HOW LONG DO I WORK?

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The heated debate on how many hours should one work in a week has gravitated the attention of many – the investors, the employers, the workers, the HR managers and most importantly, the story tellers who could weave several stories around the debate. I fondly recall the saying of Henry David Thoreau who said “It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” ?There are many organs in the body who work relentlessly on autopilot – the heart, the brain, and several other systems without taking any visible cognition of the concept of time., though the impacts are felt. But when it comes to human life, we are the articulates of our mind. The thoughts generated prepares caricatures of concepts that imprison, condition, direct, motivate and lead us to some dynamic, which we measure using the concept of time. Several philosophers do argue about ‘The myth of Time” and how this ‘perception’ creates emotions including happiness, pain, and conflicts.

Decades ago, I was an invitee to a corporate conference held by the HR departments of a few companies. In one of the brain-storming sessions, the topic given for discussion was “After forty what?” The topic cantered around the tendency of persons who get recruited into corporate jobs in early or mid-twenties, and who work under pressure day in and day out for years. They are not sensitive to the rain and shine, and they are immersed in their ‘work.’ They live in adorable cabins isolated from life. They seek promotions, benefits, bonus, and privileges chasing numbers and defining their growth in terms of their targets. Finally, one day they face a question in their mind “Have I missed anything in life?” There they listen to the whisper of someone from their heart telling them “Hey, you have missed your whole life chasing your numbers. All that you have destroyed is the gift of time.” They forgot to read the words of Geoffrey Chaucer “Time and tide wait for no man.”

The concept of time does not exist either for the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom in the format that we celebrate, though they are sensitive to the changes that are captured by us to define time. They also engage in work, but not for a ‘gainful purpose’ as conceived by the Homosapiens. The term ‘work’ has, in the recent years, been capsuled into some deliverable formats for bartering, trade and engagement of human services.?

Work cannot be constrained to the expectations of others because every work has two different dimensions – what is delivered and what is conceived, experienced, and pursued. There are several types of work which are driven by passion, curiosity, admiration, and a few of those which happen seeking alignment with a larger purpose of life. Many of them neither seek compensation nor are celebrated by the time put in to give them the structure and format in which they exist. Says Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine novelist, “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” The depth and insight of these words do convey how we are avatars of our time! To imprison the self into hours of work we do is a limiting value we propose to ourselves. A productive failure is as much a work as a 'remarkable success.'

Several facets of our life make it complete – the personal life, the emotional life, the social life, the professional life, and the spiritual life. Any attempt to define who we are by our professional life, the standards set in for them, the achievements made therein, alone do not define the completeness of our life. Nor is there any guarantee that such achievements are certainly going to contribute to other dimensions. “Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people” says Virginia Wolf. There is more to life than mere professional work. A pickle does not make a full course in a meal.

Going for a morning walk, refreshing over a cup of coffee, chatting with my wife on a dining table, playing cricket with my children, taking a tour of the places I love and sitting idle on the banks of a lake are as much relevant and important to me as essential parts of my work, as my struggle with a design on my computer using Artificial Intelligence. From weeks to days, days to hours, hours to minutes, minutes to nano-seconds- the measurement of the input-output ration could make me a better Quantum Computer but will rob me from life. "You’ve got to keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life" says Warren Buffett

To the question “where do we draw the line? Where lies the balance?” there may be multiple answers. These answers are born out of the individual’s socio-cultural environment, the geo-political compulsions, personal choices, and the influences that drive them from influencers around them who work either with a purpose or without it.

The joy of work is timeless and priceless. Tools for achievement, tools of judgments and scales to define their mean, mode and standard deviation do not qualify either the quality or the limitless joy in engagement. Though many may not agree to the proverb “work is worship,” I strongly endorse the advocacy of work as conveyed in Bhagavad Gita “Yogaha Karmasu Kaushalam” – ‘Excellence in action is yoga.”

How long should I work? – Leave it to me. I will make my decision.