I first read about a ROWE (Results-only work environment) when Dan Pink wrote about it in his wonderful book, A Whole New Mind.
In that book, he describes how at the start of the week, you get set tasks to be completed in the week, and when you're done, you're done and how that way of working seems to make a lot more sense than telling someone to sit at a desk or a machine for a solid eight hours a day with prescribed breaks and then go home.
It turns out (as we now know) that there is almost nobody who can do solid eight hours of knowledge work a day; it's just not possible.
Much of the research suggests that the best you can get out of someone is a really focused four or five hours at the most, and that begs the question, 'What do we spend the other three or four hours a day doing?'.
If you have the opportunity to change the way you work, if you have the privilege to call your own systems or deliver the hacks that make your work faster or more efficient or more effective, what should you do or what should you have to do with the time that you have saved and the time that you now have spared?
We live in a world where more efficiency is better; we're squeezing more into every day after yesterday, and the day before seems to be the only way we can travel.
But that makes no sense, does it?
It's like earning more and more money but having no time to spend it.
And so, planning your wasted time is a beautiful thing.
I have this vision for my winter sabbatical (the six weeks that I take off work every year now).
We had some new sofas delivered for our living room on Saturday, just one of the days in that sabbatical when my wife, Alison, goes off to work, my son Callum goes off to school, and my daughter, Grace, goes off to be a teacher somewhere else and my other daughter Rosie is still studying in Sheffield I will light my little log burner in the living room at quarter to nine in the morning and I will not move for the rest of the day.
I don't want to live my life like that every day (I actually have the opportunity to do that if I chose), but I want to plan in times when I don't have to think or worry or construct a scheme or strategize or plan for anything else.
It's those days when the best thoughts come; it's those times when we're free like that for the best work actually happens.
Blog Post Number - 3968
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