Gordon MacRae Blog

Ever since my job became more remote, I’ve been trying to rethink my relationship to work. Whether I like it or not, the reality is I currently have a remote job. I need to make it work for me.

It is individual. What works for me might not work for you.

I came across this advice by Lisa Sibbett about subverting the idea of the 8-hour working day.

It’s a pretty radical idea.

4 hours for work.

4 hours for self.

4 hours for family/house.

4 hours for community.

When you think most “routine” advice is more of the Ashton Hall, wake-up-at-4-am type advice.

Now to be clear, I don’t think a perfect 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 allocation is achievable. There’s a privilege or a punk ethos to achieving it.

Privilege if you can afford to only work 4 hours a day. Or punk because you are underemployed as an act of subversion.

But it does force you to think about why we live our days how we do.

I found the paper here. As Jenna Parks says over at Everything is Liminal, “Office jobs are like 65% actual work and 35% bullshitting with your coworkers and making coffee runs.”

But if you don’t have co-workers and you can’t make coffee runs, you need to replace this time with some other form of social connection.

Otherwise we might as well be robots.