I thought that one of the perks of not being a supervisor would be qualifying for some kind of alternative work schedule… you know, the deal where you work nine hour days and get every other Friday off kind of thing. Years ago at the start of my career I worked at a site that ran ten hour days Monday through Thursday. Every week was a three day weekend. I have to admit that there’s something to be said for that schedule. Yesterday, though, I took a pass on the chance to get on board with the every other Friday off schedule. I always figured I’d jump on the opportunity for “free” days off, but I didn’t and here’s my rational:

1. I’ve become a morning person by default. I’m more productive between the hours of 8-11 AM than I am the rest of the day. My least productive time of the day tends to be between 2-4 PM. Tacking on another hour after that doesn’t seem to be a value proposition for anyone. Now if they’d let me start the day around 6AM, we might be on to something, but that doesn’t seem likely.

2. If I leave on time, even in the depths of winter, I get 30-45 minutes of daylight in the evenings. It doesn’t sound like much, but for my money there’s little worse than driving to work in the dark and arriving home in the dark. In December, those few minutes of light every day are worth more to me than extra days off (seriously).

3. The only “alternative” I’m really interested in is telework. I had a good run with telework back in the day and found working from the kitchen table, five feet from the coffee pot to be probably my most productive day of each week. That probably has something to do with being out of sight and out of mind. It’s a great way to sit down once a week and focus on something without that cacophonous roar of people yelling over the top of cubicles at each other.

4. Being a single father, there’s only so many hours I can stay away before something bad happens… like the kids staging a jail break, eating the couch, and turning the floor into an open sewer. Since they’re pretty well trained at keeping themselves entertained for 10 hours, trying to change up a system that works seems like a bad idea. That’s just a layer of additional stress that I don’t need to inject into the environment.

So yeah, I’m going to take a pass on the alternative work schedule for the time being and just be happy keeping banker’s hours.