Summary:
- There’s a saying which I always find interesting: “Sleep is when you work with your eyes closed”.
- Doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to work while you sleep. It means that while you sleep, there’s a lot of unconscious stuff that happens, connections that get made in your brain. Those connections that get made are very valuable to any business.
- So to regard sleep or spending time with your kids as “not work” and the time at your desk as “work”, drawing that distinction, is a bit ridiculous when doing complex knowledge work.
- But there’s a reverse side to that.
- If you were to present this idea to executives in most companies, you’re going to get some assholes who will take that idea and try to create a culture of being at work all the time, always responding to emails, always available. Which totally misses the point: which is that you get those ideas when you’re not working, not thinking about work, thinking about other things.
- Another side to that: if you want your people to be considering business ideas and thinking about them, and being willing to engage into that sort of thinking outside of working hours, that requires the right kind of mindset from people, and people won’t behave like that if you’re always pressuring them to think about work. So the side that many people wouldn’t be willing to accept, if you expect people to be willing to spend time outside of work thinking about work, then you can’t give them a hard time regarding what they’re thinking about while in the office.
- You can’t have the expectation that your people are creative people who really care about their job and want to make a difference 24/7, and give them a hard time if they take a longer lunch break. The two are incompatible.