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"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it." While we live in a world where setting o

"I don't have time for that" should be translated as "That's not a high enough priority for me to make time to do it." While we live in a world where setting our priorities one way (more money, less time) is facilitated by everything from labour laws to social conventions, we do have a choice to set them differently. There are two prongs to this: 1) setting our personal priorities differently, and consciously accepting the trade-offs that involves and 2) promoting social and corporate policies that enable our preferred priorities. Setting personal priorities may involve simply not working through lunch every day and ramping up from there. Promoting social and corporate policies may involve things that facilitate telecommuting (reflecting the discussions here on the time-cost of commuting) or a move toward more European-style labour policy, which doesn't seem to have harmed European productivity (http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states http://ieconomics.com/productivity-euro-area-united-states). That's another way of saying the Anglosphere all-work-all-the-time ethic is really inefficient, and who wants to be inefficient? For many people, though, leisure time is over-rated. People work long hours because they value their working hours more than their leisure hours, and set their priorities accordingly. There are a lot of reasons why people have those priorities, some of which may be related to how bad we are at judging what is likely to make us happy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-research-ranks-_b_829591.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kirsten-dirksen/happiness-rese...

jamesaguilar 12y ago
Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job. In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and, surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with their careers either. By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for these links. They are very interesting.

jamesaguilar 12y ago

Sometimes I meet people who feel obligated to work late because they're told to. Since I'm in the privileged position of never having been asked to do this, I can't fully know what my response would be. But I'd like to think at some point I'd simply tell my boss that I would not be working any more, and trust my daytime productivity to keep me my job. In theory, the company would not take negative action as long as my productivity less cost to employ was positive. In fact, in an ideal world, you'd even continue to be promoted as needed to retain your services. But what would actually happen? I've never had the chance to run the test, and, surprisingly, I haven't been able to convince my friends to experiment with their careers either. By the way, I upvoted you, but I also wanted to actually say "thanks" for these links. They are very interesting.