(Actually, it’s Wednesday. But I am in love with Fridays. To wit:)
One of the things I love about the company I work for is that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, we get Friday afternoons off. Now, I’ve worked at other places where we had “summer hours”; they’re the norm in the publishing world, and even my last job, at the happy factory, offered some version of them. They always involved a tradeoff, though—we had to work extra hours the rest of the week to earn those four free hours on Friday. At my publishing job in Mpls., we weren’t supposed to shorten our lunch hours as a way of extending our Monday-Thursday workday, so I’d drag myself in at some ungodly hour like 7 a.m. and then stumble home exhausted on Friday afternoons, unable to do anything with those free hours except nap. Eventually I decided I preferred working normal hours during the rest of the week, and I gave up on summer hours (and then I got promoted to editorial director, and was way too busy to take whole afternoons off anyway…but I digress).
Here, though, there are no strings attached; we simply get Friday afternoons off in the summer. Of course, if you’re wrapped up in some big project or your client calls a meeting on Friday afternoon, you stay and work, but the message from The Powers That Be is clear: if you can, go home at lunchtime on Friday. They lock the doors and switch the phones over to voicemail, and the office is officially closed. Last summer, I was only able to take every third Friday or so, which was okay; I appreciated the ones I could take. This year, though, I’ve been in between projects and picking up little fillers for most of the summer, so I was able to go home early nearly every Friday that I was in town.
So the news we got yesterday was fairly fabulous: TPTB have decided to extend summer Fridays through the end of the year (or rather, through Christmas, since we close between Christmas and New Year’s, which is also fabulous). In addition to being delighted by this news, I’m feeling a little bit chastened as a result of it, like I’m obligated to Do Something with my Fridays instead of just wasting them the way I usually do. I confess that—probably due to its having been a pretty blah summer—I have once again spent most of my summer Friday afternoons napping.
(I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about my fondness for being asleep and what it means, and it’s been bothering me for the first time ever. Usually, I treat naps as a necessary part of dealing with day-to-day life as a depressive: existence is tiring stuff for me, and so I’ve tended to let myself off the hook for taking frequent breaks from it. But I don’t know, I’ve started to think that I shouldn’t coddle myself so much. It can’t be a good thing that unconsciousness is my preferred state so much of the time. And on a practical level, my frequent inability/unwillingness to do much of anything except sleeping all day on Saturday has gotten to be sort of a pain, because it means that I have to cram a weekend’s worth of chores and errands into Sunday, which generally means that most of them don’t get done at all. But just thinking about all of this makes me tired.)
So I’m entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, I should plan some sort of structured activity for my fall Fridays. I’m considering using that time to actually read all the information architecture books that I bought when I was preparing for a career switch; I’ve read the polar bear book and JJG’s book cover to cover, but the rest of them I’ve either skimmed or, in one or two cases, just barely glanced at, almost as though merely owning them was enough to improve my qualifications as an IA. I can never find time or atmosphere or, really, justification for reading them at work, so going through them on Friday afternoons might be a good solution. On the other hand, reading can be done in bed, and that usually leads to naps, so maybe I need to find an activity that’s a little less passive. I could set the time aside for going to the gym at a nice uncrowded time of day, and it would be great if I could be sure that I would actually go, but that’s far from a safe bet. Or maybe I should use the time to knit, which is a) realistic and b) sufficiently relaxing and c) might mean that I’d actually finish a project sometime soon.
But maybe there’s some perfect Friday afternoon activity that I’m just not thinking of. Anyone got any ideas for me?