The 1-4-40
An idea of how to work to live and not live to work
Dear Members of the Feminist Consciousness Raising Pool Party,
I hope this note finds you well. It’s been some weeks since our last poolside meeting, after which I was thoroughly refreshed. What is it about sitting around with people (usually women) discussing books and ideas with a drink and gorgeous food that makes my heart feel full in this damned world? Pure leisure and I love you for it. Thank you for making the experience; I appreciate the book suggestions and even more appreciate that the very thorough discussions regarding those ideas allow me the opportunity to skip over some of these texts, such is the quality of the discourse amongst us Pool Party Members.
I had some news that I wanted to share poolside, but somehow the topic never seemed appropriate: I am starting a business. The “business” is really just selling the skill set that I’ve honed over 20 years working in the US labor market. In our time together you have witnessed my exhaustion at participating in the workforce; you’ve felt it too.
The demands of our jobs have squeezed us all into these strange spaces, along with the demands of being a woman in a patriarchal society. However, I have decided to bring how my time is spent into my locus of control; I am now willing to take on the burden of paying my own taxes and providing my own office space in the hope that I will gain a sense of freedom over my life. This drive to start a business makes me one of five million new businesses in the US a year,1 with approximately twenty percent of those small businesses expected to close before making the one-year mark.
And yet here I am, having entered a new phase of my development as an American Citizen: the Entrepreneur. In our poolside meetings, we have often mocked the idea of the Entrepreneur. As an Entrepreneur, I am supposed to carry myself with utter confidence in my ideas, firm in my belief in myself that doubters will not tell me to my face that I’m an idiot and that my ideas are preposterous, but will wait until after the networking event to grumble about how full of shit I am. Believers, though, in my Entrepreneurial drive will fall in line. The Entrepreneurial Handbook has no entry on cynicism, especially if you are a woman. You need to have a zeal for your business and your abilities akin to that of Joan of Arc. Considering the primacy of individualism in our culture, Joan of Arc, were she living in America today, wouldn’t have been a religious martyr; she would have been a Founder.
To prepare myself for Entrepreneurship, Pool Party Members, I did a deep dive into recent female Entrepreneurs. You may know their names: Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey (aka Sorokin), and our own homegrown flimflam ma’am, Gina Champion-Cain. You may be saying, Auxie my dear, these are not the texts you should study as you become an Entrepreneur.
I assure you that I am not interested in following these business templates. I’m examining them as precautionary tales. All these women got caught up in the lifestyle of successful entrepreneurship—the private chefs, the parties, the glamorous connections, the magazine covers. As many Entrepreneurs do, they also believed themselves invincible, above the law. I should know: I’ve been in the position of explaining laws and consequences to Entrepreneurs, only to be told, “We can’t do that—it would put us out of business!” Yes, to follow the law.
Points in my favor for NOT becoming a criminal Entrepreneur: I’m not attracted to private jets, fancy cars, or even mani-pedis. You know; I don’t even dye my hair anymore. I do, like you, live in one of the most expensive metro areas in the US and I happen to co-own a house. Having been houseless in the past (in a romantic, feckless sense), I know what the options are. And I like owning property. It wasn’t until I bought this house with my husband that I recalled how much I liked digging holes and doing experiments in them. You can’t earn a living doing that unless you’re an efficient digger (I’m not) or have a Ph.D in something digging-adjacent (I don’t). To allow myself the leisure of hole-digging, I need to exchange my labor for some cash, as we all do.
I am compelled in this free society to join every American and to prove my economic value. And I know that herein is the challenge for me: even when I was willing to be a wage slave, I still struggled to convince interviewers of my value to the business. At one point, trying to escape a company run by a middle-class man trying to keep up with his childhood friends who’d inherited their wealth, I went on forty-five interviews without a single offer. I’m too honest in interviews about my flaws and what I don’t know; remember, I haven’t dyed my hair since 2010. There will be challenges to landing clients in my consulting business and most of the challenges are self-made, inherent to my personality. I believe of all the people who know me, you understand this the best. I am, though, willing to persevere.
If there is a thing that I do want to sell, that I have an Entrepreneurial Zeal for, it’s a lifestyle. A work style. One that’s in line with the ethos of Pool Party. I call it the 1-4-40.
Succinctly, it is:
1 Good Job
4 Days/Week
40 Weeks/Year
When I’ve pitched this to other people, they agree with the four days; studies have shown that four-day workweeks increase revenue and productivity and lower turnover. It’s even a demand with the current UAW strike. But they scoff at the 40 weeks a year. “That’s a teacher schedule!2”, they say, as if teachers are particularly lazy. ([Redacted], we know how hard you’ve worked in your career.) Then they push me to explain how companies would do it and why. Rarely, though, do they ask me why I want to only work approximately 160 days out of the year rather than the standard American 218-244 working days a year (or more, if you work in hospitality, retail, or health care). No one has ever been at a loss with what they would do with that extra time.
Because we all have dreams of how we can spend our time and not all of it is “frivolous poolside chitchat,” as some of our naysayers would call what we do. I know that you, beautiful Members of the Pool Party, have dreams; perhaps it is traveling by sailboat to Belize to take free diving courses to master your apnea techniques that will improve your daily snorkel session. Maybe you want to attend a horror film festival in a small mountain town and you’d like to drive there rather than fly. You may just want to take the time to enjoy this place with its perfect weather. Or you just want to take a few weeks to be at home and re-plaster the outside of your house rather than pay someone to do it? Or work with your neighbors to clean up an abandoned plot and plant a community garden? Or just spend time with your kids when they aren’t in school? Or to have a kid? Remember, we suck in this country about parental leave —twelve weeks is the most you can get under the law. My goal is to give everyone twelve weeks a year, regardless if they have children or not.
The naysayers always push me to answer how or why “companies” would do it. The short answer I give them is that there are always inefficiencies that eat time in companies; indeed, I’ve made a career out of finding them and getting rid of them, along with the money paid to employees to do the work. The why is very simple. We demand that they give us this time or else we won’t work. We did see how few of us worked in “essential industries” that needed in-person collaboration nearly three years ago; surely they could try to compress that inessential work into 160 days?
You all know that I’m not against work; I like doing hard things. But since returning to America, I have found a false sense of urgency in the world of business, and I don’t get it. Most of this urgency doesn’t benefit anyone in the long-run; we’re selling a SaaS reliant on energy-hungry remotely-hosted servers that depends on rare earth elements mined in dehumanizing and ecosystem-destroying ways or an object that is made of plastic that will spend eternity in a landfill after it was used for two years or less. So little that most of us do for money truly helps improve anyone else’s daily life.
The only thing we are rushing towards in our hurry is climate disaster. And I know that the planet will survive, that life in some dumb form will survive, but shouldn’t we avert some suffering? Shouldn’t we allow people time to care for each other, time for leisure, poolside or not?
So I am trying, in my small way, to see if I can make the 1-4-40. Can I make my one Good Job out of myriad clients? Can I figure out how to only work four days a week for them? Can I find the projects to occupy twelve non-working weeks a year?
Answering these questions are what I’m mustering my Entrepreneurial Zeal for.
As always, I await your ideas and feedback.
See you by the pool,
Auxie
This number is what I scraped for looking at US Census monthly business filings. This number is the total of new businesses “started” in 2022. It is unclear how many of this EINs are the result of business restructuring AND it’s also possible to start a small business as a sole proprietorship in the US and not apply for a separate Tax ID, but I’m going with it. This website also uses that number. https://www.commerceinstitute.com/new-businesses-started-every-year/
I did research! Most teachers are averaging 54 hours a week, and working way more than 40 weeks a year. https://www.edweek.org/research-center/reports/teaching-profession-in-crisis-national-teacher-survey; https://www.weareteachers.com/teacher-overtime/