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The Curse of Work?

I overheard someone grumbling at a gas station about the curse of work this morning. It caught me off guard. It brought me back to some the earliest practical theology that stuck with me.

Work came before the fall.

It’s both simple and resounding. Adam had to work in the Garden. This was deemed good. To cultivate, to dominate, to steward. These were tasks for mankind in the perfect, good Creation before sin entered the world.

This is why idle hands get men into trouble. We were not designed to do nothing. It’s why you hear so many say they cannot vacation well. They want to be doing things. I am one of those people. Too long away from working and I start to get anxious. Yes, reading a good book is great, a taking a day by the beach can be relaxing, a week driving around the mountains to mesmerizing, and a week at a music festival charges up the batteries, but…

I was made to work.

I wake up early, usually between 4 and 5am, and work on side projects— like the new mandolin I just started— to get by brain ready for the day. A work friend jokingly said that once the kids move out I’d likely start sleeping in and I responded that I’d still be getting up early and going into the shop to build things.

If I didn’t have my day job as an engineer I would be building other things, whether apps or wooden things. Simply, I could never go more than a week or two without productively doing things.

If you treat work as a part of the curse, that is where your bar will be. If you reset your heart to seeing that work was created by God, you can start to see the importance of your role in the world, even if lowly, and start to bring glory to God in one of the most substantial parts of your life.

Work Can Wait

We believe Work Can Wait is an important notion. 9pm on Friday night is not work time. 6am on Wednesday morning is not work time. It may be for you, but it’s not for me. And I don’t want it to be work time for my employees either.

Every user on Basecamp 3 starts with a default work time from 8am to 6pm in their own time zone. People are free to change it, of course, but we think it’s important to encourage Work Can Wait rather than default everyone’s notifications on 24/7/365.

We hope more products offer similar abilities to shut themselves off when work is over. “You can get ahold of me about work whenever” will eventually lead to “I don’t want to work here anymore”.

Here’s to early mornings, evenings, and weekends being free from work. Work Can Wait.

Jason Fried

Good Lord. This has been one of my biggest greivances with our culture over the last decade. From my second job chewing me out for not bringing a laptop and an Internet connect with me to a Christmas party while on vacation, to a young gal at my job at a start-up chewing me out for not receiving email over the weekend about a meeting at 7am on a Monday being cancelled. I don’t set up company email on my phone or iPad. If I’m not working, I’m not available.

Unfortunately, software has encouraged this practice of always being on. Over the weekend I had to silence Slack notifications because I was receiving notifications on a Saturday while preparing for one of my best friend’s weddings. While I am working, I want these notifications, but not when I’m with friends and family. Now Basecamp is going to support this. Let’s hope this becomes a trend.

The fact that employees are now always reachable eliminates what was once a natural barrier of sorts, the idea that work was something that happened during office hours or at the physical office. With no limits, work becomes like a football game where the whistle is never blown.

New Yorker