Do Less (7 page)

Whether you work to live or live to work, minimalism can help you define your goals, work efficiently, and balance your time at and away from the office. The minimalist path to work success can mean working less, finding a new job, or even changing careers. Your choice and path will be unique to you and your goals and dreams. If you're burned out by a long commute, explore the idea of shifting where you work, or even where you live, to take back weeks of your time. Unfulfilled by your current role? Minimalism will help you find your passion and translate it into a career.

Think big. Do you want to go back to school? Apprentice in a new field? Cut down your work hours so you can finish that great American novel you started years ago? Do you want to work in the nonprofit sector? Do you want to work overseas? No change is too small, no goal too big.

Just as minimalism can transform your home and finances, it can also change your work life. You can Do Less and be more efficient, happier, productive, and successful. In this section of the book, we'll explore all of the different routes you can take to build a more productive work life.

Parkinson's law of triviality states that we put time into making a decision in inverse proportion to the importance of the decision. In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson, a British author, used bike sheds and atomic reactors to show how organizations spend time on things in inverse proportion to their complexity and cost. He explained how a committee would debate the merits, cost, and design of a bike shed for hours because it is something most people would have some experience with, or have enough knowledge of, to form an opinion on. The debate would take a lot of time and the organization would deliberate at great length on trivial details and small costs. In comparison, a similar debate about an atomic reactor wouldn't occur that way, because those who work on it have such specialized knowledge and skill that there is no need for anyone to contribute to the discussion or debate in a trivial way. The bottom line: the more complex and specialized the matter, the less room there is for triviality.

Most workplaces are rife with the trivial. Meetings run late because someone wants to contribute a long-winded case on something small that has little to no impact on a project. In deference to good manners, we let our coworker prattle on while hundreds of dollars of man-hours disappear as colleagues sit idle, waiting for him or her to finish.

Clutter doesn't begin and end in our homes. The workplace is just as much a culprit when it comes to stealing time and money as our homes and hobbies are. Many of us take work home with us in the evening, come into work on weekends, and check in on our jobs while on vacation. We work longer hours than we need to and we don't have an improved product or great volume of work to show for it.

Minimalism can help you work less, not only by reducing your income needs, but also by helping you work smarter. Working smarter doesn't necessarily mean working harder—it means working more efficiently. The minimalist approach to work means assessing your own work style and the work culture and norms in your office, and then adjusting how and when you work for success. Be open to the idea that your actual workplace values—the ones that are used day to day rather than the ones on the company mission statement—may be slightly outside of conventional norms and practices. (Work culture and the unique skills and tastes of coworkers and management often override the formal value statement in an employee handbook.)

You're going to realign your work based on the culture of your workplace in a few simple steps. You're going to change how and when you work to suit the optics of your office. You're going to work more efficiently and when it will be noticed so that you can work less when it won't be noticed and spend less time chained to your desk. Get ready to rethink how, when, and where you work.

In order to figure out what your workplace values, ask yourself some questions about what gets people ahead.

• Is it the early bird who gets the kudos from management? Do you see your coworker who regularly sends early-morning and late-night e-mails rising to the top?
  
• Is it the person who fervently argues in a meeting and shows that she's not afraid of being the lone dissenter who gets the promotion?
  
• Is high output, no matter the quality, rewarded?
  
• Look at your colleagues who are consistently praised and rewarded. What do they have in common?
  

Many workplaces give lip service to traditional measures of performance like punctuality, volume, and quality of work and
actually
reward a completely different set of skills and traits. Unearth what those are at your workplace.

What time does your workday start? What about your colleagues'? Is there someone who typically arrives fifteen to thirty minutes later than everyone else? Everyone else might make note of it, but does management? Is that two and a half hours a week that your colleague isn't in the office hurting his or her career? If you had an extra two and a half hours a week to do with as you please, what would you do?

Forget about what the conventional working hours are and look at what the actual ones are in your workplace. If the manager values people who stay until six, even if they arrived an hour later than everyone else, make that work for you. You can do this by coming in later, taking a longer lunch and using some of that time to run personal errands, or leaving early and logging back onto work e-mail when you get home. You don't have to put in a lot of work, merely send a few e-mails or finish a small item to send the message that, like everyone else, you worked until six. Adjusting when you work to fit the hours valued by your employer will not only raise your profile at work, but it will also allow you to work less at other times.

Let go of the idea that the workday must be nine to five. Many successful people are night owls and others work best in short concentrated bursts of time. If you are in tune with how and when you work best, adjust your work schedule to those hours while being mindful of the necessities of your workplace. If you prefer to come to work later after a leisurely morning at home, but there is an unspoken rule that 8:30
A.M.
is the general start time, hold back some e-mails you might send at night and instead send them first thing in the morning while you are still at home. Get the work done, but present it in a timeline that suits your employer or manager.

Tip: want to take a longer lunch hour? Leave your desk “un-tidied” with some carefully placed paperwork that works as desk camouflage. Give the appearance that you've just stepped away from your desk to use the toilet or discuss something with a colleague, even if you're actually at the gym for a forty-minute spin class.

Do you struggle to get the big work done at your job? Are you often mired down with administrative tasks and too busy to do the really important work that will advance your career and impress your manager? Most of us have to leave the distractions of the workplace, the water-cooler talk, the incessant e-mails, to get our critical work done. Big deadlines often mean taking work home with us or coming in on weekends. These sixty-hour workweeks burn us out physically and mentally and sap our time and energy for any other pursuits.

In these busy workplace cultures, it's important to tap into your natural rhythms to be at your most productive when it counts. “Ultradian rhythms” are those natural cycles that happen in a human body in a twenty-four-hour cycle and include your patterns of sleep, appetite, and even frequency of blinking. You want to harness these rhythms and assign your most important work to certain time periods.

The following is a sample schedule for a workday with timed intervals during which you will do your most important and challenging work. Remember, we all have our own internal rhythms and external schedule demands. Tailor this schedule to your own needs. If you're an early riser, you may even want to put a work interval in as soon as you wake up. Some of us work best just out of bed, clad in pajamas and sitting in our home offices. If you work best in the late afternoon to evening, stagger your work intervals to start once you have been in the office for two to three hours.

Always take note of when your attention wanders and for what reason. Are you hungry, tired, or bored? You'll be able to train yourself to work up to longer sessions, but always read your own physical and mental cues for when you need a break. It's much better to grab a glass of water, respond to a few nonstressful e-mails, and reset yourself mentally than to stare blankly at a screen as the clock ticks on.

After a few weeks of working within a schedule and keeping performance notes on yourself, you'll know what your optimal time is to break for lunch, take a walk around the office, or move on to less demanding work.

This sample schedule can be a starting point for some people or an end goal for others. We all have different capacities for focused work and we all work at different speeds. If you struggle with highly focused work, break down your workday into two or three evenly spaced ninety- to 120-minute segments to start. These cycles should be used for demanding work that requires a high level of focus. This is not a time to answer e-mails or idly surf the human resources section of the company intranet. These short cycles are times to create or edit documents or projects or brainstorm for a new initiative. Close your e-mail program, turn your phone to silent, and set your messenger status to do not disturb.

As you begin working in this way, try starting with a shorter work cycle of thirty to sixty minutes. If you are used to checking your e-mail every five minutes or frequently being interrupted by coworkers, it will take a few sessions for you to get your focus skills back and to eliminate distractions during these relatively short bursts of work. Your busywork—the stuff that you can do while also keeping an eye on a basketball game on television or while chatting with a colleague—can be done outside of your focused work cycles. Using these work cycles to be more productive during your workday will make you more efficient and allow you to leave your work at the office every night instead of taking it home with you.

Once you've tapped into your ultradian rhythms, you will become aware when you hit a point of diminishing returns at work. We all have limits to how long we can work in a focused and productive way, and when we work beyond that limit, we make mistakes and the quality of our work suffers. A thirty-minute task stretches into two hours because we start surfing the web or writing personal e-mails. If you want to work more efficiently, you need to recognize your threshold for work and stop or change your work when you hit that threshold.

In practical application, recognizing the law of diminishing returns in your work can mean:

• Saying no to working after a certain time in the evening
  
• Building rejuvenating breaks into your day
  
• Taking your lunch break away from your desk and going for a brisk walk outside before returning to work
  
• Shutting off your work computer in the evening and doing something that engages you a different way, such as exercising or enjoying a hobby
  

These types of breaks will help you reset so that when you return to work, whether it's thirty minutes later or fourteen hours later, you are ready for focused and highly productive work.

We're working longer hours than ever before. Many of us aren't even taking vacations. The toll on our health and relationships from these long hours is evident. We're tired and stressed out, and although we can blame work culture and the mobile and 24/7 nature of work today, there
is
a way out. There is a way to work less and live more—it's minimalism.

Why are we working so much? During her years helping people through their final weeks of life, hospice nurse Bronnie Ware observed several common regrets people had about what they wished they had done more of or less of in their lives. She chronicled them in her memoir,
The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.
A big regret of the dying was working too much. As people reflected on how they'd lived their lives, it became clear that working long hours had kept them from the people they loved and the pastimes that nourished their souls.