4-minute read
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you." ~ Anne Lamott.
The topic of “rest” seems to be continually showing up in my life lately. Even Mark Ferguson, who exists on the most crazy hours of anyone I know, wrote an email about it a couple weeks ago… And it's particularly pertinent as we have family visiting from South Australia this week.
It's the middle of lambing, feed is disappearing, there are fences that need replacing, a shed that needs building, paddocks that need subdividing, regrowth that needs clearing, websites that need updating, buildings that need restumping, houses that need painting, oats that need grading, succession that needs planning, books that need reading. Need I go on??? I haven't even gotten to the personal tasks I want to do!
I bet you're the same. Maybe I just reminded you of more jobs that need adding to your own list…
The point is, there is always work to be done (and always more that could be done!)
And the default mode for me, and for most farmers I know, is to just keep ploughing through that to-do list.
It can even be a badge of honour - the number of days (or weeks, or even months) that you haven't had a day off.
But we also need to rest.
I believe that God designed humans to need rest, and commands us to do so. But you don't need to believe the bible to realise the benefits of rest. There is lots of research that also shows the benefit.
For both our health and our productivity
Resting!
Rest is good for health
In 2021, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization published the first global study specifically looking at what long working hours do to your health. Working 55 hours a week or more was linked to a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to a standard 35-40 hour week. Worldwide, they attributed around 745,000 deaths in 2016 to long working hours — making it the largest single occupational health risk they'd studied.
That's a bit wild! That's two of the biggest health bodies in the world looking at the data and concluding that hours worked past a certain point aren't just unpleasant, they can be deadly!
There's a bloke I know whose story is of working dawn to dusk to build up a property he'd just bought, on top of a full-time job. It worked for a while, but then his body forced him to rest. He was in and out of hospital for 18 months, and he's on medication for life now because of it. Unfortunately, I'd bet most of you know someone similar.
Now I suspect there's more nuance to this than just long hours. Stress, coupled perhaps with working to avoid something else would have been major factors in the health outcomes.
We rested on a cruise earlier this year!
Rest is good for productivity
This research surprised me. I've certainly felt my productivity decline throughout the day and week, but I didn't think it was as extreme as this.
Stanford economist John Pencavel went back through historical data (munitions workers, originally, where output was relentlessly measured) and found productivity per hour declines sharply past 50 hours a week. Past 55 hours, it drops so much that the extra hours add almost nothing. Someone working 70 hours a week was getting about the same done as someone working 55.
Iceland tested this at scale. Between 2015 and 2019, over 2,500 workers (more than 1% of the country's entire workforce) trialled moving from a 40-hour week down to 35-36 hours, on the same pay. Productivity and service levels stayed the same or improved in most workplaces. Worker wellbeing improved significantly, and it didn't cost the employers anything either. The trials were revenue-neutral. The result was convincing enough that by 2021, 86% of Iceland's workforce were allowed to work shorter hours.
Now farming isn't a factory job. Particularly when working with animals, sometimes it wouldn't matter how rested or tired you are. There's a limit to how fast animals can move through an autodrafter!
And when the headers are going, the bottleneck is usually machinery, not worker capacity.
But there are still lots of areas where we could be more efficient working shorter hours, better rested.
Always more jobs to do...
So what?
Rest is important. But it can feel unachievable sometimes.
Next time I'll look at how we can make space to rest.
Until then!
Alan Rissmann
References
- WHO/ILO Joint Estimates: Long Working Hours Increasing Deaths from Heart Disease and Stroke, WHO, 2021 — https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo
- Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. Stanford University / IZA Discussion Paper. https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
- Haraldsson, G. D. & Kellam, J. (2021). Going Public: Iceland's Journey to a Shorter Working Week. Autonomy (UK) & Alda (Iceland). https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW.pdf