Some days I feel like there are 30 hours in the day; the week has approximately a thousand. I'm no more taxed than your average working mother of a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old (less taxed, probably, given that it's 2017, not 1957, and the help I'm able to afford). But there are moments in the symphony that starts with the 5:34 A.M. wake-up wail, is punctuated by the pings and pops of endless electronic alerts throughout the day, and concludes with a 9:15 P.M. won't-go-down-whimper, where I'm just: Enough already, can't I pause time and get some quiet?

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Snooze-proof

So about a month ago, a headline caught my eye: "Sweden Sees Benefits of Six-hour Working Day in Trial for Care Workers." A six-hour workday meant a 30-hour workweek, approximately 970 hours shorter than my current psychic burden. In this two-year experiment, nurses at a retirement home replaced their eight-hour shifts with six-hour ones and kept their original salaries. Additional workers were hired to make up for the reduced coverage. It cost a lot, obviously, but the nurses (also obviously) reported greater well-being and took fewer sick days. "I used to be exhausted all the time," said one of the women in the trial, quoted in the Guardian. "But not now. I am much more alert; I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life."

If I worked just 30 hours a week at the job I happen to love, would the rest of it all feel a bit less like a grind? A lot of what contributes to the overwhelming onslaught of my daily life is the "work" of piling groceries in my FreshDirect cart, the remembering of doctors' appointments, and ensuring that my kids have properly sized shoes. That is to say: There's no containing the psychic expenditure of parenthood with a scaled-back 9 to 5.

But if I stopped answering emails at 6:10 A.M. when the baby has a bottle and at 9:30 when he's finally knocked himself out, would I not only focus better at work, but feel a bit more sanguine about the demands at home? Would I finally try SoulCycle? (There is one directly below my apartment. Never been.) Would I send the Christmas–New Year's presents that are nearing four weeks late? Would I cook the fucking cauliflower? (Two weeks and counting in the fridge.) Would the day just feel a bit less oppressively crunched?

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Two weeks and counting in the fridge

I told a friend who had been contemplating an abrupt professional adjustment about my intended trial and he looked at me with something like awe. "If I only worked 30 hours a week, I wouldn't have to quit my job to become a folk singer," he whispered. "I'd just do it."


MONDAY

I wake up and check my work email at 6 A.M. while brushing my teeth before remembering that the experiment has begun. It takes a willful effort not to open up the Mail app on the subway. Abstaining induces a vague sense of vertigo. Usually I'm at my desk by 9:15 or so; that day I plop into my swivel chair at 9:30 and read the news till 10. Not not-work, but also not usually something I indulge in at my desk. From 10 to 5 (with a one-hour break for lunch, a respite I don't think I've taken since I started this job), I'm a machine. All personal tabs on my browser are closed; I force myself to jot down personal "to-do's" in a separate column in my notebook when they cross my mind―they'll be tackled outside working hours.

By the end of the day, I'm invigorated. Although I arrive home only an hour earlier than usual, I'm proud of my short list of accomplishments:

  • I make a lasagna without causing fits of hysterics from hunger.
  • I check out some real estate online for a possible move.
  • I do a load of laundry, including a baby carrier that I am two years overdue on returning.

Success. I go to bed eager to see what will appear on the list the following day.

TUESDAY

Day 2 is stressful. I have my plan when the day begins: Rigorous separation of church and state (personal/werk) had forced me to focus my energies on the most pressing work issues on day 1. I was a light saber, or something similarly buzzing with focused energy. But somehow on Tuesday it fails. I have three meetings lined up back to back in the afternoon, and so that witching-hour efficiency that had propelled an afternoon inbox clearing dash was frittered away in aimless meetings.

That said, with the arbitrary but imposing limit placed on my shortening day, I plowed through about 4,000 words of editing in 45 minutes. Probably not my best work but definitely not my worst. At the end of that sprint it's 5:15, and I've already broken the six-hour rule. I feel so panicky at the prospect of confronting dozens of unread emails in the morning that I take another 15 minutes just to delete the junk, file away the important stuff, and flag the unread ones for the morning.

I do not make a lasagna.

WEDNESDAY

Cheat day. I remember something needs to go live at 8 A.M. and so I do some work at home. But having gotten this little head start on the pile of work waiting for me, I feel a little more at ease. I walk rather than drag my kid to preschool. We chatter about the windows of Anthropologie, where a cardboard tree is metastasizing little butterflies and flowers into the air, sprung by tiny wires―storybook fantasies on Fifth Avenue!

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This is the book I bought on my first IRL trip to a bookstore in recent memory

Despite the relative failure of Tuesday―what's the point of this experiment if it increases rather than decreases stress?―and the slip-up in my morning abstention, I feel optimistic on the way to work. Walking from the subway to the office, I run into a colleague and feel the need to hold her arm and blab, like when you're getting away with something and you can't help but let someone in on the secret.

I work through lunch (old habits die hard) but give myself a strict deadline of 4 P.M. But it's a tricky thing waltzing out of the office while sunshine is still glinting off the neighboring skyscrapers and all your colleagues are hunkered down amid the fluorescent glow of their monitors. I fiddle around on the internet for 30 minutes and then slink out at 4:30. It occurs to me that if I hustled somewhere and wasn't picky I could see a movie. (I saw a single film in the theater in 2016.) I saunter home and stop at a bookstore instead.

THURSDAY

The church-state separation has collapsed. We need a new apartment. My son needs a new speech therapist. The therapist needs forms from the Department of Ed. These things cannot be dealt with outside the 9 to 5, and as the border grows more permeable, I feel my strategy failing. Gliding between work-work and personal-life-work, I feel less pointed in all my actions.

It's a tricky thing waltzing out of the office while your colleagues are hunkered down amid the fluorescent glow of their monitors.

Still, I attempt to make up for my hundredth email to the NYC DOE by working through my lunch again. I'm out of the office a bit before 5. I stop at the post office―delightfully uncrowded!―and mail my brother his Christmas gift.

FRIDAY

On Fridays my team generally works from home and so it's not totally surprising that this is the day that I finally relax into this little experiment. I do my work. I'm focused, but not panicked. And perhaps most significantly, I'm not paranoid about the sense that someone is tallying my comings and goings. (The suspicion that mothers are judged more readily than fathers for their comings and goings in the workplace has sunk in, whether I like it or not.) After I finish for the day, I walk to the tailor to get a pair of pants hemmed that I've been meaning to alter for months. The sun is shining and I enjoy it.


Did I feel more balanced and relaxed as a result of this work diet? Yes and no. On the "good" days, I felt maximally efficient. But the trade-off was that I was less social than normal (and, sadly, as the only mom in my immediate work cohort, my schedule often make me the least gregarious of the bunch―spontaneous happy hour can't really happen when there's a sitter waiting at home). When a friend/colleague suggested coffee to talk over a piece, I almost declined the invite. My rigid time-management agenda had no room for niceties, or even elevator rides. (I went, okay, I'm a still a human; I just had to pause the clock.) And on the "bad" days, I felt more stress than usual; it didn't feel like I even had the space to pause and take a walk around the block.

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Don't get me wrong. Would I take a 30-hour workweek if it was offered to me? Sure. Dinner got made, the presents were sent, and the pants were hemmed―small tasks it's felt almost impossible to accomplish in my normal routine. But the lesson of my little experiment was not just that shorter hours lead to greater efficiency (duh) or that you're a more involved and nutritionally attentive parent when you have enough time and energy to explain window displays and confront the contents of your fridge (also duh). It was that work is as much a state of mind as anything else.

I asked Nikil Saval, the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, if he had any thoughts on my experiment and he pointed me toward a passage in C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951). "The office may be only a bundle of papers in a satchel in the back of somebody's car," Mills writes, "or it may be a block square, each floor a set of glass rabbit warrens, the whole a headquarters for a nation-wide organization of other offices, as well as plants and mines, and even farms." The point is: Work is where you make it, and work is where you take it (even half a century ago, this was apparently true).

At this moment in our economic and technological history, it can feel as though we're asked to make and take work everywhere, but that doesn't mean we have to. I don't think anyone really noticed my more relaxed comings and goings over the course of the week. I don't think, ultimately, any less work was accomplished. I may not be able to make the 30-hour workweek my de facto schedule, but I can resolve to stop a little more readily on the walk to preschool and admire the cardboard flowers.