do have an office at my workplace and I also have a lab. I also have an office at home. As a research scientist I don’t believe I could ever fully abandon a workspace because of this need for a laboratory. Despite what so called “biohackers” might have to say about it, building a lab in your garage or basement will never approach the level of sophistication of anything you will see in a fully stocked corporate or academic research laboratory. So, for me at least, there will likely never come a time when I could disconnect entirely from a physical workspace.

I work 7 days a week and I very much like it that way. Yep, every single day of every week, 365 days a year, including almost always on my “vacations”, I do some bit of work. It might be a very small bit, say checking work email or looking at a piece of data, for 10 minutes or less, but it is still a bit. In addition, I do work “in my head” on a fairly regular to near constant basis in that I think about work or problems at work all hours of the day, every day of my life. Some people may not consider this work, however, at least in my case, it absolutely is. Some of my best work ideas happen while I am considering a work problem in the shower. Am I working when I do that? It doesn’t feel like work, and yet I am almost entirely focused on work and advancing a problem at work while I bathe. The shower has very little of my attention though I (usually) manage to get clean at the same time. The same could be said of a variety of passive activities I engage in on a regular basis, such as driving around town, or cooking or cleaning to name just a few.

I have tried to estimate what percentage of my daily thoughts are primarily work focused and what primarily about non work topics and the best I can come up with is about a roughly even split, about 50/50. So I spend approximately half of my life working and half not. It has become harder and harder over the years to distinguish the work thoughts from the non work and the two have blurred together in many strange and interesting ways. To the other people in my life this merging of work and home is sometimes annoying and sometimes maddening, but mostly it is unremarked upon. In fact, I rarely remark upon it, until now I suppose. Bottom line is that for myself at least work is an integral extension of the other parts of my life. To work less would mean to live less, and I have no desire to do that.

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