“Workin 9 til 5 just trying to make a livin”

When did working 9 til 5 go out of fashion?

I’m re-reading ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race” and a small point jumped out of the pages. Surprisingly, it’s not about race. It’s about work.

For most of my life I have believed that a normal day job is boring. That the real work starts after the school bell rings for home-time.

For as long as I remember I viewed the standard eight hour working day as a life for grey people in grey suits working grey jobs in grey industries living in grey towns.

Grey life was not for me, I wanted excitement, dynamism and creativity. That is why I chose a career in big city media.

The excitement of Adland lured me in, where the days and nights blur because the fun never stops. An industry fueled by ideas, big budgets, cocaine and alcohol.

I worked all day and late nights, filled by coffee and survived often without lunch. The excitement of a new business pitch being the pinnacle of adrenaline fueled around the clock work, work, work. Work hard, play hard win big.

For a long time it kinda worked for me. All the work, work, work did lead me to Instagramable success, as advertised.

But work, work, work didn’t reward me with happiness. In fact it had the opposite affect on the health and happiness of me and the people around me. I’m not just talking about colleagues, I’m talking about an entire generation that reached burn out officially or other.

When did the actual work get relegated?

All the digital tools were supposed to elevate the strain and optimize our work. Instead they seem to alert us to all the extra things we should be doing, notifications we should read, software updates we need to download.

We spend so much time working on the ‘way of working’ that we have no time to do the work itself. Don’t get me wrong, I love a process and a system that works. But too many simply don’t.

And let’s talk about the work. What is it? Is it responding to the questions in the meeting, the emails you missed while in the meetings or the client problem that you are trying to identify after you were briefed without any particular objective to solve for?

We are all far to busy to stop working and ask why we are working. Until now.

It’s been almost five months since the world stopped. Since I stopped. And I did. Because my one and a half year old daughter has dinner at 17:30 and I want to be apart of it.

Which means by the time she is in bed it’s seven, maybe seven thirty. Which gives me thirty minutes to check in on work before my eight pm self imposed work emails curfew to stem my sleep anxiety. After that it’s Netflix, PopcornTime, books, bantz with my wife or the rare night out with friends.

Call me grey, old (I’m 38), boring, lazy or a lier. But I must say, I’m working on working nine til five more often. I have not achieved it yet, but it’s in my sights and it’s looking far more exciting than work hard play hard.

Working nine til five is very much in fashion for me right now.