What I set out to do in this intervention was to challenge my conception of spare time within my work space. By this, I do not mean the formal breaks that I am provided with, I am talking about the periods of time when I am working but I am doing nothing in particular. I wanted to challenge the periods in which I was doing nothing, to at first accentuate the potential periods in which i could be doing more with my time, and secondly to see if I could challenge the 'work' time by reclaiming it for myself, and reclaim it as my 'leisure' time. I thought this was an interesting area to of wasted time to challenge, because I wanted to see if you could actually take control of this time when it really is someone else's; the employer's. I wanted to to see if it could be made into 'my' free time, even though my time was already being paid for by someone else.
By no means was this an intervention to justify being lazy or avoiding your duties whilst working, I was not ignoring the work that needed be done, and for all understanding whilst doing these interventions me and my colleagues were seen to be working to our full potential. What we tackled in this set of mini interventions was the genuine down time between jobs when there was nothing else to do. These periods occur in all work places, whether it be a chance to chat to your colleague or a customer, check your phone, have a chat by the water cooler, stare into space, relax for a second. These are breaks away from work within work time, but what we wanted to challenge was whether it was our time or the employer's.
The intervention was to try and reclaim this time by doing absolutely anything that the person wanted to do in these periods, which was something physical and creative; something that could be seen and questioned. The reason why I suggested it to be something creative was to revert back to what we wanted to achieve in our initial chats as a group. We believed that pushing someone to be creative was the one way to get people to project their true feelings as to what that period of time represented to them. Secondly, the reason why in this intervention I wanted it to be something physical, is because I wanted these pieces to have presence in the work place and by actually producing something that could be seen allowed us to reflect and look back on all the pieces and the visualise the time we had reclaimed. Those periods of time were not just visualised but represented by these pieces. These little mini interventions were physical representations of time we had reclaimed within the monotony of work.
This was of course something that could not just be done in one shift, as it would have been too obvious not only to the employer but to ourselves. I did not want these interventions to be forced, as they were intended to provide a means for the worker to slowly start to establish an authority over his own time within work and leisure. We have been doing this for the past month slowly and surely, and what would have been interesting to know is the accumulative amount of time these little interventions had taken away from work time. However that was not the aim for the intervention, it was to provide myself and those around me with the drive to recognise the time spent within our everyday workday and to realise how we could reclaim some of our work time for our own leisure time. It was intended to do this so that we could realise the use of our actual leisure time away from work.
But as i said it would have been interesting to actually accumulate the time spent, because what I have noticed more and more as this project continues is the idea that leisure is just a product of labour and then just like work shouldn't this time be recorded. Should we have a quota to reach of a certain amount of hours of leisure a week? Should we have to clock in and out of our free time too? This is a concept I think we should tackle in our final intervention, when we develop this idea of trying to reclaim time and see who our time really belongs to.
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