Time For Niksen (not that Nixon)

That's it! We're starting a church...

Links to articles, episodes and topics discussed in this episode:

0:30 - The U.S. tried permanent daylight saving time in the 1970s — then quickly rejected it

24:05 - Transcard

29:32 - Gen Z Does Not Dream of Labor

Visit us at busynessparadox.com for the transcript to this episode. Check out some of our blog posts and other content while you’re there!

Come visit us at busynessparadox.com to see episode transcripts, blog posts and other content while you’re there!

Frank Butler 0:17
Hello Busybodies, welcome to another episode of the Busyness Paradox. I'm Frank Butler here with Paul Harvey.

Paul Harvey 0:22
Good day.

Frank Butler 0:23
Good Daylight Savings Time to you, Paul.

Paul Harvey 0:26
Nice...good Daylight Savings Time to you, Frank.

Frank Butler 0:30
So we decided that it was time to cover daylight savings time. And it's because Congress managed to agree on something a couple months ago, for change.

Paul Harvey 0:40
It's in the Senate

Frank Butler 0:40
Or Senate rather just the specifically, yeah, the Senate agreed that we should end the changing the clocks, and just stick with daylight savings time. Sounds wonderful. And I think a lot of us were like, Oh, thank goodness, I'm tired of saving the clocks. What is it falling back or springing forward? And trying to remember which way does what and going oh, God, I'm gonna lose an hour of sleep? And if I'm not mistaken to it's the one that when you have to fall back, so you lose the hour of sleep or something like that? Or is it when you spring it? No, it's when you spring

Paul Harvey 1:08
Springing forward

Frank Butler 1:09
Apparently, there's there was like a, there's an uptick in heart attacks during that time.

Paul Harvey 1:13
That's my understanding is that that is true. Car accidents, heart attacks. But at the same time...this part I'm a little bit less sure of, but I have heard that when you fall back, when you have that night with the extra hour of sleep, there's a reduction in those things. So they sort of like balance each other out.

Frank Butler 1:30
Well, I think it's very interesting that by springing ahead...you lose an hour of sleep, I mean, I guess it makes sense, right? Your body doesn't have enough time to capture that full night's sleep

Paul Harvey 1:39
Unless you just go to bed an hour earlier. I mean, it's like...

Frank Butler 1:42
It's hard to do, though. We're creatures of habit, right? I mean, if you think about it, the end of the day, we are truly creatures of habit. But Paul and I were talking about this whole Daylight Savings thing. And you know, it's funny, historically, we've tried this before.

Paul Harvey 1:55
Yep.

Frank Butler 1:55
In the 70s. They tried it because Nixon was trying to offset some of the oil issues. You know, this is back when

Paul Harvey 2:01
The oil embargo

Frank Butler 2:02
There was the embargo

Paul Harvey 2:03
Yeah, was a direct response to that.

Frank Butler 2:05
Interestingly enough, by ending daylight savings time, it actually did not change the oil consumption, as it was expected that there was no results of that. But there were some more negative ramifications as a result of it. And at the end of the day, we went back.

Paul Harvey 2:23
Particularly bad for farmers in northern latitudes,

Frank Butler 2:27
School kids

Paul Harvey 2:28
School kids, anyone who has to work or be somewhere or do something early in the day, you end up doing more stuff, pre dawn in the dark trade off being that when you get home from work, or school, or what have you, you've got more daylight hours in the evening. And that that's not a bad thing. You know, there's there are benefits to all these options. But there's also trade offs to all these options. And like you say, in the past, when we've attempted this, we have found that collectively, the bad outweigh the good. And we end up going back to daylight savings time again. And it's not just in the US. I know it's been attempted in Russia. And it was a big failure, partly because there are 13 time zones. Yet some places like...the sunrise was already like, you know, coming up at 11 o'clock in the morning or something ridiculous. And now it's like even later in the day. So a lot of it depends on where you live, what you do for a job, and what kind of nocturnal preferences you have. Are you a night owl? Are you a morning person? Yeah, there's no solution here that's gonna make everybody happy.

Frank Butler 3:30
That's right. It's there's not but I think you just said something this morning person or night owl kind of thing. And it's really interesting because you share the story from the Atlantic with me, and we'll obviously share the link with you guys. But what I found fascinating about this, as I was just kind of checking out the little examples in there, there's one person that she is a life coach for introverts, and she says she got stretched thin by her old office job because he was always in the meeting rooms with meetings all the time. And I can kind of relate being somewhat of an introvert myself. It gets sort of exhausting being around people all the time and it's not that you don't want to be it's just that your body just physically gets worn out. It's very tiring and it's hard to be quote unquote on all the time.

Paul Harvey 4:14
There's a lot of cognitive switching going on. You got different people talking to you about different things asking questions, wears you down.

Frank Butler 4:20
And and what was really interesting is that she's now working remotely, gets up at 4am gets work done from four to six then her kids wake up and she says though it leaves her exhausted. She says she needs to take advantage of a so a sliver of time when those around her are asleep when she can breathe and focus. And after she has time you know getting the kids ready stuff like that. But you know, you think about that too. I used to be more of a night owl myself because I would work deep into the hours of you know, after midnight, three 4am before going to bed, largely because there was no thing on there was nothing on TV. There's no other distractions made it really easy for me to work nobody else was a Wait. I also could relax them too. Because there I wasn't concerned about, Am I missing something either, you know, the stuff were stuff like that.

Paul Harvey 5:09
But it's quiet, like there's nothing, nothing competing for your attention. And, and the same thing applies, you know, I've had phases of my life where I've gone both ways where night owl like that, like one to 3am or my golden hours. And more recently, like three to 5am are my golden hours, like, just get up really early or go to bed really late either way, for a lot of us, it's beneficial to have those, that chunk of time. That's just yours. There's nothing else going on, and you just do what you want to do.

Frank Butler 5:38
It's almost like niksen, that idea, right? It's like niksen.

Paul Harvey 5:40
Not the Nixon you were talking about a few minutes ago

Frank Butler 5:43
No, not President Nixon, but niksen as in the Dutch word n-i-k-s-e-n

Paul Harvey 5:47
Dutch word for doing nothing, in a good way, doing nothing to rejuvenate yourself.

Frank Butler 5:53
But this, this one example got Paul and I sort of also talking about the idea of remote work. We were thinking about this because Paul is in New Hampshire. And he was saying that one of the things that would help because again, he's much further north is having more time zones, right? That New Hampshire's...

Paul Harvey 6:10
And further east

Frank Butler 6:12
And further east

Paul Harvey 6:13
For timezones, that's the biggest issue with, like...we stick away out east. Sun rises in the east, sets in the west, so it gets dark really early in the winter, and then you know, daylight savings it or, or whichever one it is in the winter, it just makes it even worse. So yeah, sun setting at like 330 In the afternoon, he just want to jump off a tall building.

Frank Butler 6:32
That's where the winter blues come into play. If you don't live up north, you've not experienced winter blues in the south end. And sorry, Paul, I just want to share with Drew in the south, we still have daylight, when we get done with work, stuff like that. Because our days while they are shorter, they are not that short. But I lived in Germany, which if you ever go look, it's way up. It's like New Finland level, it's I mean, way, way, way up there. And I would go to work at 8am I would get home by after five. And when I got to work, it would be dark. When I left work, it was dark. Now the one difference is that Germans are pretty good about building buildings where every office has windows. And so that way you get to see the daylight. I think it's because of that right. So I think that's why you see some architectural differences in places up north to have that

Paul Harvey 7:18
Plus you kind of get it back in the summer. They're right when you're that far up north and much longer days, right, the long days and some early signs up until like 10 o'clock. You won't get that in New Hampshire not far enough north for that.

Frank Butler 7:28
I was in Finland when it was 24 hours a day. Like I tell you

Paul Harvey 7:30
Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Frank Butler 7:31
Crazy experience.

Paul Harvey 7:32
That was...one time I was in Sweden in the summertime. And I was in a hotel room that had no windows and I was like well this is kind of weird. Turns out that that's like intentional it's a feature not a bug because you cannot block the light out but it's funny because coming from we're talking about in the south of the US you know I came from the exact opposite scenario in Tallahassee, Florida like South and as far west as you go and still be in the eastern time zone like you could walk to the Central Time Zone from there say these really long Sunday night evenings you know, summertime a sun would be setting real late just the opposite year and it gets far north and east as you as you can go and still be in the timezone so yeah, the sun comes up or at least like sometimes a little bit but you don't really feel that as much as you feel the the sun going down at three o'clock.

Frank Butler 8:19
That's right. And I think that's it right because it's when you get home you've had a day and you're exhausted and you don't get a day and it makes it hard because you can't do yard work the same way and floods okay in the younger you are you're still sleeping more so you like I remember sleeping through the daylight sometimes waking up and it was like holy crap it's dark outside.

Paul Harvey 8:41
Like college days, like sleep into like noon...wake up have lunch, it's dark.

Frank Butler 8:46
Like wow, no. So but it's policy you know, New Hampshire is very far east and they would belong in was it Nova Scotia, you said like the timezone that they're in keeps

Paul Harvey 8:56
coming up every few years a push to slide over into the Atlantic timezone, which is where the eastern most provinces of Canada are including, I believe Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and it would just be so much better for us to be in that time zone and there's last for for a year but end of the day they don't want to be in different time zone and nearby metropolitan areas of Boston Boston and to a lesser degree in New York City. So it's it just never gets the distraction but it's like always dead on arrival because there's this fear of the logistical complexities would be so detrimental that it's not practical and that's…

And that's where working remote just suddenly…I wonder

Frank Butler 9:37
Right

Paul Harvey 9:37
Does that change things or

Frank Butler 9:38
Or you know, as Paul and I talk about quite frequently being more flexible with regards to work right more hybrid work environment work from home remote work, you know, all this stuff because you know, if you think about I can see the concern with changing to the Atlantic timezone for New Hampshire and Maine and that area, because you know, you think about it, it's like, if you do We work in Boston, because it's not a long commute, right? What is it about an hour by train to get to Boston,

Paul Harvey 10:05
From where I am Southern New Hampshire, it's about an hour by train.

Frank Butler 10:08
So about an hour to Boston, you know, a lot of people probably do work there because Boston is a major business area.

Paul Harvey 10:15
Or you might work at a subsidiary of a company that's headquartered in Boston, they have locations in New Hampshire, but you're still like, on the same schedule as the main office.

Frank Butler 10:23
Right? Right. And you think, okay, let's say it's an hour earlier in New Hampshire than Boston, and you're expected to be at work at eight o'clock. That means that you're getting up and having to be there at seven o'clock your time, you know, it's rough as I

Paul Harvey 10:36
No it would go the other way. Right. We'd be twiddling our thumbs waiting for those lazy bums. And the

Frank Butler 10:41
Oh yeah right, you’re an hour ahead. That's right, yeah right. Sorry.

Paul Harvey 10:45
So see, wed be the early birds

Frank Butler 10:46
You’d be the early bird.

Paul Harvey 10:47
Wow, there's New Hampshire, guys. They're crazy.

Frank Butler 10:49
I was thinking the other way. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. This is the challenge with time zones and people, right is

Paul Harvey 10:54
Changing the clocks to it's, it's very abstract.

Frank Butler 10:58
It really is. But you know, you think about it, it's like you think about okay, well, I gotta go in at nine now. And starts at eight work starts at eight, but then I get home by six when, right and even though it's five o'clock. And that's it, which is again, what comes back to we got it, we just got to be more flexible, right. I mean, if you guys are an hour ahead, you could get there at eight o'clock your time, it'd be 7am their time, you'd be home, you know, again, an hour commute, which is kind of sucks on its own. But the idea is that if you're doing it by train, it's better, right? Because you don't have to actually drive you can read, you can sleep, whatever it is. But you know, overall, it's like, that's the first thing. But I think this fits well, with sort of our general idea of the Busyness Paradox. We could have more time zones, we could have more success with some of these things if we adopt this more remote, flexible work environment. And sure, yeah, you might not have the exact same hours of the subsidiary in New Hampshire as in Boston. But does it really have to overlap 100%

Paul Harvey 11:55
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe someone trying to call before the Boston office opens, it gets rerouted to the New Hampshire office, because we're already there an hour earlier. And you're covering more than the total clock as a result.

Frank Butler 12:08
Exactly. And, again, I think that even if you have workgroups that have to work together and collaborate, they don't need to be up to each other's rear ends 100% of the day, right? I mean, there's benefits to people being able to have their time to get things accomplished, when other parts of the office aren't waking up when they have more of their workers being sort of going. So I think this is what makes this interesting and sort of reinforces Paul and Mies, General, I guess, view of how work should work. Let's forget timeless, you know, because we are we as human beings really do use time as a structuring mechanism, whether we are aware of it or not. And I think this is something that's what causes some of the problems that we talked about earlier. Like, you know, heart attacks go up, car accidents go up when you you have to sprint ahead and you lose that hour of sleep. It's something because we haven't so fixated in our mind that we have to do things at this regimented sort of eight o'clock and...

Paul Harvey 13:01
At a certain time or for a specific amount of time.

Frank Butler 13:04
Right

Paul Harvey 13:04
Must go into work and be there for eight hours. As we've said before, why eight? Where did 40 hours a week come from? We need to decouple time from work. Yes, is ultimately the issue. And the more we can succeed in doing that, the more we have the flexibility to do something like change our timezone or decide to drop Daylight Savings Time, or all these artificial constraints that we put on ourselves, because we're looking at time and not looking at results.

Frank Butler 13:30
Amen.

Paul Harvey 13:30
Amen.

Frank Butler 13:31
Thank you. You too, are welcome to the church of busyness.

Paul Harvey 13:34
We've...we've now started a church

Frank Butler 13:39
Well, it's part of the cult

Paul Harvey 13:40
That’s right we’ve upgraded from cult to church

Frank Butler 13:42
Our cult...our cult is now converting. Oh, goodness. No, but truly, it's one of those things that it could create such better things for people's lives. Because we do have to have time at the end of the day, right? You know, there's so many, there's so many businesses that are built around time consulting firms are built around time and billing hours and all that, but at the same time...

Paul Harvey 14:06
Because they're focusing on time, not results.

Frank Butler 14:07
Oh I agree, I agree. They could probably benefit from going to a project Ty's style, thinking, Oh, this is going to cost you this much. But you know, I know that a lot of times I'll have it where jobs are saying we think it's going to take eight hours. So this is what it would cost if it takes eight if it takes six, you know, you don't pay the eight hours worth of work, which is kind of cool. And right. I mean, I kind of liked that. Those sorts of things, because they're not focused on time, necessarily.

Paul Harvey 14:32
They're focused on the results. So why mention time at all? Just say, "Alright, we're gonna do this job for you. It's gonna cost this much." or up

Frank Butler 14:37
Or up to this much, right. Well, I think that's the whole thing is that you feel good if it only takes them six hours and they say it's a you kind of get a discount through that

Paul Harvey 14:44
It does, it's almost like a form of currency like

Frank Butler 14:46
Yes

Paul Harvey 14:47
It would be hard to just do away with that.

Frank Butler 14:49
I like that idea. It's like time is like currency in its own right. But at the same time, I think we're at a point of time and flexibility that we could be more aware of people's livelihoods like this notion that, okay, we're going to we're going to reintroduce daylight savings time, once we test this again and realize that, okay, it doesn't work as being getting ready for school at 5:30am, to stand on the corner by six to get to school by seven, when it should be like eight because, you know, we realize that kids need to sleep more and that they shouldn't be getting...

Paul Harvey 15:18
What we really should do is just start the school day later as well. But then our whole society is built around it. So what were the parents gonna do? Like they have to be at work at seven or eight. So they can't just have their kids sitting around by themselves for an hourly, like, these are all artificial time based constraints that we've placed on ourselves. But it's difficult to change things sometimes. You know, in our recent episode, we're talking about our failure to switch to the metric system in the US. Same thing, just the switching cost, the the inertia is so high, it's easier to just say eh, just stick the way we do it.

Frank Butler 15:49
Exactly

Paul Harvey 15:49
And that's what we see happen.

Frank Butler 15:51
Right. That's sort of the whole key. And that's what we're talking about here is that I you know, I love the idea of daylight savings time sort of going away, and we're not changing time anymore, although I don't think it's going to be a great experiment. Again, because we've done it before. I think what we could do to make it work though, is if we adjust the work side of things, right, be more flexible when people come in or adjust more time zones, as Paul was saying that might be beneficial to people in New Hampshire, Maine, I mean, think about schools than to write you guys suffered from that same issue that if you're on the Boston timezone, the East Coast or eastern standard time that you're running into issues with, you know, kids being dark, getting home, or dark going, or whatever, I think we could solve a lot of those issues by introducing those time zones by being more flexible with people's work. And maybe it's the start times of businesses change, instead of changing time,

Paul Harvey 16:40
You know, let's not let that off the hook. Maybe instead of complicating the whole world time schedule, maybe we just build some more flexibility into our culture, that things don't have to start at these arbitrary start times for every single person, no matter what your situation. And COVID is kind of forced some of that to happen. So I think we've got potentially some momentum, or at least some, a better understanding that, you know, that level of flexibility won't necessarily hurt us, and indeed, can help us.

Frank Butler 17:11
Right. And I mean, we've seen examples of this productivity increases and such like that from work from home or hybrid or more flex time type work style work, despite people like, you know, the CEO of Goldman Sachs wanting to have five days plus people working in the office again, you know, whatever, we've talked about those kinds of challenges that they face. But I think this is an opportunity, again, for businesses to learn to be flexible, to learn to adapt, to help improve their employees, and customers sort of livelihoods, right. Like, if you're a customer, and you need something done, it's I you know, I keep coming back to this notion of thinking about when doctors are open, right, the doctor's office is not like the doctor doc, but your your primary care physician, or your dentist, you have to take off time from work to go see these people, you know, and so it's like, you're taking sick leave or personal time off, or whatever it is to go see a doctor for physical to go get your tea clean, it's like goodness, why don't we just make it flex, where we don't focus in on the time, and just more on the job. And I think that allows businesses to be more flexible, say, hey, you know what, we don't need to be open at eight o'clock in the morning, when it's wintertime, we can open at nine and get the same outcomes. And or not even that, it's like, Hey, we're gonna have a staggered morning with people coming in, or they're gonna be working from home. But as long as somebody's saying, hey, I'll be the one who's up at this time, because this is when I want to work.

Paul Harvey 18:40
And you know, it's at least worth an analysis to see if those things are feasible and potentially beneficial for you. And the work better for some companies than others and all that. But at least if we're not just dismissing dismissing it out of hand, you know?

Frank Butler 18:55
And I think it's a great opportunity for people to figure out what's going to work for their business wasn't going to work for their customers, what works for their employees, and, again, not be so rigid, right, I think it's the rigidity that creates project with the rigidity. I agree, you know, if you're saying everybody has to come into the office five plus days a week, but again, Goldman Sachs, I'm calling you out on this, because this article just came out, you're going to create problems for your organization, your top talent, who might be like this person who's a life coach for introverts, who likes to get up at 4am. You might lose those people to other places, because they can get into a work schedule that works best for them. And that might yield better results for their clients in terms of financial investments, or whatever it is, right. I mean, just like Goldman

Paul Harvey 19:44
Sachs investment banks, like their whole culture is you just work all the freaking time. Like, if you're not doing more than 100 hours a week are not working just isn't the right kind of thing. Like they're just in a whole different planet of...yeah.

Frank Butler 19:59
But there's usually trade off with that, right? Usually they're paying for that they pay well.

Paul Harvey 20:03
It pays well, that's for sure.

Frank Butler 20:05
You know, I think we've talked about this to my book, I could be wrong. But people always aren't motivated by pay. I mean, sure, pay is an important facet of it. I'm, I'm willing to do a lot for more pay. But at the same time, there's also

Paul Harvey 20:20
Go into investment banking, you better be very motivated by pay.

Frank Butler 20:24
Well, yeah. But I don't think they have to work the way that they want them to work, because I don't think they create value that way.

Paul Harvey 20:30
That's, you know, I've never worked in investment banking. But I've read a strangely large number of like memoirs and biographies and books about people who have and especially like the the junior associates that are putting those like 120 hours a week to like, an hour just like putting together Excel models and proofreading like reports and PowerPoint slides. It's like, this is not brilliant people, largely from Ivy League schools and stuff, like spending 120 hours a week doing this, like lost my hair and gotten divorced, just correcting typos and PowerPoint slides.

Frank Butler 21:05
So you're saying is not like Wolf of Wall Street, where they're just snorting and huge amounts of cocaine driving their Lamborghinis while high on Quaaludes and stuff

Paul Harvey 21:13
I think that's kind of how it got that way. If you have to do that, if you have to do that kind of mundane work that quickly. And for that much hours a week. Yeah, hell yeah. You're, you're bumping cocaine and doing whatever else you can to keep yourself awake and sane and well seen maybe not so much. But yeah, it's not to say, I mean, there's some high level stuff that goes on in those investment banks. But my understanding is, it's not really till you're out of that junior associate phase that you're even allowed anywhere near the big brain stuff. So I think it's not like Wolf as Wall Street as much as us plus, that's like, it's not really investment banking. Right. That's more,

Frank Butler 21:47
they're more of the stock trading side of things. Yeah. Yeah. I just think banks, banks, financial industry, you know, they go, they can be go crazy, and all that kind of stuff. But

Paul Harvey 21:56
To be honest, students think that way, too. Like, "I wanna go to investment banking, because I want to be buying and selling, trading stocks," like, "Okay, well, you're not gonna do that in investment banking."

Frank Butler 22:04
So a lot of investment banking is trying to get people to put their retirement into your company, and you have managed funds that do that, but you're not the one managing the funds, you're the one selling them.

Paul Harvey 22:13
That's more like commercial banking and asset management. Investment banking is mostly like underwriting, like IPOs, and mergers and acquisitions. And, you know, they do some, like proprietary trading and run dark pools and things like that. But they mostly like financial services for the extremely wealthy, or very large corporations and stuff like that.

Frank Butler 22:36
So they're not doing the Wolf of Wall Street trading, they're doing more, they're doing more the analysis kind of things, right.

Paul Harvey 22:42
Yeah, exactly.

Frank Butler 22:44
Evaluation side of the whole world

Paul Harvey 22:45
Valuing companies and stuff like that.

Frank Butler 22:47
Well, you know, it's all good. But they don't need be working 120 hours a week, probably. I think that's just a way of saying, Hey, we're justifying what you earn. And I think you'd probably get away without doing that

Paul Harvey 22:59
It's backed down a little bit. There are some bunch of people who died of exhaustion like 10 years ago or something and brought this stuff to the fore, like, you know, yeah, like, you're really just working people into the ground, because that's just how it's always been done. And it's like a badge of honor kind of thing for the field, but it's not really accomplishing anything. It's kind of stupid. So I don't know how much it's changed. But anyway, sorry, that was a little bit of a tangent. But coming from Goldman Sachs, like, I'm surprised that they even felt the need to, like, say anything about it. It's just implied?

Frank Butler 23:29
Well, I think a lot of the younger people are expecting it, right? Well, I think it'd be I think there's a lot of organizations out there, I think the FinTech side of things, has really created a challenge for you know, established firms like Goldman Sachs. And I think, if you think about it, though, investment banking is not the only avenue of Finance to go into, right? I mean, you could, if you get if you get your undergraduate in finance, or masters and finance, your skill sets, you know, when we have bent to one talking to him about what finances I mean, it's a big broad world out there.

Paul Harvey 24:01
The vast, vast majority of students with a finance degree don't go into investment banking, right?

Frank Butler 24:05
It makes me think of we have a fin tech company here in Chattanooga called Trans card. And they labeled themselves as a global technology and payments leader. They have operations in the US and the UK, for sure. They bring their goals to bring the latest in payment innovation to enable financial institutions, technology, partners, payments, networks, payment facilitators, and businesses of all sizes. So that's they're trying to bring the latest in payment, innovation, right? And they're growing rapidly. They're here in Chattanooga, headquartered in Chattanooga. I've gotten the opportunity to visit their offices a couple times now because we're working with them on some cool initiatives that we're doing in the college and they've got some interesting ways of helping support the people who graduate from some of our programs. It's amazing what they do in their office here. It's an it's an incredibly beautiful office, but it kind of fits into what we're talking About though of sort of the hybrid work environment, and then let me just kind of quickly give you guys a painted picture of their offices, their main floor that you kind of come into so you come in on the first ground floor, but you have to go up a floor to get to the offices startup. They have an incredible workout room. They have peloton, you know, bikes and treadmills and stuff in there, they got punching bags, they have a local company come in to help do fitness training twice a week, those kinds of me really incredible amenities there. They have great bathrooms with showers and stuff in there. So once you go work out, you can go clean up and go to work, what have you. Again, this is still made floor may floor has a beautiful kitchen in there. And on one side, they have coffee machine that can make whatever you like your beautiful coffee machine. The other side has wine and beer and stuff like that, because it was described as there's the am side, so your morning side, and then the pm side. And so it's kind of funny that we but it's got this long island in there so they can have catered lunches or dinners in there. They have couple arcade machines built into the wall. So you can play traditional arcade games, or you can turn convert one to do Xbox games and stuff like that, you go into this other room and they have one of those skit giant screens where you can hit golf balls or you can convert it and they've got like you can do boar hunts with it, you know, it's Dell digital is kind of like, it's like a glorified Duck Hunt kind of thing. It's amazing. And then, you know, you go upstairs and you got your offices. But it's not just offices, they have conference rooms, it's all mobile, like there's very few actual like, offices where people have a fixed space. It's a very sort of, hey, come in, there's workstations, you can just drop down and use a workstation. If you need more privacy, you can go to one of the conference rooms, and you know, all technology driven really, really amazing, right? But it's completely hybrid, they focus more on you getting your job done, they don't care if you come in now they try to recommend come in, you know, two days a week, that kind of stuff. But you'll you know, there's no real pressure to do much of that. And so, they've been just going, going going and so I keep thinking like okay, I'm this old, you know, sort of traditionalist organization like Goldman Sachs, I want five plus days a week, where people are in office, or I'm a company like trans card in the finance FinTech side of the world where I've got, you know, I've got to get work done to it's not like I can't ignore that. But I'm focusing on the job being much more we got to get stuff done and not on the time, right? Not on how you work. It's what's going to make us the most productive, what's going to get us the best output and the best results,

Paul Harvey 27:37
Lazy thinking to just fall back on a schedule, pre ordained. This happens at this time. We do this for this much time.

Frank Butler 27:43
And that comes back to that daylight savings time. Right let's be we don't need to change the time. We just need to be flexible with how we work

Paul Harvey 27:52
And join our church.

Frank Butler 27:54
The church of busyness,

Paul Harvey 27:55
Church of busyness, ha!

Frank Butler 27:59
What have we done. We have the cults and now it's now it's upgraded. Maybe we need to file for tax exempt status. For all that money, we don't make here.

Paul Harvey 28:11
Tithing, you know, feel free to tithe 10% of your income to the church of busyness.

Frank Butler 28:17
Oh, goodness, me, we have clocks as sort of our thing all the way around, you know,

Paul Harvey 28:22
The hourglass

Frank Butler 28:23
Hourglass,

Paul Harvey 28:24
Like...yeah. We're gonna make this happen.

Frank Butler 28:30
Good. But anyway, so we wanted to talk about it because the timezone thing has become a, an interesting one are not timezone, but the daylight savings time. But I think what's interesting is thinking, let's make sure that people can operate when they function best people who do want to work more than five days a week and want to be in office and are in finance, they're probably going to end up at Goldman Sachs or something equivalent, right? Because that's what they're looking for.

Paul Harvey 28:53
Hopefully, that yeah, find the...find the place that's got the schedule that works for you.

Frank Butler 28:59
Or others might end up you know, at a Transcard kind of example, a FinTech type company where there's that flexibility.

Paul Harvey 29:08
There's home for all of you in the church of busyness.

Frank Butler 29:11
As long as we can get rid of the busyness.

Paul Harvey 29:13
Yes, yeah, we should probably call ourselves something other than the church of business. We'll work on that.

Frank Butler 29:17
The Church of niksen, and not the President Nixon, The Art of Doing nothing.

Paul Harvey 29:23
Paragraph, not that Nixon,

Frank Butler 29:25
Not that Nixon

Paul Harvey 29:27
In parentheses, not that Nixon.

Frank Butler 29:32
I love the...

Paul Harvey 29:33
Yeah, this is gonna happen.

Frank Butler 29:34
I actually like the church of niksen, because that means that we, we can do nothing. And I think that aligns with Generation Z, right? Because, again, aside, there's that article that came out recently that generation Z really doesn't want to work. They just kind of want to retire, which I think all of us would love to do. And that way we can just like as one of them, I think had said is that they just want to lay in a bed of moss with their love or painting pictures and reading or something like that.

Paul Harvey 30:00
The hell you reading over there?

Frank Butler 30:02
An article that came up on a... I don't know, it was something on, on... Which one is this? Vox, it was Vox and it says, you know, and I don't again, Paul. And I will tell you that we don't really necessarily like these, these nomenclatures of Gen Z and stuff, but

Paul Harvey 30:18
Or the whole concept of generational demographics, but

Frank Butler 30:21
There are differences among different people, and especially depending on how old they are. And that's right. I've had different experiences, for sure. But this is the example right here. This is from this Vox article. I don't want to be a Girlboss I don't want to hustle. I simply want to live my life slowly and lay down in a bed of moss with my lover and enjoy the rest of my existence, reading books, creating art, and loving myself and the people in my life. So in the church of Nixon, come on, you can do all of that, if you wish. Welcome aboard. I think that sounds ideal. Except for we wouldn't need to find that utopia, which we don't have to work to get paid. Which is the only problem you know. Yeah, it's it's darn thing of having to get money. And it's not Star Trek yet. You know, ubi isn't the universal basic income is not yet a thing

Paul Harvey 31:12
Because not enough people have joined our church to make it a fence. Right?

Frank Butler 31:16
So now it means that one of our tenants is...UBI

Paul Harvey 31:20
We just signed on for UBI Okay, fine, whatever.

Frank Butler 31:23
Yeah, we'd love the idea that we didn't have to work unless we chose to to make extra money, right? That's kind of a utopian thing. But I don't think it would ever come to fruition.

Paul Harvey 31:30
Unearned money is a dangerous thing. That's, that's my fear. There's

Frank Butler 31:34
some greedy too. I like things. I'm kind of I'm a little bit more I think materialistic in some ways. Some ways, definitely not. But I do like my guitars.

Paul Harvey 31:44
Anytime you find yourself a hobby, suddenly you're you end up being materialistic, at least in that hobby. Just happens.

Frank Butler 31:51
I also like space too. So I like having property and no anyway, we wanted to address this Daylight Savings times it will have ramifications

Paul Harvey 31:58
how long it's going to happen to be honest with you. By the time it got to the house, if sorry for non US listeners, but it just had that like weird, unanimous thing in the Senate. And then, but that we got to the house people were like way, way, way, way, way too. Turns out, we've tried this before. And who knows?

Frank Butler 32:15
It's still a good opportunity for businesses to be more flexible. Yes. New Hampshire legislation. You know, you guys might want to consider being an Atlantic Coast time because it makes more sense.

Paul Harvey 32:25
Oh, we...we have just need to actually push it through.

Frank Butler 32:29
You need champion and so the church of niksen

Paul Harvey 32:31
yes.

Frank Butler 32:32
Not that Nixon

Paul Harvey 32:33
Not that Nixon

Frank Butler 32:33
Will happily lend support to...

Paul Harvey 32:39
Our lobbying wing will will will draw down upon Concord, New Hampshire. I would show them the way

Frank Butler 32:45
Where all this money is coming from to pay... Or maybe we're working off the dreams of our employees not doing nothing. You're not doing anything and

Paul Harvey 32:54
All the money you earn doing...not nothing? Give it to us.

Frank Butler 33:02
Thanks for listening. Everybody. Be flexible.

Paul Harvey 33:05
Niksen be praised.

Frank Butler 33:06
Niksen be praised. Not that Nixon.

Paul Harvey 33:10
Not that Nixon, thank you. Good catch.

Frank Butler 33:13
Good day everybody.

Paul Harvey 33:16
Good day. The Busyness Paradox is distributed by Paul Harvey and Frank Butler. Our theme music is adapted from "It's Business Time" by Jemaine Clements and Bret McKenzie. Our production manager is Justin Wuntaek. We hope you've enjoyed this episode, and we'd love to hear from you. Please send any questions, comments or ideas for future episode topics to input@busynessparadox.com, or find us on Twitter. Also, be sure to visit our website, busynessparadox.com, to read our blog posts and for links to the articles and other resources mentioned in today's show. Finally, please take a moment to rate and follow or subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or...I don't know, wherever the heck you get your podcasts.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The Busyness Paradox

Time For Niksen (not that Nixon)

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