I have a confession to make: I’ve taken off every Friday for the past ~2 years but haven’t told anyone.
Why do I keep it a secret?
Because I worry that people will think that I’m a slacker. Because I worry that I MYSELF will think I’m a slacker.
That I don’t work hard.
That I don’t put in the work.
That I don’t #grind, won’t #crushit, and will cease to be #relentless.
I fear that if I’m not working the prototypical 5-6 days a week I’ll be lazy.
I’ve bought into the cultural [mis]conception that My Value = Effort Exerted of Hours Logged.
….
It was two summers ago that I experimented with taking Fridays off.
My family buys a membership at a community pool, and almost every sunny day between Memorial Day and Labor Day you can find my wife and our kids there. Yet I was finding it hard to get there myself to hang out with them, often because during our weekends we’d have other plans or commitments.
So I decided to just take off Fridays for the summer to go to the pool with my family (we only have 18 of them with each kid, after all). Summers are typically a little slower work wise anyway, and it was an experiment. If it didn’t work, I could always abandon it.
Then September rolled around, and I realized that I was able to get the same amount of work accomplished in 4 days that typically took 5 days. Nothing was getting missed. Parkinson’s law on full display.
So I thought I’d do it for the rest of the year. Still didn’t miss a beat.
Then January came and I created a calendar event every Friday from 8am-4pm saying “Fridays Off” and set it to repeat with no end date.
….
My intention here isn’t to boast. In fact, my lead-in confession isn’t about taking the time off.
The confession is the fact that I kept it a secret.
Call it the “Protestant work ethic” or American dogma or perhaps subconscious habits from earlier in my career, but I firmly believed that working hard (and long) was the measuring stick of Doing Right. I’m sure a psychologist could have a field day examining this in my mind alone.
I also have an aversion to being lazy that I picked up somewhere along the way in my life, and I feared if people knew I was taking Fridays off that I’d be associated with being lazy. Equally as powerful, I feared that I myself would view my own self as lazy if I spoke this thing aloud.
And while it’s been a number of years now that I cringe at the idea of “Chronic busyness” and how people wear it as badges of honor – myself previously included – the idea of “staying busy” gnawed at me.
I falsely viewed (and still do, at times, honestly) an untruth of two binary options in life: busy or lazy.
As with most things, there’s a healthy in-between that should be explored.
Call it rested. Or unhurried.
Productive and efficient and effective? Yes, yes, and yes – but not exhausted.
….
We live in a culture that celebrates chronic busyness. I don’t think this is even a debate, is it?
Count how many variations of the pleasantry conversations you’ve been part of in recent past that go something like this:
“Hey! How’ve you been? Staying busy?”
“Absolutely. Better than the alternative, right?”
We boast about the hours that we work, the responsibilities that we carry, the amount of things we have to do, and how there’s just not enough time in the day to get it all done.
I recognize the absurdity of this and I still really struggle with not answering it in some form or fashion of “busy” when someone asks how I’m doing. But I have definitely grown better at it.
I probably have a whole book’s worth of hypotheses why we struggle to NOT be busy, or at least claim we’re busy. A lot of them boil down to the idea that we’re simply not comfortable with the resulting stillness that may lead to an examination of deeper parts of who we are as individuals. Staying busy keeps us distracted from the Deeper Things.
Or as my friend Ashby recently reminded me, the words of TS Eliot: “we are distracted from distraction by distraction.”
[A potentially sidenote: I wrote about this idea of busyness back in the beginning of 2020, and can now see the connection between me being overly busy and me defining what’s Enough at the end of that year. Interesting.]
….
A book that was hugely influential to me was The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comers. If you need any additional affirmation that we as a culture are overly busy, burned out, and just plain exhausted – just read the introduction.
If you want to read some practical advice on how to solve it, read the whole book.
….
So again, back to my confession. It’s so silly.
Anyone who knows me – or takes a few minutes to browse my online profiles or this website – can see that family is of utmost importance to me. Infinitely more important than my career or scaling my business.
If I’m taking off Fridays to spend more time with them, I should celebrate that, no?
But I didn’t. For the longest time. At least publicly. Because I was fearful of how people would perceive it, and probably equally as much how I would view myself if I talked about it too much.
I’ve stopped waving the flag of Chronic Busyness – and I’m raising a new flag of being rested and #unhurried.
Carl Richards is pointing people in this direction as well, and encouraging a “quiet army” of people to challenge the status quo of busyness so ingrained in our culture.
To let people know we’re not enslaved to the chains of busyness.
To ignore the Siren calls of false self-importance of an overly booked calendar.
To invite them to celebrate Rest and Balance and Proper Priorities.
To let them know there is another way.
My contribution right now is this confession. And a more public commitment to living life #unhurried.