HOW TO BE IDLE
Tom Hodgkinson, HarperCollins, US$14.50 on www.amazon.com
Employers, take heed. Here’s a book you may just want to hide from your staff since it dishes out tips on skiving. Reasons for idling are aplenty in its 24 chapters, with each chapter represented by the 24-hour clock, addressing a different topic. In chapter two, 9am Toil and Trouble, Hodgkinson muses about why people abide to a nine-to-five work schedule as 9am is “the time when someone, somewhere, decided that work should start” and suggests we work a four-day week or three hours a day simply because longer work hours don’t guarantee higher productivity.
In 1pm The Death of Lunch, he speaks against combining work with food, or worse, still eating in front of the computer, a habit regarded as the norm in the work-obsessed culture. But really, the book is not as seditious or frivolous as it sounds, although it aims to be a satire on the self-help books. It is an antithesis to Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and read more like a 24 habits of highly idle people, filled with entertaining anecdotes and persuasive arguments to justify a slower pace of life, backed by successful idlers – writers and philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche. The quote “Doing nothing is hard work”, by epigrammer Oscar Wilde, sums up the whole belief of the book.
This theory is exemplified by the leisure activities one can partake in the “hard work” of idling provided by the 24 chapters. Some of the activities and topics of discussion include: 8am Waking Up is Hard To Do; 10am Sleeping In; 3pm The Nap; 6pm First Drink of the Day; 9pm The Idle Home; 2am The Art of Conversations; 5am Sleep; and 7am A Waking Dream. The latter marks the last of the 24 chapters ending at 7am and Hodgkinson seems to suggest that an idler’s life is indeed a waking dream or perhaps a day dream.
Although there are many in-depth and often humorous discussions about the pleasure of leisure activities, Hodgkinson frowns upon not working for what you enjoy doing (here idling), hence highlights the negative aspects of working conditions: “With a very few exceptions, the world of jobs is characterised by stifling boredom, grinding tedium, poverty, petty jealousies, sexual harassment, loneliness, deranged co-workers, bullying bosses, seething resentment, illness, exploitation, stress, helplessness, hellish commutes, humiliation, depression, appalling ethics, physical fatigue and mental exhaustion.”
It may not offer tips on managing office politics or suggest new relaxation techniques. Instead, it uses humour to endure the daily toil, evoking every workaholic’s fantasy to idle. This is a book employers and employees may secretly relish, but only those who take it too seriously will hide it from others. Memo to the employee: send this to your over-worked boss. You might as well share a chuckle over it during that power lunch.
Lucinda Law
