Temet nosce: A model of self-care for people who work too much

"Remind me not to invest in your company," said my dad to my brother.

My brother, Isaac, works for Northern Tool + Equipment, which is a store that sells basically what you would expect from the name. Isaac works in the business end of Northern Tool and he was explaining how the staff do not allow him (or any of their fellows employees) to work late. They also cut short Fridays--sometimes making it a 5 or 6 hour day. This is a somewhat unusual thing in the working world.

My dad's response, though somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is also a classic comment of the Protestant work ethic that drives Americans to work weeks exceeding 60 or 70 hours. We take pride in the virtue of hard work. But we sometimes, wrongly I believe, equate hard work with long work. I want to point out firstly that my brother's company is not suggesting that quality of work isn't important; in fact, it is quite the opposite. They are strongly suggesting that there needs to be a balance for the best work to be done. Quality of work is not achieved by quantity of hours; instead it is based on the focus, intensity and care taken in the time it takes to get the work done. Product may develop slower but you will get a better product in the end from a well-rested, well-cared-for workforce. That, at least, is the principle behind this model of vocational self-care.

This is particularly apt for pastors, because we work at the intersection of two groups that have a tough time walking away: the self-employed and the service sector. In some sense, pastors are employed (called) by their congregations or their church councils or their larger church bodies, but in the day to day workings of our vocations we are often left to decide how long and how hard we want to do this gig. We also tend to have a bit of a messiah-complex common to those in the service sector, who have most often entered into their particular vocations in order to help people and to make the world a better place. This is a never-ending job and many in these careers treat it as such, never truly walking away from the job.

But we do ourselves a real disservice when we fail to recharge. I could work 70 hours every week. I absolutely could. I don't, because I have enough self-awareness and a spouse who would bash me over the head for doing it, but it is easy enough to drift in that direction. Above the door in my office is a variation on an ancient Latin aphorism that reads simply, "Temet nosce" or "Know thyself." To know yourself is the first step in treating your vocation with the respect and dignity it deserves, which is often to step away from it and recover.

I don't judge my weeks by the hours I work; that simply doesn't work for the kind of vocation I have. I've heard it said that most jobs are task-oriented with relationships embedded; pastors' vocations are relationship-oriented with tasks embedded. For us, counting hours is a challenge. So are boundaries. When I meet a member at the grocery store in one sense I'm not working any more than they are, but in another sense my every word and action is as their pastor. In that way I am very much on the job.

A couple of months after starting my work as pastor I developed a metric to chart my "stresses" and "rests." For the mathematically-challenged, this may not be for you, but I hope you can still see the use in it. It was difficult to tangibly measure what I do, but I think this comes close. I score points for working in the morning, afternoon, or evening, and I also score points for additional stressors: working early or late, funerals and weddings, sudden deaths, short lunches, long drives, leading worship, and having multiple meetings. These are all weighted based on how much of a stress they are to me (each pastor's stresses would inevitably look different). Then, I tally my "rests," which include long lunch breaks, work-outs, and family time; I subtract my rests from my stressors and get a composite score. Any single day could have a score from 0 to... well, a lot. Each week I tally the daily scores and get a composite for the week. If I'm being healthy, I'm in the 8-10.5 range, but I've been as badly over-working as a 14. I've been told by pastor friends who have checked out this same metric that they score well over 16 on a regular basis. This, my friends, is not good.

A sample week of "normal working" for me

All of this is merely to say that it is hard to find balance. I appreciate places like Northern Tool for valuing that. I hope more workplaces do. I should say I have felt nothing but encouragement in this regard from the congregations I serve. Nobody complains when I leave work at 3 in the afternoon to take a long bike ride, go for a run, or get in a round of golf. They know I need it more days than not. Honestly, I rarely stay in the office until 5 because my production wanes more and more and my vocation becomes less and less relational for the sake of greater and more bland tasks. I'd rather re-charge, and I think my congregation would rather I re-charge as well. I already have a job that is difficult to turn off. Why would I spend more time in intentional stress than is necessary?

Why would any of us?