I've been suggesting this for years!

I just ran across this great New York Times article on wasted time. This is exactly what I dreamed of in my years spent doing my best to resemble a productive employee when a lack of work left me looking "lazy" to the powers that be any time I had the poor judgment to finish of a day's tasks before lunch. Oh, how I learned to stretch three hours' work into eight hours of appearing a top-notch secretary!

An excerpt:

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

[...]

It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.

[...]

Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day [as a freelance writer], but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today. [...] I focused on his more general point that it shouldn’t matter whether I wrote these words in hours or days, at a desk or on a deck — the end result is all that counts.

“The old thinking says ‘the longer it takes, the harder you’re working,” says Lynne Lancaster, a founder of BridgeWorks, a business consulting firm. “The new thinking is ‘if I know the job inside and out and I’m done faster than everyone else then why can’t I go home early?’ ”

A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment.

There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.

In other words, what looks like wasting time from where you sit, could be a whirl of creative thought from where I sit. And, with due respect to Mr. Gilbreth, all the energy that’s been poured into trying to force everyone to work at the same pace and in the same way — it seems that’s the real waste of time.

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So there it is, folks. My problems in the past with, oh, waking up before 8am and whatnot weren't actually problems -- they were symptoms of my dazzling creativity being constrained by an outmoded work system! Yes!

I really do think this is awesome, though. If only the world could allow me to work when I wanted (between 2pm and midnight) and sleep when I wanted (between 2am and noon), not only would my productivity shoot up dramatically, I'd get to sleep longer, and the world would get a 10 hour work day out of me. How do you like that?

I wonder if I'll be able to find any night-owl clients interested in receiving their counseling sessions at 10pm...?