Why we need freedom of time

Creative knowledge work is a mixture of high and low collaboration activities.

For some things we do, we benefit hugely from 'riffing' with others, building on each other's ideas, solving problems, debating, refining and using the wisdom and energy of the group to spark bigger things.

And for others, such as writing, editing, designing, imagining, analysing, and more — we benefit from blocks of focused time on our own. This is often called deep work.

We tend to use our freedom of place to go to quiet locations to do the deep work. But that often turns out not to be enough.

It can still be hard to focus, even working in your own home, while chat apps and emails and video calls are pinging for your attention — or even if you just feel people might be expecting your involvement, there might be something interesting happening, or you feel you ought to be seen to be present.

Yet, most remote/hybrid organisations still expect people to be available online between 9am and 5pm, and perhaps even in the office on set days of the week. They fill the days with video meetings, and expectations of live-chatting in the company chat app.

So there is no freedom of time in most remote/hybrid work. What matters to those organisations is the hours in which you are present, rather than how well you are able to work.

It is the traditional approach to office work, just spread across different places.

But life has moved on since the boom in corporate office work seemed to set office culture in stone at the start of the 20th century. Back then, people got married early, one partner stayed at home and sorted out everything in the family's personal life and the other went to the office and only needed to focus on work.

The 9-5 is a continued source of entrenched prejudices that harm individuals and hold us back as a society.

Nowadays, people have wildly different lives and multiple complex responsibilities. If work life doesn't adapt to reflect that, then it will become a growing source of imbalance and friction in our lives, and our society. Organisations will see (and already are seeing!) lower engagement, creativity and productivity as a result.

In modern life, any working individual may also have responsibilities for children, elderly relatives, sick relatives, their home, their community, and more. And on top of that it's important to have time for healthcare, sports, hobbies, continued education and self-care.

Everybody's lives and commitments are more complex, and differ wildly. So only they know best how to integrate their work into their life.

But the success of this integration is key to the engagement and productivity that organisations need. Enabling more deep work is vital to unleashing the latent creativity and productivity in our organisations.

In creative knowledge work people need to be able to do their deep work when they can best apply their focus and energy, and do their collaborative work when it best fits the schedules of those who need to collaborate.

The people should determine those times, rather than the organisation.

So in addition to freedom of place, we also need freedom of time.

The Free-Range Work manifesto says of freedom of time:

We are free to schedule our work to meet our commitments in a way that best uses our talent, energy and focus. What we achieve and the way we do it matter more than our working hours.

In future posts I'll set out how to make that work in practice.