Could the UK manage a four-day working week?

I took a personal decision about 18 months ago to address my work/life balance and condense my full time, five day a week hours into full time, four days a week. This means longer days Monday to Thursday, but I have Fridays off. It has been revolutionary. I am grateful to my boss and employer who agreed that I could do this.

I read recently that Iceland (the country not the frozen food shop) had been experimenting with workers being paid the same amount but only working four days https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57724779 Other trials had been taking place in parts of Spain and in some companies in New Zealand. The Icelandic trial workforce, based within a range of preschools, offices, hospitals and social care providers reduced their hours from 40 hours per week to 35 or 36 hours per week. Now approximately 86% of the Icelandic workforce works a shorter week for the same pay.

The benefits of the trial showed that workers felt less stressed and therefore at less risk of burnout, and their work/life balance improved. Workers felt healthier and moral and atmosphere in the workplace improved. The director of research said the study showed an overwhelming success with workers being just as productive in four days as they would have been in five, and that the public sector was ready for a step change.

I can certainly attest to feeling much less stressed knowing that I have Fridays off and that I can fit other parts of my life in more easily. If we choose to go out, or visit our daughter or other family members, or just take some time to relax. We can still get everything we need to get done over the course of the weekend but in less of a rush. Even chores seem less stressful because we don’t have to rush to get them done so that we can have some down time.

According to https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/time-four-day-week-has-arrived/ the UK has one of the longest working weeks across Europe. There is a group in the UK who are trying to get the government to move to a four-day week for the benefits outlined above, but also it thinks that it would reduce overall carbon footprint. I think that it is now really possible to consider this given that we can work from home and use technology differently to do a lot of jobs. I just wonder whether some employers would down grade jobs as they may not be able to sustain the same costs with lower output. For public sector roles most of the money required to pay salaries comes back in the form of income tax and national insurance contributions, so the overall cost to employers would be relatively low even if they did have to employ more staff to cover any shortfall.

Whereas I still work the same hours but condensed into four days, this means I get the same pay, the same annual leave and bank holiday entitlement, as its all calculated on the number of hours you work, not the number of days, or the days of the week you work. I don’t mind doing slightly longer days, as I was generally doing those hours anyway before but just not getting paid for them.

I would certainly recommend a four day week to anyone that can.

Staring at a screen too long

With meetings, #bellringing, family gatherings, talks, plus the usual social media, emails, work etc, I find that I’m currently spending roughly 12 hours a day staring at a screen. Small wonder my eyes are dried out at the end of the evening.

I work a 9.5hr day Monday to Friday and most evenings am either on a Zoom meeting, or a virtual #bellringing session. On my non-working day I have, one, sometimes two virtual #bellringing sessions and more often than not a meeting in the afternoon on Zoom as well. Then every other Sunday there’s the family Skype gathering.

Apparently, there’s a name for it now ‘digital eye strain’ or ‘computer vision syndrome’. However, help it at hand with some top tips on how to reduce eye strain from All About Vision:

Get an eye test and tell the optician how much time you spend on the computer or devices.
Reduce excessive bright light. Close blinds or curtains, use lower intensity light bulbs, and position the computer so that windows are at the side, not in front or behind.
Consider an anti-glare screen for your monitor and have a more muted coloured wall to reduce glare from reflective surfaces.
Upgrade your monitor with a flat-panel LED screen in anti-reflective surface.
Adjust the brightness, text size and contrast, colour temperature or your screen.
Blink. When staring at a screen, people blink less frequently — only about one-third as often as they normally do. Blinking moistens your eyes to prevent dryness and irritation.
Exercise your eyes by frequently looking away from the screen at a distant object and focus on it for at least 20 seconds.
Take frequent breaks to help reduce neck, shoulder and back pain. Get up and move around for 10 minutes every hour.
Modify your workstation. Check your posture and ensure that your chair is the right height with your feet comfortably on the floor. Make sure that your screen is 20-24 inches away from your eyes with the centre of the screen 10-15 degrees below your eye level.
Consider computer glasses. Customised glasses which photochromic lenses.

I am conscious that my eyes are tired at the end of the day, and that I do probably need to get up and move about a bit more.

Maybe I will also try a digital detox day as well. A day without any screen time at all. Hmmmm!

Lost and found

You know when you know you have something, and you know where you last saw/used it, but for the life of you can’t find it when you need it next? That was me and a set of colouring pens.

Now, we’re not talking anything deep and philosophical or anything like that. We’re talking a set of colouring pens that I wanted, because I wanted to use a different colour, other than blue or black biro, to mark something off so that it was more visible.

I’ve had a set of colouring pens for ages, and I kept them with the squared paper that I used to write out #bellringing methods when I was learning something new. Every bell was assigned its own colour and I would draw out each lead end so I could see when a different place bell started. I’ve kind of moved on from doing that so much these days and use other methods for learning new methods that seem to work.

The pens however, were last seen with the squared paper, on the pile of books and magazines that are in the cubby hole to the left of where I sit on the sofa. That’s where they’ve always been and had no need to be moved anywhere else.

I have a nice new set up in our study with a new desk, chair, my laptop set up and my Holhem gimble ready and poised, and a nice shiny new stationery holder. The stationery holder currently has my post it notes, my favourite couple of writing pens, a calculator, my business card holder safely ensconced. There’s any empty slot shouting out for something to fill it. The colouring pens would do marvellously, and then they would be at hand for me to mark off things on my events calendar. But where the heck are they?

Having decided to look for said colouring pens two minutes before a video conference meeting was due to start, and not finding them instantly, I sat wondering for a while as the attendees for the meeting arrived. Hmmmph!

Meeting over, I then had several actions as a result and some other things to immediately attend to, so the search for the illusive colouring pens dropped out of my mind for a while. Then I went to sit down in my spot on the sofa and suddenly remembered that I had a mission to accomplish. Find those ruddy colouring pens. They’ve got to be there somewhere.

Books and magazines start to get launched out of the way. They can’t be far. They shouldn’t be anywhere else. They shouldn’t be this far down the heap. After a full on three minutes of frustration, I flopped back in my sofa seat. Grrrr. Where are those blasted pens?

Oh, hang on. There’s a couple of books in the pile that have fallen over. I’ll just put them upright again. Oh, and hallelujah! There are the prodigal pens. Hiding in the blackness of under the small coffee table that nestles amongst all these books and magazines. Hoorah!

I happily skip (well, more like lumber) off back to the study, tip the pens out of their zipped, plastic casing and decide upon which colour to use as my marker. Then, rather satisfyingly, plop them all into the waiting vacant slot in my stationery holder. Having used the red pen to mark off my events calendar, I add that to the collection, then sit back to admire my handy work.

The simple pleasures!

The Unfamiliar Familiar

Today was my first day back on the hospital site for 3 weeks. I was a little apprehensive about it I’ll be honest. Not particularly about being back at work after a week’s annual leave, but being on site, where there are people, lots of people and patients, lots of patients. I think I was more apprehensive about that than the fact that I actually had to go and sit in my old office to cover for my number two whilst she’s on annual leave, which meant being back with the team that I moved on from just over a month ago.

I went straight to my old office, and set up my laptop and settled back into the smells and sounds that are along that corridor. Then I went in to the main office where everyone else is and said hello. There were a few comments like “where have you been?” but some nice enquiries about how I was getting on in my secondment role. I asked after each of them and how they were getting on generally, and explained that I’d been sitting in my old office for a couple of days whilst V was on annual leave, so if there was anything they needed, to just shout. To be honest, they know what they are doing and are quite capable of getting on with it but every now and then someone throws a curve ball that puts things out of kilter so I was just here to make sure that they were ok. They don’t need me, and that’s fine.

I had occasion to walk through the hospital site where nothing much seemed to have changed since I was last here. Although there was the vaccine hub outside and new tented waiting area. There were fewer people wandering around, only people that absolutely should be here are being allowed in the front door.

At lunchtime I went for what used to be my usual walk around the perimetre of the hospital site. Sometimes that walk became a bit of a chore, doing it because I felt I ought to do some exercise, but also rather boring as you can’t go very far in half an hour. Today, it almost seemed like a brand new walk. The season has been marching on and buds are starting to sprout as the first throws of spring are imminent.

The sights and sounds of a busy hospital go on, with or without you. It was quite reassuring that there was some familiarity about it, even if it did feel a bit odd being here.

Surround sound

How often do we get an opportunity to just sit and listen, I mean REALLY listen to the sounds around us?

Both C and I were sat out our respective desks in the study, going about our business when it suddenly hit my ears there there was silence. Neither of us were speaking. At the time neither of us was hammering our keyboards or frantically clicking a mouse. But then I noticed the non-silence which actually became quite loud.

I could hear the birds twittering in the back garden, as clear as a bell. The hum from the fan on C’s PC, continual hum. The wall clock ticking, so loudly too that it beggers belief that sometimes you barely notice it at all. There was an occasional mouse click as one or other of us scrolled up whatever it was we were reading on the screen. There was a throat clearing after a glug of water. There was a chair squeaking under the pressure of shifting weight. There was an airplane outside on its way to, or from, who knows where. There was pen scratching on paper as I was making notes. There was a belly rumble and an over emphasised exhalation.

Within the space of somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes there were all these sounds surrounding me, but there was silence. Peaceful, gratifying, restorative. All of these amazing sounds that I might have missed had the radio in the kitchen been on, or had I been hammering away at documents or emails, or people talking.

Silence can provide us with so many benefits if we choose to allow them into our lives.

It can allow us to concentrate and focus, which apparently can be lost if the sound is over 80 decibels. Obviously the writer of that point has never been to a #bellringing practice where concentration is required despite the noise of the bells.

It can allow our minds to be more creative. Some eminent scientists did their best creative work after a period of solitude and quietness.

It can allow us to discover how we may improve our lives when attention is given to self awareness practices. Taking time to self reflect can help figure out what and where we want to be.

It can help relax us and reduce stress levels if we allow a period of silence.

It can affect our ability to learn. The more noise we are exposed to the worse we perform and find it harder to concentrate.

Doing nothing and remaining silent can increase productivity of new brain cells, which in turn supports greater productivity as much as tenfold.

Silence can help cultivate calmness and peacefulness when you regularly practice silence and patience.

If you are able to, I invite you to sit somewhere comfortable and just be silent for even just a few moments. Make a note of all the things that you can hear in the silence. You’ll be surprised how much surround sound there is.

Getting back to it

We have almost got to the end of all the Christmas food and hampers that we were sent. Friday is weigh in day for me so when I got on the scales for the first time of 2021 I knew that I wasn’t going to like what they told me.

My problem is that I don’t like fruit, of any kind, and I’m not a massive fan of very many types of veg or salad. And who wants salad in winter anyway, right? And I have a sweet tooth. So how on earth am I going to diet? Oh, and I have a desk job and am fundamentally lazy so any kind of exertion is unlikely.

We do kind of follow Slimming World as far as evening meals go, and I do try with breakfasts and lunches too but I’m not very good at counting syns and limiting treats. Quite frankly life, particularly at the moment, is too short.

I’m sure I’ve said it before about understanding the benefits of a healthier lifestyle but why is it easier to get into a habit of bacon rolls for breakfast on a Saturday than it is to eat salad and exercise?

One good reason for not exercising is that I just don’t enjoy it. I certainly don’t like the prospect of group exercise or jumpy about videos. I’ve tried do it yourself yoga and home workouts but they just don’t make me feel any better.

When I was in my early 20s I had a Jane Fonda workout video that I used to do at about 5am before getting on a train to work. I did actually enjoy that and felt energised (ok, I was 30 years younger and 5 stone lighter then which probably helped). Sadly I lent that video to someone and never got it back. I’ve tried looking online to see if it could be reproduced but couldn’t find the right one.

I do try to get out for a walk every day, but now I’m only clocking up an average of 5,000 steps per day. I don’t have to walk to the car anymore or around the site, which all helped clock up some mileage, but my commute only goes from the lounge to the study.

I did start hula hooping during the summer which was fine when I could do it outside but when the weather turned and it started getting darker, it was less tempting and we don’t really have enough space indoors.

I guess like a lot of things its all about determination. If I’m going to do something about my weight and health I really must make more time and effort.

Password Reset

Again, things came in pairs today.

I’m working from home at the moment and have a work laptop. For the last few days its been pinging me a reminder that I’ll need to reset my login password soon. It even counts down the days until the current password expires and suggests that you could do it earlier if you want to.

Why oh why then, was I completely annoyed when this morning I was asked to enter a new password and had to think of a new one. I’ve had a week to think of one. And it’s always when you want to get on with something, so it throws you off your train of thought. And then, the only ones that you think you’ll remember are ones you’ve had before that the system won’t allow you to use again. And it has to be a minimum number of characters, contain at least one number and one non-alphanumeric character. And they still expect you to be able to remember it without writing it down.

And that’s just the front log in screen. Everything you want to access in a different system also requires a password. But with a different number minimum character length, so you can’t use the same one. Then it’ll tell you that’s its too similar to previous passwords so think of another.

Then there’s the system that requires you to enter a new password, but then its going to send you a new verification code so you can’t access the system until you’ve had that email. And that email may take 24 hours to get to you.

This was the second password reset request of the day.

I need to get into this stuff to be able to get on with work. I understand the need to ensure everything is secure but surely once you’re in the main front door system, you should be allowed to access everything within it without the need for 27 different sets of log on details.

Favourite corner #2

This is my next favourite corner of the house. Its in the new office space set up in the study where I can work from home.

Its not my favourite corner because it means I can work from home, but because the photos that were put on to canvas were taken by daughter before she really knew what she was doing with a camera. She went on to study photography at university.

I used to have these on the wall in my office at work but since I don’t currently have an office to myself, and I’m not always there, I didn’t want them getting lost or taken by someone else. I thought they would make something lovely to look at whilst I am working from home and after some inspiration. They also remind me of my favourite person.

If you Google “good things about corners,” you get a plethora of ideas about how to decorate awkward or empty corners, or design ideas for corner shelves. You also get quotes about turning a corner and such like.

I’m not sure that I’ll manage 10 interesting corners in my house as most of them are full of stuff and either untidy or uninteresting. I might have one more before I might have to move on to the next 50 by 50 thing.

2020 Review of the Year

OK, so let’s join the band wagon of a review of the last year. After all, its been a very different kind of year. Every aspect of every part of life has been impacted one way or another.

Career – started the year thinking it was going to be another year of same old, same old. For the first 3 months that’s exactly how it was. When covid hit it put a lot of things into perspective and I made a decision that, to be honest, had been brewing a while. An opportunity came along to get back into project management, albeit on a secondment. I had to take it for my own sanity. Even though I didn’t start in the new role until December, the thought of it being there was enough to see me through some really horrible months.

Ringing – various ups and downs along the way. Normal routine of Sunday service, monthly quarter peals and weekly practices turned into nothing at all, then maybe 5 people of a Sunday but no practices, then down to just the 2 of us. It looked like we could have gone back up to 5 again for Christmas Day but at the last minute it was not to be. At first I didn’t want to embrace the virtual world of #bellringing. It just didn’t seem worth it. But by May I was running my own weekly practice for family and friends, joining in the odd other online practice and starting to run a monthly district practice and organise a monthly 10 bell practice. Taking full advantage of ringing methods that I wouldn’t normally get to ring in a tower.

Home life – I suppose this is where its hit hardest. We haven’t been able to gather as a family for all the usual events. Mum’s 80th birthday, the May “counting”, R’s birthday, Dad’s birthday. No holiday, no ringing weekends. No visits to North Lincolnshire or Hemel Hempstead or Nottingham. No Cake International Show. We did manage to get a couple of day trips to see R when we were all allowed to mix in small groups again but towards the end of the year it became impossible again. We did set up a regular fortnightly family Skype so we could all keep in touch and at least see each other on a screen if not in person.And of course Christmas was very different. No car boot present swap, no drinking Baileys with R. Just a low key day with C, and chatting with family on Skype.

Cakes – as we haven’t had the usual gathering I’ve not needed to bake as many cakes. I did make a small one for mum’s 80th, a friends 60th and Dad’s birthday, but they only needed to be small ones. I have tried some other bakes instead and been mostly up to date with my BakedIn boxes. I’ve tried a few other recipes too, and did manage to get to a socially distanced class with my favourite teacher at @thecupcakeoven to learn how to make cakecicles and heart gems. I didn’t need to make a Christmas cake as we’re not massive fans of it and we got so much food in the hampers that people sent us. I’m hoping that there’ll be more opportunity for cake in 2021.

I suppose I’m quite fortunately really in that I’ve still been able to go to work and keep some semblance of routine. I’m reasonably tech savvy so have been able to embrace video conferencing and Ringing Room. And of course, the most important bit is that I have managed to stay healthy, as has the rest of the family.

Nothing is going to dramatically change as the clock strikes midnight and a new year starts. But there is hope on the horizon. My colleagues are going through an incredibly tough time and are on their knees trying to keep everyone else healthy but with little support and those idiots that flout the rules and put everyone else at risk. But I do have a sense that we will come out of this the other side. Things will be different and we won’t go back to the way things were, or at least I hope not. We have proven that we can work and play differently.

A strange day

With the excitement of starting a new role next week, and a long weekend away in between, today was a very strange day indeed.

Because the move to the new role has been swift, the opportunity to hand over things, finish things off and so on has been very short. Not least having the chance to tell my team about it.

The day has been spent trying to wrap up loose ends and get things to a sensible state for someone else to pick up and finish. The other things I need to sort out is moving desks. There are some things I can take home that I won’t be able to utilise in my new office space, but there are other things that I will need to take across, and some that I don’t need to take with me.

The plan is to come back to this office on Tuesday, after my weekend off, to pick the bits that I will need, then walk them over the other side of the site to where I will base myself. I also have the option to be able to work from home, so I may start doing that a couple of days a week too.

I suppose I’m not technically leaving the team as its only a secondment, so there’s been no “leaving do”. I’ve spoken to my team leaders and sent a message round to the team as I didn’t get to see and speak to everyone. I will get to see them from time to time so I guess its not a case of walking away.

At least I have a nice long weekend, Thursday to Monday inclusive, to be able to switch brain ready to hit my new role next week.