NFIB

MyBusiness Manual: Seven-Day Weekend
03/ 30/ 2004

Our April/May issue stressed the need to get away from your business -- even if just for a long weekend. But Richard Semler's new book, The Seven-Day Weekend, proposes turning every day into a weekend. Read this excerpt to learn the benefits of down time.

"SUNDAY

* Answer your e-mail.
* Be idle.
* Form new habits.

Sometimes at business workshops that I conduct, I ask participants to write down what they would rather be doing at that moment. I've never had someone write: °Nothing. I signed up for this sucker, so this is exactly how I want to spend my time." They always write fishing, golfing, playing with the kids, digging in the garden, or even answering e-mail.

But shouldn't they say the workshop is the only place they want to be? Why is it a given that work is the last thing someone wants to do? Instead, we lament being robbed of freedom, and it is that lamentation that hints at an answer to these questions.

Freedom is an empty word without "free time." I don't mean chore time, errand time, homework time. Free time must be unencumbered by a to-do list. It is epitomized by idleness, otherwise time is not free if it belongs to something or someone else. Robbed of idleness, free time is stripped of its restorative powers.

Work is so intense these days, so all-consuming that it is the arch enemy of free time. It looms like a dark castle on the distant horizon, symbolizing oppression. My workshop question taps an instinctive awareness of that fact and generates an almost romantic longing for free time and a preference to be somewhere else even if it means also forfeiting idleness in the form of a weekend off that is actually a weekend on steroids.

Consequently, we no longer grasp the difference between leisure time and being idle. Western society is highly structured and action-oriented. If you go to the beach, you don't spend the day doing nothing. Within half an hour you're reading, walking, collecting seashells, swimming, fretting about your tan or your overexposure to the sun. Most of us have to keep one eye on our children while slathering on sunscreen and planning dinner.

Idleness, in this case, is really just a change of scenery. There's no true opportunity to sit back, relax, and let the mind wander. That's too bad. An idle, wandering mind is not the devil's playground, as the Puritans believed, but a garden of rejuvenation, growth, and contemplation. Even when we set weekends aside to do what we want, we often spend most of Saturday and Sunday engaged in chores, personal tasks, and other obligations. In my book, that's still work, you're just not getting paid for it, and you're certainly not relaxing.

We insist that spending quality time with our family is the number one priority. And a study done in 2001 would seem to back that up. It reported that kids between the ages of three and twelve spent thirty-one hours a week with their mothers and twenty-three hours with their fathers. They had more time with their parents than children twenty years before. But the study also found that the increase was due to the hours the kids spent sitting in traffic with Mom while she ferried them to soccer games, music lessions, and day camp, or from errand to errand. Is this the kind of quality time we had in mind? Are any of us better off for it?

And now, technology permits work to seep increasingly into the gaps between weekend activities. We can work at home, be tracked on our cell phones at the beach, read reports sent to us anywhere via e-mail. Technology has made us accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It has no respect for the weekend or for the sanctity of a Sunday afternoon. Once, it was possible to completely avoid contact from the working world simply by refusing to give out a home phone number. Now, e-mail is coming to TV! When a football game is on and a telltale beeping announces an e-mail with an exclamation mark, will anyone be able to ignore the message and go on watching the action?

Technology has encroached so deeply into our lives that I believe we must make deliberate efforts to beat it back. Changing the way work works is the way to go. People should be encouraged to rearrange their week, drop the traditional notions of a workweek and a weekend, and divide the seven days among company time, personal time, and idleness (free time). Then they should look for more efficient ways to manage their time.

Instead of wasting it in rush hour traffic, rearrange your schedule to work when most other people don't. Run errands on a quiet Monday, particularly if you've spent your Sunday answering e-mail.

It's in your best interest, and your company's best interest, to understand this. Anyone who can eliminate the stress of an overbooked schedule, arrange a workweek to sleep according to biorhythms rather than a time clock, and enjoy a sunny Monday on the beach after working through a chilly Sunday, will be a much more productive worker. It will ultimately benefit organizations because employees will find equilibrium in their professional, personal, and spiritual lives. This isn't just an avant-garde approach to running a company. It¡¯s a sound strategy for business success and gaining competitive advantage.

To put it another way, people who have learned to answer e-mails on Sunday evenings also need to learn how to go to the movies on Monday afternoons. To get to that point, they must discover that happiness, contentment, and inner peace do not come from joining the rat race in order to acquire DVD recorders, big screen TVs, cable hookups, expensive cars, and big houses, much less private helicopters and pilots.

Even so, I'm not preaching antimaterialism. We do, however, desperately need a better understanding of the purpose of work, and to organize the workplace and the workweek accordingly. Without it, the purpose of work degenerates to empty materialism on one side and knee-jerk profiteering on the other.

Every time I propose reinventing the workweek to allow more freedom and flexibility, there's a skeptic in the front row rolling his eyes as if to say, "Wait a minute, if I let employees come and go as they please, half of them won't show and nothing will get done." But that's not going to happen; people want to work when work is not the enemy of personal freedom and legitimate self-interest. Let's say you declare every day a Sunday, and leave people alone with their toys and accessories. You wouldn't be granting them automatic peace and contentment. The lack of challenge, meaning, and purpose would be suffocating. Human beings thrive on being productive, on working toward goals, on providing for their families, on building a future -- just don't ask them to do it all the time and without the freedom to say, "Now, I need time for me."

What's important to understand about the seven-day weekend is that by redesigning the architecture of time, we can make room for work, leisure, and idleness. All three can coexist and harmonize together to produce happiness and a sense of purpose.

Since work is so ubiquitous, we have to find ways to make it fulfilling and to curb its propensity to suck up all the available hours. Let's start by borrowing a term that's usually associated with Eastern religions -- symbiosis. Roughly speaking it means "a living together," and implies that the combination is mutually beneficial, if not downright blissful. For instance, the "work" of a Tibetan monk exists symbiotically with his intimate beliefs and sense of purpose. Now there's a happy, contented man, at peace with himself and the world around him -- or so it seems.

While I may not be sure about the monk's soul, I am certain that we all need that kind of symbiosis. First we have to face up to the technological changes that have occurred and reorganize daily life with them in mind. Sociologists might argue that eliminating fixed days and events and creating a world of constant and sudden change would make people insecure, perhaps unhinged. But a seven-day weekend (and implicitly a seven-day workweek) doesn't mean that the regular Sunday lunch with the parents will cease to exist or that weekly Mass will be on erratic days. People will maintain their important routines, just as they do now without feeling like the Sunday lunch is a burden they'd like to cancel. The rest of the time, they'll create other fixed events like Marcio Batoni, the CEO of Semco RGIS, who has a regular Tuesday afternoon movie date with his wife.

Semco is bucking not only the traditional business model, we're resisting a code of behavior at the very core of Western culture. No wonder our ideals are hard for outsiders and other companies to embrace."

Reprinted from The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works by Ricardo Semler (Portfolio). Copyright (c) 2004.

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