Time off.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

This month, as we were preparing the cover story about the need to work less, I took a few days off myself. My wife and I were celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary, and we couldn't decide where to go. We boiled our choices down to either Florence, Italy, or Bayfield, Wisconsin, and Bayfield won somehow. And I'm glad. It was a beautiful drive up to Lake Superior, and we really unwound. We took a boat ride to see the Apostle Islands. We went on a hike. I did some birding and a little fishing, which is how I managed to find myself sixty yards from a big-assed black bear. (Fortunately, the bear was more interested in the raspberries than me.) Other wildlife abounded: bald eagles, an osprey, a loon, red-eyed vireos, a coyote, and even a bobcat, which ran across the road in front of us.

One of the highlights of the trip was unplugging. I didn't take a laptop. I didn't check e-mail or go on Facebook or Twitter. We didn't watch TV, and we hardly used the phone at all. I didn't miss any of it. And I didn't miss work, either.

More free time is key to our happiness and health, author John de Graaf points out. He also makes the strong case that a shorter workweek will mean fewer people going unemployed. This essential truth isn't new to our pages. William Green, the head of the American Federation of Labor, made the case for the thirty-hour week way back in September 1929. And like de Graaf, Green stressed both full employment and increased happiness. "Reducing the work period--daily and weekly--enables wage earners to share the opportunities for leisure which formerly were the privilege of only the wealthy," Green wrote.

Eighty-one years later, we still need to reduce that work period.

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