What's your ideal work schedule?

[Kestra]

Assuming you want to, or have to work? Short term, like daily hours, or long term, like how many years? Answer however you want.

For years, I used to plan to work hard full time, lots of OT and then just retire completely. But the idea of less work, but for more years, and a better interim life kept cropping up. Eventually I had to go with that. Life is too short and unpredictable to spend it all working.

For hours, since I've been working for myself I've settled into a routine of 4-5 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. Eight hour days are really hard when there are so many other fun things to do. And I don't enjoy "weekends" if I don't have enough stuff going on. My work is my hobby for the most part, so not doing it makes me cranky. I like moderation in most of my life.

[Ultralight]

Wake up, enjoy a home-cooked breakfast, go fishing, come home and clean the fish. Shower, have some lunch, take the dog on a walk for an hour or so, do a little gardening, read a good book, visit with some friends, maybe have dinner with them or just something simple at home, then go fishing again in the evening. Come home, clean the rest of the fish. Shower again. Relax for a while in the evening and listen to some music. Go to sleep.

[ApatheticNoMore]

A 20 to 30 hour a week job with a short commute. I see absolutely no conceivable way to make it happen so I must regard it as about as useful a question as "what would the ideal government be" or "what if you could date any movie actor", yea I don't think I have to worry about that in reality though. But in an ideal world we'd have a shorter work week.

I think I will always have a job schedule I hate with all my being. Corporate America really wasn't ok with me working part-time and I probably lost a job for it (I worked 30, I had benefits, like health insurance). I took a pay cut to work part time, I didn't care. But of course it has accustomed me to taking jobs where I make very little (to being used and underpaid at this point, if I make very little and don't even work part-time - as I can live on it). I would probably rather work less hours every day even if it meant I worked Saturdays though, but only if the commute was short, of course that's not on offer either. What a world, where you can have anything you want of things you don't want, but not one of the few things you do - more leisure time now.

[iris lilies]

Seasonal and part time. I might still be working if I could work November through Februaryy, half time, with some occasional hours of my choice in March, August, sept, October.

during April through july the lilies and iris must be serviced.

[razz]

Seasonal and part time.

during April through july the lilies and iris must be serviced.:~) One has to have priorities, of course.

[oldhat]

My ideal work schedule has changed over the years...often, of course, I've been constrained by someone else's schedule (when I was working at a regular job). When I was in grad school writing my dissertation and could set my own hours, I tended to sleep late, go to my carrel in the library late in the morning, work until mid-afternoon, go home, relax and eat dinner, and then go back to the library and work until 10 or 11. But that was 25 years ago.

Now, my most productive time is undoubtedly in the morning. my job hours are 9-5, but I get up early so I can do some things that are more important to me than my job, like learning Spanish, stretching exercises and meditation, playing guitar scales, and going to the gym before I have to be in the office. So I'd have to say that at this point in my life, my ideal work day would probably be 7 or 8 in the morning until lunchtime.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Noone really works 9-5 do they? Because lunch is required (oh it's required legally unless exempt), so it's really 9-5:30 or 8:30-5 or or 9-6 if you take an hour rather than 1/2 hour lunch, to get 40 hours. 9-5 is a saying I know, but if we literally worked that we'd all be working 35 hour weeks like the French or something.

[Kestra]

Noone really works 9-5 do they? Because lunch is required (oh it's required legally unless exempt), so it's really 9-5:30 or 8:30-5 or or 9-6 if you take an hour rather than 1/2 hour lunch, to get 40 hours. 9-5 is a saying I know, but if we literally worked that we'd all be working 35 hour weeks like the French or something.

Some people do. My last job had full time as 35 hours, with 1 hour lunch, and recently switched to 37.5 with half hour lunch. Lots of government type jobs in Canada are like this, though my job wasn't government. But yes, I agree, it's not that usual.

[oldhat]

Noone really works 9-5 do they? Because lunch is required (oh it's required legally unless exempt), so it's really 9-5:30 or 8:30-5 or or 9-6 if you take an hour rather than 1/2 hour lunch, to get 40 hours. 9-5 is a saying I know, but if we literally worked that we'd all be working 35 hour weeks like the French or something.

I think the amount of time you actually work, and how hard, is very dependent on the work environment you find yourself in. One of the things I like about my job, and one of the reasons I've stayed as long as I have, is that I basically do have a 35-hour week--I come in at 9 and leave at 5, with rare exceptions.

Furthermore, I think it's safe to say that I probably do about 20 hours of actual work in a typical week. I am not alone in this; there have been plenty of studies showing that in corporate environments like the one I inhabit, this is pretty much the norm, at least for worker bees like me. If you take a stroll around the cube farm where I work, you'll see plenty of evidence of this. Some people are working, but at any given time nearly an equal number are web surfing, updating their Facebook pages, or shopping on eBay. Most of us have certain amounts of work we're expected to do, and as long as we get it done, management doesn't care much about how many coffee breaks we take.

I suppose people around here who are real go-getter types, when they find themselves with downtime, go to their managers and ask for more work. But judging from what I've seen at this company, that's the exception, not the rule. Most folks, like me, seem content to do enough to stay out of trouble, and not much more.

[mschrisgo2]

I've been a teacher for many years. During the years I worked in private learning centers, my hours were 8-5 (yes, an hour for lunch and we were required to be Out of the building, intense work during school vacations, and I truly HATED that schedule! I find 8-3, with flexible after-3pm meetings, training, working on grading, planning, etc. to be very acceptable for 10 months out of the year.

As I'm nearing "retirement," I'm looking at presenting trainings again (I did that years ago for a couple of years), and only actually "working" outside of my home an average of 2 days a month. Of course, there will be contact and preparation time, but on my schedule. There will be some travel involved, and since I won't be full time, I can stop and see the sights along the way.

[Teacher Terry]

For the last 3 years I teach a uni online class so do it whenever I want. For my consulting that varies & I decide when I want to see clients. Since I have been contracting at my old state job the past 6 months I go in to test clients for 6 hours once a week & do the rest of the work at home. I Usually get up drink coffee, read paper, etc & then go to work in my office. Sometime in the afternoon I take the dog for a long walk. By 5 I have made dinner and spend the time relaxing or going somewhere with my hubby. It is a much more relaxed pace. Some days I don't work at all. It just depends on how I feel.

[rosarugosa]

DH works at a local hospital Mon - Fri, 10 - 3. If I could get a job there with similar hours after I leave my corporate job, that would be a pretty pleasant routine for the two of us.

[iris lilies]

[QUOTE=razz;208848]:~) One has to have priorities, of course.[/QUOTOh yeah! And I should add that the wine must be drunk, especially nice after 3 hours of weeding.

[iris lilies]

:~) One has to have priorities, of course.Oh yeah! And I should add that the wine must be drunk, especially nice after 3 hours of weeding.

[Float On]

I work 9:30-2:30 4 days a week which gives me plenty of time in the early morning to sit on the porch with coffee and watch the sunrise or go kayaking for an hour or so before work. And I get off early enough that I can do errands before the mad rush or go home and do housework or yardwork or a project and make an early dinner and either go kayak again or another activity.

[rosarugosa]

Float On: That sounds even better than DH's schedule! :)
I'm out of the house from 6:45 AM - 6:30 PM, Mon - Fri including commute.

[Float On]

I should of said that that was my summer schedule. When the kids were in school the school year schedule was a little more crazy and most days we were gone 6:30 a.m. - 9 p.m. or later. I really don't do well with long hours away from home. I like to "hermit" a bit.
In late August when I've launched both of them to their colleges it's time for me to get serious about looking for a full-time job for a few years.

[Zoe Girl]

hmm, i kinda want it all. i want tea on porch time, off to cook dinner time and time off to do 2 longer retreats a year. what do i have? well i am on call during the school year from 6 am -6 pm, i am at site early one day a week at least and every afternoon 2-6. i often have mid-day meetings and if there is an adult class then i am later one night a week. the bonus to this? Many days i have 4 hours in the middle of the day where i need to be reasonably available by phone but i can go to the gym, make appointments, take a nap in my car (yeah i really do that with enough long days). Now that i am year-round i can take time in the middle of the year in exchange for working all summer. that means i get a 10 day retreat in September. i really only got from the 2nd week in June to the last week in July off and often the retreats don't fall when i want them to.

So i like mine in many ways, there isn't a perfect one really for me.

[freshstart]

As a nurse, I've had the opportunity to try many different options. Did 3-11p, every other weekend, half the holidays, liked that time in terms of patient care, you got to meet the families in the evening and then had time to listen to whatever the patient needed to talk about as you "tucked" them in. Sucky shift to have a regular life around. 7-3p, every other weekend and half holidays, meh, very busy, understaffed, always went home feeling like there were at least 10 other things I could've done to make a patient's day better but ran out of time. 3 12hr shifts, same deal with weekends and holidays. Good until management decided since 3 12s was only 36 hrs instead of the 37.5 considered full-time, they added on another 8 hr day, what? yeah, no thanks.

4 10 hr shifts, 3 day weekend every weekend, no weekends, on call or holidays. Should've been perfect, but nurses were not fully used as nurses so many hours a day spent with nothing to do but sit at a desk reading magazines, that was the actual culture, nothing to do? grab a magazine. There was actually a ton of nurse functions we could and should've been doing but I worked with elderly nurses on the downside of the hill, who got pretty pissed at the mention of "more work, fewer magazines", I was so bored and useless I gave up the dream schedule, the extra pay (because for some insane reason, this job was considered "acute" nursing, on par with ICU) and generous bonuses from the docs. A monkey could've done my job and they would've saved on magazines.

ended with 8-4p M-F, no holidays, on call or weekends, lowest paid level of nursing in the hospital system, you got to set your own schedule, it was totally fine to go to a school function as long as you left if there was a patient emergency, electronic charting done at home balanced with just enough office time to see your friends...., er, work with your peers. Drove around listening to audiobooks, doing my absolute favorite kind of nursing and given more than enough time to do it in. You couldn't have gotten me out of there without a crow bar. Instead of a crow bar, it was unexpected, severe illness.

In the end, it wasn't the shift, it was absolutely not the pay, it was the quality of life at work that added the most quality of life outside of work. If you leave a job and pine for the work you loved, then IMHO, you hit life's lotto. So now that I cannot work, I guess I'm supposed to say that zero hours is the best schedule. It's totally not.

[lmerullo]

I've only really had the one job over my 30 years. I did add in a self employed home child care component for a few years with overnight shifts. That was in the days when I could wake up at 230am and send a child off with parents and go straight back to sleep until morning. If I could actually sleep, that might be ideal again -the pay was high, and you just have to feed dinner, and tuck in the little ones.

Regular job was either 8-4:30 with half hour lunch or in later years 8-5 with a one hour lunch. I preferred 4:30 as you could miss rush hour and I had kids in sports that worked out better time-wise.

As I am now unemployed, I astonished with how much time I spend on housework. I can easily spend four or five hours most days. I never even spent one hour per day while working.

I would say 8-4:30 M-F with no nights or weekends and an increasing scale of vacation time for me. I don't need flex time and value the regularity of a set schedule. I would not do well with "flexibility".

[freshstart]

just curious- do most jobs really allow you to surf the net on work time? Our computer usage was so closely monitored by I believe, the IT dept, that ridiculous things happened. One woman wanted a picture of her grandchildren as her screensaver, everyday she would come in and it had been removed. She put it back every day, they got rid of it everyday. There must have been some kind of program that does this because no humans could possibly be so tenacious with thousands of employees. I never, ever did anything but work stuff on my computer and we had gotten wind that our boss was reading our emails, so I thought I was fine. I had a patient with hepatitis C who had a question that I could not answer, googled it. The next day, I was called into my boss's office for googling for personal use. Since I do not have hep C and I had a documented patient who did, I was let off with a warning, gee, thanks. Another guy got called in for checking a sports site twice. It's 1984 in some places. But we also have a few admin staff with not enough to do. These three surf the web much of the day, send stupid chain emails, are all over Facebook, even buy stuff online. I do not get this. Is this the norm?

[ApatheticNoMore]

I don't think as strict as that is the norm (ha you might actually have that revolution on your hands if it was. If people's jobs are endlessly tedious and mundane they take breaks to maintain some semblance of sanity. If their jobs are mentally challenging they take them to give their brains time to work). But I don't think quite as loose as oldtimer describes is exactly the norm either. It's usually somewhere in between. Oh I take it for granted you'll be given more leeway higher up the food chain at a higher paying job. But there's studies about people surfing the net at work and they show that people goof off A LOT at work on average.

But people play the game as it must be played, if internet usage is monitored and cracked down on on work computers, they bring in their personal tablets to work and play on them (yes I've seen people do this - they absolutely do). But noone can play on tablets all day long and keep a job.

[freshstart]

I don't care what anyone does pretty much as long as they get their job done. One of those 3 admins, her whole job is to schedule the aides, this should take someone an hour a day tops. If the company was stupid enough to hire a full time person to do a very simple job, well, that's on them if they allow her to surf all day. What kills me is she has gotten so used to this, that she completely mucks up her small job. When aides do not show up at patient's home when they were supposed to, the family gets mad at the nurse who gave them the schedule. They do not know or care that I have nothing to do with it. So her goofing makes the nurses look bad. We complained and complained on deaf ears. She wanted to be my friend on Facebook, after coming home and seeing how much she had posted on FB all day, I unfriended her. The closest thing to firing her, apparently, lol

[jp1]

Noone really works 9-5 do they? Because lunch is required (oh it's required legally unless exempt), so it's really 9-5:30 or 8:30-5 or or 9-6 if you take an hour rather than 1/2 hour lunch, to get 40 hours. 9-5 is a saying I know, but if we literally worked that we'd all be working 35 hour weeks like the French or something.

My fulltime job is officially 8:30 - 4:30 with a 1 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks, so technically I only work 6.5 hour days. I'm exempt and my boss is 3,000 miles away, so all of that is pretty meaningless to me. Some days I get in early and stay late. Some days I roll in at 9:00 but still leave by 4:30. About 40% of the days I'm outside the office at meetings or traveling to get to meetings elsewhere (my territory is the entire western 1/3 of the country), so on those days the "official" hours are irrelevant. And if I'm taking a client to dinner is that really work?

My current job is great. Within limits I do set my own priorities and focus on projects that I think are important/useful to my employer. My boss does absolutely no micromanaging. And there are no TPS reports... My perfect job would be this one but with a month or two solid off at some point during the year so that I could go away somewhere and be completely non-working during that time. In theory I could since I get 27 PTO days, but in reality I think I'd get pushback if I tried to take more than 2 weeks straight off at any one time.

Regarding surfing the internet at work, part of my job is learning about the companies that we are considering providing insurance to. More than a few times I've gotten the 'stern warning screen' because the site was blocked by the company's net nanny. I've never known anyone to have ever had any sort of followup from management due to web surfing so I assume they're not going to actually start monitoring it unless they're looking for a reason to fire someone. Sites like facebook and gmail are blocked by the net nanny so most people just use their phones if they want to post/browse facebook or send a personal email.