Yet another reason I don't miss working...

Retirement has many things to recommend it. And ranking high amount those many things is that you're kinda-sorta on permanent vacation. Sure, it's mostly stay-cation, but your time is pretty much your own. You don't have to "put in" for time off;, you don't have to check in with your boss to see if that time off is okay; you don't have to put up with any peer pressure to not take off and leave your colleagues in a real - or as often as not, imagined - lurch. 

Nope, you can make those plane and VRBO rezzies months in advance on your very own say so. You can take - get this - two consecutive weeks off. (Hey, don't be a piker: you can take two consecutive years off.) As for occasional days off, you can wake up any morning and declare it a personal or mental health day, even if all you had planned for the day was a trip to the corner drugstore to pick up toothpaste. 

Of course, as a freelancer, I had been out of the corporate regiment for nearly two decades before I retired. My days off, my vacation policy, the hours I worked each day, were entirely under my control. Still, when I was freelancing, there were always client projects and priorities to juggle, so sometimes there were some times I couldn't just take off.

But mostly, if you're on your own, it's all (mostly) up to you. Sleep in. Work late. Take a four hour lunch break. Loaf your Saturdays away. Two-hour workday? Twelve-hour workday? MYOB! In my business, other than meetings that were fixed by the client, it was my call.

Anyway, not having to worry about formal and informal corporate vacay and hours-put-in policies is another reason why I don't miss working, and a recent article I saw on MSNBC brought this home in spades. 

The article was about how overwork has been pretty much normalized in a lot of workplaces.

This is nothing new. I don't think I ever worked anyplace where the implicit expectation wasn't that a professional workweek meant, at minimum, something north of 40 hours. No place I worked was as cutthroat as management consulting, investment banking, Big Eight Four accountancy, and white shoe law. (Then again, none of us made as much as those Bain consultants and white shoe lawyers.)

Many years ago, a friend of ours who was working at an investment bank in New York - was it Morgan Stanley? we're talking the way back of 1980's here - was visiting us for the weekend. Panic time! He remembered that he had left a document on his desk that should have been in his desk. He called the office, knowing that a colleague would be there on a Saturday, slugging away. He asked his colleague to put the document in a drawer. Her response? Fuck off! If you want it in the drawer, put it there yourself. Our friend high-tailed it back to New York.

So crazy hours are nothing new.

But the expectations thing has gotten worse now that the miracle that is the Internet makes it possible for employees to be "always on," which sadly translates into "always at work." Which means that the pressure to work all the time has increased, and spread to organizations that might once have been exempt from it. 

Be the first in! Be the last out! Even if you're on vacation, check those emails at 3 a.m. and "Reply to All" so that all are aware that you're the do-be (suck-up) who's working all hours! 

Conventional career wisdom practically encourages [this sort of behavior]. The message we’re given is: if you want to stand out at work, you need to extend yourself cheerfully and overdeliver. That way, you don’t leave a speck of doubt in people’s minds that you’re capable, productive, and worthy. Employers know this and often leverage it –and in plenty of cases, they reward employees according to just out-of-reach standards.

Nonsense, the article argues. All this equating "overwork" with "productivity" is making the workplace more toxic than ever. 

It cautions against glorifying those who brag about the late hours they worked.

I know it's been a while, but, while I didn't brag about it, I was often one of those extra-hours folks: arriving early, staying late, dragging in on weekends to finish things about and get a head start on the next week. Even at the time, I recognized that at times I was just being a sucker, letting myself get dragooned into extra work because it weirdly seemed flattering to be asked. And even at the time, I recognized that one of the reasons I dragged in so many Saturdays was because by mid-afternoon on Friday, I'd already decided to come in the next day. And so I spent those Friday afternoons lolling around, gossiping and shop talking with friends rather than being efficient and getting the g.d. work done. 

And I will note that, in my experience, the folks who were most efficient were working mothers. No fat in their work days! They were at work to work, and when they had to leave, they had to leave. There was a kiddo to pick up at daycare or the after school program. So they worked through lunch, chewing on their sandwich while sitting at the computer, rather than chewing the fat with others.

Then there's vacation time. 

A whopping 55 percent of U.S. workers didn’t use all of their paid time off in 2022, and about a third of employees don’t even have the option to take paid vacations. In addition to normalizing 50+ hour workweeks, most working people view vacations as a luxury they can’t afford – whether that means there isn’t any room in their financial budget or they simply don’t think they can spend a week or two away from work without (direct or indirect) consequences.

According to New View Strategies, 32 percent of Americans feel guilty for taking time off work, and the number increases to 41 percent when going away for seven days or longer. Over a third of workers also regret going on vacation because they need to double up their workload before they leave or when they return.

This is just awful. Awful as in awful. 

People need to take vacations. They need to get away. To spend time with family. To take care of "house stuff." Or to just hole-up and chill with a few good books. 

I still need vacations, and I don't work.

And when I did work in corporate, I never neglected to take the time coming to me. And I mostly tried to take a vacation that, if not two full weeks long, at least had enough + in the 7 days + so I'd have days when I could be thinking "next week at this time I'll still be on vacation."

Occasionally, there had been a bit of pressure to get me to put off a vacation.

One time in particular, the company I was working for had a major product launch coming up, and I played a major and visible role in the launch, which was scheduled for a month or so after my return from vacation. A few weeks before that vacation, the company's CMO announced at a team meeting that he was cancelling all vacations until after the launch. 

I told him that I wasn't able (subtext: or willing) to cancel my plans, which had a lot of moving parts and involved a house on Christmas Cove in Maine with me, my husband, our friend Michele, and my sister Trish and her family. Mr. CMO gave me a withering look and said, "I'm even postponing my honeymoon for this launch." 

Mr. CMO and I got along (mostly) pretty well, so I said, "Well, it's a good thing you're not the blushing 21 year old groom, isn't it." (I think this was wife number three, and they were already living together, so what was the big deal?) Mr. CMO did laugh. Kinda-sorta. 

Meanwhile, one of my colleagues jumped right in to announce that he would cancel his vacation, and that we should all support Mr. CMO, blah-di-blah-di-blah. 

This was twenty years before we had ever heard of Logan Roy or Succession, but what popped into my head - once I got through the obligatory flash thought of "what a suck up" - at that moment was Logan Roy's classic response to almost every situation: "Oh, fuck off."

I didn't say anything of the kind.

What I was also thinking was, twenty, thirty, forty years from now, the people I love (dead or alive) will still be part of my life, while the folks on the big product launch team would be vague memories. 

Anyway, I did agree to make one check in call in the morning of Vacation Day One, when we had a regular weekly call scheduled. Fortunately, the cell coverage was so crappy in Christmas Cove that it wasn't worth staying on the phone for more than a couple of minutes. 

Of course I wasn't needed. The people on my team were able to take care of things while I was away, and the big launch went off without a hitch. (Other than the fact that the entire product and its launch was one big ridiculous hitch. A post for another day...)

If we stand a chance to reduce toxicity and overwork at work, it starts with seeing employees not as workers who *happen* to have personal lives on nights and weekends - but as full, multidimensional human beings. People who want to use their gifts, operate according to their values, and get paid fairly in the process.

Amen to this! 

All this pressure to overperform in terms of "time served" is yet another reason I don't miss working.