And that's the most important part. I am vacationing from the routine.
Seeing how much relaxation this offers, how much a difference in thinking and feeling, I can't help but wish there were more alternatives in the routine.
I would love some alternatives to being to work. We have a very narrow telework policy. One that keeps you at home, so there's no possibility of working from the library or a coffee shop. There is more than one slot of hours that work could happen or some flexibility in week schedules. There are, again, narrow policies allowing these. But they're set to take hours away from employees, rather than improve work-life balance.
Of course, this gets to not be a routine pretty quick, but I'd make due.
It gets broader than that, though. Just getting to work has only one alternative. There's only one parking lot. There's only one door to go through. There's only a handful of places to get lunch. There's only a couple of places to go during lunch hour.
These are structural things. So often, we focus on the "mix" of amenities. Simple alternatives are an amenity too. The ability to break the routine without blowing up the routine. I still want coffee, but there's only one place on my one route to get to work.
But we skip on making sure there are backups should the initial mix fail. A friend asked if he should buy a condo in a particular neighborhood. It's an up-and-coming place, one with a history of being bad, but now hosts a cluster of nice shops and a movie theater. All of which are in the same complex, owned by the same group. I said he should think hard about the purchase. It has a lot of upside, but it's a monoculture. There is no redundancy to catch a mistake.
So, my vacation from the office is not about simply being out of the office. (It's a nice perk, tho). It's about being out of my routine and away from the bland vanilla of the workplace. It might be easier to get back to the workplace if it didn't come with so much extra weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment