Part Time Inc.

On my street alone there are a bare minimum, 4 Bachelors degrees and 2 Masters degrees that are stay at home parents. I suspect there are many, many more. All would like to be working, but think the additional burden of hiring child care and other domestic services isn't worth the additional income. To me this is a huge waste of resources.

I want to start a company that hires only part time folks. Say the standard work day is 10am to 3pm. If each man hour has a dollar cost, what is the harm in dividing that work into smaller chunks of more workers?

Too Many Words on the Internets

I have long thought that there are too many words on the internet, and now I see that Penelope Trunk thinks so too.

There are thousands, if not millions of people writing interesting and important things on the internet everyday, but the vast majority of them are, in fact, writers. Writers are given to writing a lot. Despite the old axiom to "use fewer words", it seems that many people judge their writing success based on the number of words they get out. Is this because we were always admonished to write longer reports and papers in school? And consequently we've absorbed that as a unwritten goal.

The problem is made worse by crappy, non-writers like me, who want to write less, but even in a post about writing less, end up writing more. Like, say, this post....

This is not to say that long form writing isn't important. It very much is. Thoughtful, long works can communicate subtly and nuance and perspective that other forms can't match yet.

Infographics offer an opportunity to reduce the time it takes for your audience to understand what you are saying. Good infographics that is. I've seen quite a few that are lush, and beautiful, but use an awful lot of bandwidth and screen real estate to communicate a very small amount of information.

Also of note in Penelope's blog post is the section about graphic resumes. I've mocked up a few of these for myself using either the timeline approach, or the word salad version. Neither turned out as well as I wanted and I suspect that neither would have gotten me an interview with any of the companies from whom I've been seeking work.

Maybe I'll do a later post on ones I think are good, and ones I think are bad.

In Business, does size matter?

I was thinking today about why employment matters. Here are some things that came to mind:

1) Provides means.

2) Keeps people engaged in productive activities instead of unproductive, disruptive or even criminal ones.

3) Increases one's self esteem.

4) Shows the value society places on work.

More to come...

Later in the day, I came across this post by Brad Plumer about small vs. large businesses as job creators. In a nutshell, the current zeitgeist is that small business is always best, but the data says that larger more established firms are better at providing stability and job creation.

This seems right to me. And brings us back to the policy questions. Where should employment policy balance economic freedom vs. full employment.

This thought went of track somewhere along the way.

Career Choices

I love infographics, even low richness ones like this.

I do not begrudge any particular CEO his success, nor any entreprenuer his or her due for the risk they take and hard work they put in. But there is something about these types of ridiculous wealth accumulation that bothers me. Some thoughts in corporate friendly bullet points:

I think I think:

- Free rides are generally bad.

- People are entitled to the fruits of their labors.

- Equal opportunity trumps equal outcomes.

- America's (and probably the whole free market west's) current zeitgeist is equal opportunity for people of a particualr disposition and skill set, but not for everyone.

- The Social Contract is better than anarchy.

This post isn't going anywhere yet, so I'll have to revisit this later....

Reducing Traffic Congestion

Another potential benefit of part timing is the potential reduction in traffic volume that pulling some number of commuters out of the normal commute times would bring.

Say for instance, normal traffic volume peaks near the beginning and end of the normal workday. Lets call that start time from 7am to 9am, and the end time from 4pm to 6pm. Adding some time to allow worker at the edges of those windows to reach their destinations, then peak traffic in out thought experiment would run in the range of 6am-10am and 3pm to 7pm.

Speaking to my own current situation, I put my last kid on the bus at 8:45 am, and pick the earliest up at 3:20ish. Assuming a 30 minute commute, if I were working from say 10:30 am to 2:30 pm, my entire comment would be outside the peak traffic windows.

As an added bonus, hours like that would negate the need for lunch break, since I could eat a hearty brunch at about 9:30 or 10:00, and easily last until 2:30.

What do you think?

The Importance of Self Esteem

Sarah Kliff, writing at WonkBlog, shares the finding that Generation Y prefers self esteem to all other pleasurable experiences. Self Esteem is another reason why a more flexible career path is important. No matter how good you are at what you are doing for money, feeling really bad about what you are doing for money is a major drag on your health, relationships and finances.

Flexible Career Policy

Conor Friedsdorf writes a blog post today on this subject arguing that there is space for a political party or leader, or I suppose interest group to jump in and speak for the the intentions of this blog.

A Company of Part Timers

IDEA: a company that is fully part time. No (or very few) full timers. The idea is to use the probably vast underutilized resources of stay at home parents, and the currently unemployed to do some useful work.

As a first stab, it would probably need to be a knowledge business. A Marketing firm? Architecture firm?

Are there companies out there doing this stuff today? Any major corporation with a focus on, or tolerance for part time professional employees?

Just a data point: There are at least 4 unemployed, under age 45, college graduates (two with Master degrees) on my street. That's out of the only half or so of the people I know on the block. Perfect example of unused resources.

Why this blog exists

This blog exists because I wanted a place to capture ideas, articles and information on what I see a possible alternatives to the modern life-career trajectory that is dominant in the U.S.

Most posts will probably be links to blogs, news articles and company websites that can pull together information related to the non-traditional career.

I chose the name "The Flexible Career" to reflect what it is I am ultimately seeking. Having spent time working for a large corporation, I always felt that I was a slave to money, and therefore the job that I needed to earn money. I left that job in 2009 to be a stay at home dad, and now that my youngest child is in Kindergarten, I am ready to return to the workforce.

BUT..... Returning to the workforce for me entails either: 1) going back to work full time for another large corporation, where I will have to work a minimum of 40 hours per week at a location that will entail a commute or 2) work at a very low wage job that is a poor utilization of my skills and education. There is the obvious third choice of starting my own business, and that is something i would like to explore, but the time commitment to that is likely to exceed the 40hr/week situation with an existing company.

Anyway, this all just an information gathering and thinking exercise for now, and we'll see where it goes.