A Simple Dashboard to Balance Work and Personal Time
Startup founder Yina Huang had left a corporate job for entrepreneurship, yet work never seemed to stop. She said, “I feel like a salad spinner where I'm constantly pushing down on the top to spin faster” (Huang, 2021).
Pastor Mark Wickstrom felt like his life was turning into “wall to wall work” (Wickstrom 2015, p 64). In the evenings he had meetings, during the day he wrote and taught classes, on weekends he led services. He was also on call for emergencies.
Both Huang and Wickstrom have unstructured work weeks, in the sense that they manage their working hours on their own, rather than punching in on someone else’s time clock to report for a shift. One challenge for people who are self-employed or who have a lot of autonomy is figuring out how to set boundaries on their time.
Why Boundaries for Your Work Time Matter
For much of the previous century, a structured, forty hour work week was considered the norm in the United States for full-time work. But how we got to the standard that a full-time work week equals five days a week, eight hours a day, reminds us of what boundaries around work time are supposed to accomplish.
Being fairly paid for the time you spend working, having time to rest, and having time for leisure and recreation is a matter of human rights. At the extreme end is the ongoing scourge of slavery in its modern forms; the utter disregard of human rights. Debates about how to classify gig/contract workers are, at core, debates about boundaries around work.
The standard of a forty hour work week created boundaries around time.
Having boundaries when it comes to paid work time is about respecting your dignity as a full human person. It is important to know how much time you spend working, and to be intentional about it.
But if you have a lot of autonomy in how you structure your time, it can be hard to tell how much time you are devoting to work.
In a culture that loudly glorifies overwork, boundary setting begins with listening to quieter messages. It’s about listening to your body and making time for rest and for meals and for moving. It’s about listening to your inner self, and making time to think or read or learn to play a musical instrument. It’s about listening to the people you love, and setting aside unhurried time to spend with them.
Because you are a person, and not a machine, it is vitally important to make time for all of your commitments, not just work-related ones.
How Forty Hours a Week Became the Standard for Full-Time Work
Where did this idea of the forty hour work week come from?
We have the ancient world to thank for the idea of a week in the first place. A week is an invented span of days marked by time off from working. Weeks were created from the idea that people and livestock needed a regular day of rest:
When the day of rest originated, it changed the world. It began several thousand years ago when an ancient desert tribe, the Hebrews, started observing a weekly day of rest they called Shabbat, or Sabbath, which was enshrined as the Fourth Commandment. The fact that a few people just put down their plows and took a day off might not sound like much, but it was huge. First of all, it’s what actually gave us the week. Without a day off, how did anyone know when one set of days ended and another began? It was endless day after day after day. Shabbat gave us defined times. There was sacred time, and there was regular time. There was time to work, and there was time to rest and recover, to connect and do the big-picture thinking that drives culture forward. […] The need to pause and recharge is universal; most religions have some form of rest day. For Christians, it’s Sunday. For Muslims, Friday became a day for communal worship and family time, and Buddhists observe periods of rest and communal worship called Uposatha. During the new moon, the Cherokee traditionally abstained from work for a period known as “non-days” or “un-time.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secular movements, like labor unions, would call for much-needed days off as well. (Shlain 2019, pp 22-23)
The forty hour work week comes from combining five work days, of eight hours each.
The eight hour work day* was advocated by the 19th century Welsh textile manufacturer, utopian socialist**, and labor activist Robert Owen who coined the slogan “Eight Hours Labor, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest”, at a time when 12 to 14 hour work days, six days a week, were the norm.
The two day weekend came from Henry Ford. He instituted the two day weekend because he believed working 48 hours a week damaged Ford Motor Company workers’ productivity. Ford Motor Company became MORE productive after they cut the work week from 9 to 8 hours a day, and from six to five days a week***. Other companies soon followed suit.
The 21-Block Week Template: A Simple Dashboard to Balance Work and Life
Mark Wickstrom began using a 21-block weekly time template to get a sense of how much he was working each week, and to make sure he had time for his other important life commitments.
The 21 time block system divides weekdays into thirds, but skips the “rest/sleep” part. The thirds are waking hours for those of us who do not work nights: morning, afternoon, evening. Each block is about four hours. Ten blocks makes forty hours. When Wickstrom did this exercise for himself, he realized he put in about 48 hours a week to meet his work commitments (Wickstrom 2015, p 67).
Let’s look at a 20th century style 9 a.m.-5 p.m. forty hour work week. The morning and afternoon blocks for Monday through Friday are colored in:
Now check out this template with a forty hour work week, but for someone whose work time does not fit into that 9-5 weekday pattern.
Perhaps this person is a freelancer or an entrepreneur. Perhaps they are a real estate agent, a photographer, a football coach, an ER nurse, a choir director. This person needs to be available during the evenings or on weekends: when other people are out of school and out of their offices.
Let’s say this person has evening meetings on Monday and Thursday, and a Saturday morning stint. Here is what forty hours might look like for them:
If you have irregular hours, flexible scheduling, you still need time to rest. You still need time for your commitments and interests outside of work. If you block your hours in this big-picture way, you may find you’re working a lot more than a forty hour week. And it’s better to know that, than to just live with the pressing but vague feeling that you are working all the time.
Knowing what is really going with your time is what allows you to make choices about it.
Some Guidelines for Flexible Scheduling
If your job includes a lot of variables, try not to hard-schedule more than 2/3 of your work time. Block in two-thirds time for deep work and for meetings (on the 21-block template, this would be six blocks of a forty hour week). Leave one-third open for walk-ins, emergencies, surprises, complications in the coding, whatever is predictably unpredictable about your work week. This allows you time to accommodate surprises, and still have a life. You can’t predict the unexpected, but to some degree you can schedule for it.
Avoid scheduling more than two blocks (eight hours) a day. If you are working an evening block, don’t schedule morning and afternoon blocks that same day. One of those blocks needs to be reserved for you to take care of other aspects of your life.
But life happens, things come up. If you have an unusually busy week, or stretch of weeks, look for the blocks you can use to recover on less busy weeks.
Recently I worked a seven day week. I had my usual work obligations, plus an all-day business meeting on a Saturday which required extra time to prepare for. When I planned my schedule for the following week, I blocked out time to rest and recover from the previous week.
You’ve got 168 hours in a week to work, to rest, and to attend to your personal interests and commitments. Keep aware of how much of that time bends toward work.
References:
Wickstrom, D. M. (2015) Sensible Grace: Visual Tools for a Better Life. MDW Press, LLC.
Huang, Y. (2021, January). Re: Any tips on how to slow down [post]. Retrieved from Ness Labs Community . (Accessed: 2 July 2021.)
Spiggle, T. (no date) Gig Workers As Employees: Why America Won’t Follow The U.K. Anytime Soon, Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomspiggle/2021/02/26/gig-workers-as-employees-why-america-wont-follow-the-uk-anytime-soon/ (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
‘What is Modern Slavery?’ (no date) United States Department of State. Available at: https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/ (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
BBC - Ethics - Slavery: Modern slavery (no date). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/modern/modern_1.shtml (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
Shlain, T. (2019) 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. Kindle edition. Gallery Books.
Guild, H. (2020) ‘Why Do We Have an 8-Hour Working Day?’, History Guild, 6 November. Available at: https://historyguild.org/why-do-we-have-an-8-hour-working-day/ (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
Editors, H. com (no date) Ford factory workers get 40-hour week, HISTORY. Available at: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-workers-get-40-hour-week (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
Robert Owen: pioneer of personnel management (no date) The British Library. The British Library. Available at: https://www.bl.uk/people/robert-owen (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
Muravchik, J. (2003) Heaven on earth: the rise and fall of socialism. 1. paperback ed. San Francisco: Encounter Books.
The Eight-Hour Day | Unions Making History in America (no date). Available at: https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/unions/labor/eight-hour-day (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
The Haymarket Affair (no date) Illinois Labor History Society. Available at: http://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/the-haymarket-affair (Accessed: 2 July 2021).
Notes:
*Getting an eight-hour work day and five days per week to be considered full-time took over a century of sustained struggle before the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in the United States.
**Intentional communities can be life-giving, or they can be pathologically dysfunctional. While Robert Owen’s textile factory was remarkably humane for its time , his experimental utopian community was an economic and humanitarian disaster. Owen bought land and buildings from a religious community in Indiana to establish “New Harmony” in 1825. It lasted less than two years. New Harmony was not self-supporting; it limped along because Owen spent down his fortune to pay the bills. Few of its members were skilled workers. Few knew how to farm or make repairs. Gardens and fields were neglected and overrun by livestock, and food and housing ran short from the beginning. Owen, an early socialist, despised religion, the notion of private property, and the notion of marriage which he considered sexually restrictive. Some married women pushed their husbands to leave because Owen was pressuring them (Muravchik 2003, pp 48-49). Because Owen believed controlling early influences on children was critical to changing human character and sparking social reform, families were separated, with children moved into boarding school by the age of three. One woman recalled, “I saw my mother and father twice in two years.” (Muravchik 2003, p 47). Owen blamed the failure of the community on its members not having the moral fortitude to live up to his ideals.
***It’s an interesting question, which I hope to write more about, whether the forty hour week is too much for a full-time week in the 21st century. Aren’t so-called labor-saving devices and systems supposed to give us more free time? Since general productivity has risen so much in the century since Henry Ford’s factory, why are people typically working more than forty hours a week? These are all good philosophical and social science questions to dig into — why massive increases in productivity haven’t led to a decrease in actual working hours — but at this point I’d be glad to see people with some schedule autonomy set firm quitting times on their work days; and actually take one day off each week to rest. For so many people, for all kinds of reasons, this is simply not happening.