It’s not because he featured us on his blog today. (Although we can’t thank him enough for that.) The reason we love Tim is because he embodies one of the core truths behind a Results-Only Work Environment:
It’s your fundamental right to have control over your time.
Just because your company is paying you to produce a certain amount of work, it doesn’t mean that they get to tell you where to be and when. Back in the old days, where work could only happen in a certain place, then making you show up at 8:00 a.m. and sit at your desk for the day made sense. (It sucked, but it made sense.)
Today, technology allows us to break those old norms. It”s ridiculous to rush to work to be there at 8:00 a.m. and then sit at your desk reading the paper for a half hour. (If someone needs you, they can call your cell, right?) It doesn’t make sense to come in to the office at all if you can handle your work from home, or a coffee shop, or wherever. Most of all, it doesn’t make sense to put such a huge premium on the time we spend working. The only thing that should matter is results.
It’s up to all of us to challenge our assumptions about what work looks like. We need more people like Tim to stand up and say, “I have a life. I’m going to contribute what I have to contribute, but once I’ve made that contribution, then I get to choose how to live.” We also need a workplace culture that supports people standing up for their time. (That’s what a ROWE does.) But first we need people to believe that they actually have this right.
So that’s our question of the day. Who owns your time? And if you don’t own your time, do you believe you should?
