For a few decades, I’ve avoided working in an office environment after I had a boss who came into the office for a few hours on Wednesday mornings before she went to teach an afternoon class; she would only come to the office another day if she had to meet with her peers, which she went to great lengths to avoid. I flourished in the trust and autonomy. It may have been the best FT job I had, in large part because of how I was seen and treated, dignified and emboldened by my supervisor. Since leaving that job in 2005, I haven’t wanted to go back to an office culture where there’s the expectation of being at a desk at an early hour, five days a week, and then to perform that I’m working diligently, doggedly, and tirelessly for the employer. This domineering working environment pervades nonprofit organizations with social missions, along with those that purport to exist for the pursuit of justice despite the awful and atrocious ways that they treat employees. The excesses of the office afflict corporations and government agencies, too, though many of them offer better compensation and benefits packages than most of grant-seeking nonprofits that I know.
I remember reading a story, somewhere around 2006, about 40% of working adults being on Facebook (or other social media) for multiple hours every working day. My memory tells me that the article or research suggested it may have been as much as 4 hours a day. That data fit with the anecdotes of what I saw and heard around me. I considered it asinine and nonsensical to commute to work to then be tied to a desk, looking like I was typing away at a keyboard, only to be escaping a mundane job through the voyeurism of the desktop- and laptop-web, as this was before the mobile phone hegemony. That data point indicated that most people could have completed the 40 hour day job in 20 hours a week. But in the imbalanced labor/management power dynamic that defines U.S. capitalism, no bosses would pay a full-time salary to a worker toiling for 20 hours. Even if they were the most productive. (We are far away from such a worker-centric labor market and humble human resources department. That is fantastical dreaming!)
For all these years, I haven’t wanted to sit at a desk, swapping the perceived security of a biweekly check and the precarious “gift” of health insurance, in exchange for most of my waking hours five days a week.
Throughout the 2010s, I would wonder at the futility of jobs and job descriptions and employers that expected 40 hours of work between Monday through Friday. Bizarrely, many jobs demanded more time and energy, whether working on weekends or being available if not responsive to emails on weeknights. When most bosses and HR departments did not graciously honor comp time or willingly grant employees a break, a respite, or another form of reciprocity for the labor that people provided their jobs beyond the hours and salary negotiated before hiring. The brazenness of employers irked me then and continues to appall me now. So much of it because bosses needed to feel a sense of control over the employees who work under them, so creating meaningless meetings to require people to meet. Sadly, the proliferation of Zoom meetings for virtual employees feeds that supervisor anxiety of meeting with their team for meeting’s sake because they don’t know how to give direction, trust people to do what they have to do and then come back when they have something substantive to share.
This has been a key factor that’s kept me out of the office and steered me towards 1099 types of contract employment instead of W-2 salaried positions.
Recently, I noticed how I can have 2- or 3- week intervals in between conversations with the same, small group of people. This is my thematic-based alternative to the mundane mediocrity of a full time job where I would being in many more meetings, most of which would be meaningless. (There’s a reason that multiple books addressed ineffective meetings, bad habits in communication, malaise at work.)
When I did the math and division of how to sustain a frequency, a rigor of reconnecting over 12 months, it dawned on me that speaking with people every other week would result in 26 touch points over the course of 52 weeks; or every 3 weeks would be 17 touch points in 51 weeks.
There’s a curiosity about what people can do on their own in a 2 or 3 week period and have to pursue some ideas, make more inquiries and do some ruminating or analyzing and digesting before gathering again. This is also an approach to work that sets a radically different rhythm when a project is meant to progress over 2-3 weeks rather than change from 9am to 3pm or from one afternoon until the next morning.
I am basking in this niche, this other nuanced layer, rather than being confined to the impatient, harried, and bothered work environment where a supervisor best manages by seeing people in a conference room or having a Zoom check in every day at the same time.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 