5/16/2013–I accepted this job for a specific salary, at a specific location, and with an expected 5-day work week. I’ve been able to meet my priority of 4.8% FOH labor so far this month. I also would love to do hobbies and otherwise enjoy relaxing on my day off. So does this make it inappropriate, ineffective, or short-sighted to work on my day off?
I think working in a restaurant does make answering this question a little more complex than working a 9-5 Mon-Fri job. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say “shift work” as opposed to “restaurant”. In shift work, the majority of your time must be dedicated to shift execution. Covey would call this urgent, important work. Managing the host stand, reacting to ticket times, interacting with guests are examples. For me this is 3:30-11 pm every day I work. At five days per week, that’s 7.5 x 5= 37.5 hours/wk that really isn’t manageable, controllable, and surely not delegated often.
This leaves a manager with 2.5 hrs/wk of time which can effectively be used for true high ROI management—what Covey calls non-urgent, important work. Scheduling, training, all process improvement, recruiting, staff development, marketing, and of course meetings would be examples of this. “non-urgent, important” work is what allows a manager to get the right things done I.e. priorities. It’s these two guys next to me at Starbucks discussing options for investment into social media.
The tag “non-urgent” basically means you need to schedule it. Because if it’s not, then any urgent task—by definition—takes precedent when the two coincide. I’d even say, then, that the act of scheduling a task—maybe better said “giving it a deadline”—makes it urgent and therefore prioritized over other urgent tasks.
No unscheduled task is more urgent than any scheduled task, with respect to the order of priority.
Herein lies my answer to the ?: if you are a shift-worker it may be reasonable to schedule time on your day off for tasks associated with priorities. And, before this happens, that 2.5 hours better be scheduled first and spent effectively. That may be necessary to simply achieve the basic requirements. Additionally, I do think working on a day off can lead a shift manager to greatly surpass his peers who don’t even use the 2.5 hours effectively. This in-turn makes work days better and therefore reduces overall distress related to work.
The major caveat here is that this analysis is what works for me—a single, low-level manager with no obligations and gads of free time. I would not suggest this to every professional—shift worker or not–without serious consideration of how much time he or she likes to spend outside of work tasks. For this reason, time with family should be scheduled (first) as well as time for activities that don’t inherently have start/end times. This is especially true for 9-5 workers b/c they know the hours they have available to schedule. They can schedule meetings weeks in advance and rely on recurring engagements dedicated to priorities. A 9-5 professional owes it to his or her family and friends to manage time both with them and work.
There is no “life or work”, there is only “life”.
Life includes work, same as family, hobbies, and personal development—all three of which require significant investments of time.
QOTW: “I wish Arturo would’ve told us he had a baby on the way.” J.D.
?FNW: Do I get an interview? Nope
10/24/2017: I am right in the middle of this same question today, having adopted a “Peak Productivity Outlook” system modeled on David Allen’s Getting Things Done. In this journal entry, I said, “The tag “non-urgent” basically means you need to schedule it. Because if it’s not, then any urgent task—by definition—takes precedent when the two coincide. I’d even say, then, that the act of scheduling a task—maybe better said “giving it a deadline”—makes it urgent and therefore prioritized over other urgent tasks.” However, when I adopted this new system, part of it called for avoiding assigning deadlines to tasks, unless the task actually had one (e.g. create training content vs a report due 11/14). I’m not convinced yet which is ideal, but certainly either is not among the first steps toward productivity–in other words, either method is a vast improvement over not using tasks at all.
Regarding the “there is only life” concept–this idea would continue to be a focus of mine well into my time at Purdue, when it became more and more clear that the phrase “work-life balance” is not the best way to think about how to optimize time. I firmly still believe it’s more helpful to think of work as something that is entirely contained within life, instead of something that is the alternative to it. Our life each day is 24 hours; we benefit by thinking of how to divide them between all activities that enable our purpose and priority.