Desperate Need for a Break

This is from my weekly email series, The Weekly Mixtape. To get it the right way, please subscribe to the newsletter

Hey Indiepreneurs,

For the one (or fewer) of you waiting with baited breath for these weekly newsletters, you probably noticed that the last two weeks I was MIA. That’s because, after a year of this pandemic, the family and I finally called a last minute audible and got out of town.

We took an Orlando trip, and we certainly weren’t the only ones. After all those stories promising limits on attendance at the big theme parks, I expected the park attendance to be, well, you know, limited. And maybe it’s just the year in isolation, but it certainly seemed plenty of crowded to me.

We still had a lot of fun, Especially when the people behind us stayed behind the designated social distancing line.

Which brings me to my thoughts on taking breaks. There’s a culture–which I know isn’t exclusive to the US, but it’s where I experience it–that really loves work. Public accounting is famous for its long hours (though it’s investment banking that’s having its 95 hours a week moment right now) so I’ve worked with plenty of people who look at you askance if you head home before 9 pm or grumble with disgust as they approve your time off.

“The work has to get done,” is inevitably the argument. Which is true…and yet throwing in extra hours isn’t the solution it’s cracked up to be. There’s been evidence showing the physical and emotional toll of working too many hours, and one Stanford University professor even showed that in certain cases working over 55 hours lead to zero productivity in those extra hours.

But those 80 billable hours look good to the billing partner, so the long hours will continue, even if 25 of those hours may actually be counterproductive.

I know I’m hardly the only one hoping for some smart changes along these lines, and yet hours are apparently going up rather than down.

The best response to “the work has to get done” may actually be “then let me sleep.” But until more of those running the office realize that’s a valid reason rather than an excuse, we’ll likely continue going down this long hour rabbit hole.

The Links

• I enjoyed this article talking about why taxing corporations is bad policy, though it is behind a paywall. I believe they’re having trial subscriptions right now, though.
• Have you already bought all of Razer’s overpriced gaming gear? Soon you can get a (sure to be) overpriced glowing mask from them!
• If you don’t want to buy one from Razer, I saw this DIY project a while ago that looks almost as good.

Service Dog Update
Sherman missed out on the theme park fun (hard to take a non-fully trained service dogs to places like that), so we missed him for a week. Our original dog sitter canceled at the last minute due to the storm, so he got to stay with my in-laws instead. He seemed to do fine, though came back with a thick layer of construction dust on him after hanging out in their basement.

He seems happy to be back to the routine.

We took him back to my in-laws for dinner a few days after we got back, and he went a bit manic. He was running around like crazy, barking and twirling and harassing their Boston Terriers. I’m not sure if that was because he was afraid we’d leave him again or he was hoping that he would, but he settled down when we got him back home, ready to go straight to bed.