The job of not working

Just back from ten lovely days in Greece.  After about twenty years of self-employment I may just have mastered the art of taking a holiday.  I've long been plagued by freelancer’s paranoia: that horrible suspicion that you only get the work because you're the first supplier the client calls so if you don’t answer the phone then she'll just go to whomever is next on the list.  Never give your understudy a break and all that.

Absurd of course: the only like-for-like substitute I have is my business partner and he’s busy with clients in Asia-Pac.  So why has my mindset has always been to behave as if I have dozens of direct competitors across Europe?

Partly, I suspect, it’s my attitude to work itself.  One of the books I read on the beach* described two conflicting attitudes to work and leisure: the ‘income’ effect and the ‘substitution’ effect: -

Income effect: the old school economists’ assumption that once a man has earned sufficient for his needs then devote the remaining time to leisure 

Substitution effect: the phenomenon that as a man’s time becomes more valuable he is less and less likely to substitute high-paid work for another activity that pays less (i.e. any other activity, including leisure)

Supposedly we're all looking for a life informed by the income effect but of course it’s the substitution effect that describes most modern lives. This is especially so for anyone working in corporate services and especially for anyone self-employed in that sector. We work every hour that God, or the client, gives us.

Contrast this with a farmer or other seasonal worker: when the time is right you work as hard as you can as efficiently as you can then you rest.  Only a fool harvests an unripe crop.  Still, it's rare for a truly successful freelancer to be continually snowed under.  If you are then you're probably either on the way to taking on staff (good) or becoming an employee of your biggest client in all but name (bad).

So I persist with comedy, blogging and sundry other projects out of a need to create a substitution effect: there’s only so much time and attention I can pour onto a consulting project before it becomes counterproductive.

I work hard for good money when the opportunity demands it.  My real problem is that I actually like working hard all the time.  Idleness has never become me.  So for the last week I've been hanging out in the Greek islands forcing myself to not work.  I had to convince myself that proper relaxation was a right and proper substitute for thinking about something I’ll be working on in a month’s time. 

Only I could create a job out of not working.

* Yep, that’s me on holiday – reading economic theory for shits’n’giggles…