This is part of a series shared ecumenically with members to whom I was assigned; the goal was to start conversation and deep thought, and many of these messages led to great conversations.
Love Your Workday
Original Publication Date: 5 October 2020
What does your optimal workday look like? Set hours? Lunch break? Feeling of accomplishment at the end of day? No surprises? Lots of variety?
Some of us thrive at work and some of us just watch the clock until it’s time to go home. But what we all have in common—especially in the military—are those crazy days that require a non-standard work day to accomplish the mission. When that happens, we have two options:
Intensity – This is where you’re coming up on an immoveable deadline and your blood pressure is up, your focus is on the task at hand, and there is no room for breaks or breaths. On the flightline we used to call this “pinging” and it’s not a nice condition to be in. The likelihood of mistakes and oversights escalates significantly, and while you might feel like you’re getting more done, the quality of the work is almost certainly diminished.
Extension – This is where your deadline is coming up, but it’s flexible, so you work longer hours or weekends to accomplish the mission. I had the privilege many years ago of working three 16-hour days straight because the entire F-15(C, D, & E) fleet was grounded until every aircraft was inspected world-wide. Because of the gravity of the situation no-one complained about those long hours. But I’ve also faced the opposite where we were working 12-hour shifts for no discernable reason, and no-one was happy about those long hours.
The RAND Corporation, an organization that has a relationship with the Air Force as old as the Air Force, has done studies where they’ve found that when employees are expected to work longer than 9-hour shifts both the employer and the employee suffer. Productivity goes down, health is impacted, quality of life is diminished, and morale suffers when hours are increased without an emergency mission correlation.
The healthy response is to decide that when you’re at work, you’re all in, and when you go home, you leave work at work. I tested this on the flightline—because otherwise it’s just studies and statistics—and I promised my team that if they gave me 9-hours of hard, quality work, I would watch them walk out the door not a minute after their 9-hour mark. I’m obviously biased, but I believe my team worked circles around other teams that were staying to their 12-hour marks. In fact, we were the first flightline team at Tyndall to ever be nominated for the CSAF Team Excellence Award, and we did this without pinging or exhausting ourselves.
So as I wish you a happy new fiscal year, I want to encourage you to make some resolutions about taking care of your people and working hard for your bosses, but also that you won’t substitute a last minute sprint for what should have been a marathon, and that you won’t see extending the workday as a viable option to getting more work done. Sometimes that extension is inevitable, but make the resolution that it will only be when the mission is legitimately at stake and everyone impacted can see it.
And, as always, if you’re not sure how this looks, or how to accomplish it, or you hate your job, then this would be a great thing to talk to your chaplain about, because that’s what I love!
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. ~ Aristotle
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