An infrequent occurrence – out for drinks on Friday night last week, meeting Dan’s colleagues and their partners/wives/girlfriends etc.
Some of the talk circled, unsurprisingly, around the web and other techy stuff. But I also got chatting to one of the women there about what it’s like not to work full time any more – and how we’re both finding surprising stresses in it.
You can boo me offstage at this point (panto metaphor appropriate at this time of year), but even changing to a 9-day fortnight has had more of an impact on me than I expected.
The person I was chatting to had reduced her working week too. We both felt better for it. But we also felt guilty, less in control at work than before, perhaps a little smug that alternative arrangements weren’t quite such a good replacement for us at full-time work.
One of my theories in this is that it’s partly a generational thing. At school, as a girl, you got encouragement to keep going if you did well.
But the image of keeping the home as well wasn’t out of the picture, maintaining a lot of the ‘knitting things together’ tasks that often fall to women. Even if you didn’t put yourself as part of the knitting brigade.
Somehow, the two of us realised, we keep looking for more ladders to climb, more things to do, being capable.  It’s a drug, doing well, being measured by others’ comments on our achievements.
Which is also a bit concerning in an era where more and more, pay is performance related. It’s not that that is such a bad thing per se. But it’s the constant increasing of required activity, in so many jobs, that makes it harder and harder to keep achieving at the same level.
So what happens if you do less – if you’re not there all the time? A sneaking suspicion that you’re not quite pulling your weight. An added pressure to ENJOY! when you are away from work – which can itself be a pressure, at the very time when you were meant to be reducing the pressure…
A few months ago, earlier on into the shift of working pattern, there was also a sudden realisation – that you can work fewer hours.
The world does not fall apart. Ye verily, there are even others around working fewer hours than me. There comes the smugness again – but also the the thrill and anxiety combined of doing less. And getting away with it.
Sometime I hope, there will come a middle ground, or at least less of a rush up and down the xylophone of opposing feelings. And less of a desire to check that this is still acceptable, permissable.
Which is needed, given that I will be trying out this working pattern at a particularly busy time of year, in another few weeks.
I’ve heard often enough of the injunction to be a human be-ing rather than a human do-ing. At least the wind-down in the year, with Christmas, suggests an opportunity to practise being for a while – if that isn’t too active a response.