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Woman flips the script on habits, touting the benefits of a 'chaotically organized life'

Being unable to stick to routines and habits doesn't mean you're lazy, says Elizabeth Filips.

Elizabeth Filips/YouTube

Elizabeth Filips shares some refreshing insights for people who can't stick to habits.

One of the beautiful things about humans is how diverse we are. Not just in the way we look, dress and eat, but in the way we feel, think and process. What works for one person won't necessarily work for another, and trying to force a square peg into a round hole is just an exercise in frustration.

This truth is particularly apparent in the realm of productivity.

Productivity "hacks" are everywhere these days. As of July 2023, James Clear's book "Atomic Habits" has sold 15 million copies worldwide. Clear's approach to habit formation has made waves because it feels far more accessible and achievable than many others—and indeed, many have found it life-changing—but what if consistent habits and routines aren't a part of your makeup?

That's the question Elizabeth Filips addresses in a script-flipping video describing how her brain simply works differently.

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Danes have the best work-life balance in the world thanks to these 3 important beliefs.

This article originally appeared on November 23, 2016

By the end of her first week living in Denmark, Helen Russell was worried about her husband's brand-new job.

She explained in an article she wrote for Stylist that she was sure Lego had fired him already because he kept coming home early.

Originally from the U.K., Russell was used to her home country's work customs, where late nights and long hours were worn as a badge of honor. She felt surprised and embarrassed when her husband first came home from work in the early afternoon — she'd hardly started her own day of freelance writing.

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Well Being

Four lessons the U.S. can take from Iceland's hugely successful 4-day workweek trial

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The country of Iceland has released the analysis of its 4-day work week experiment and the results speak for themselves.

The trials run by Reykjavík City Council and the national government took place from 2015 to 2019 and included about 1% of Iceland's working population, making it the world's largest shortened workweek trial to date. The findings show that paying people the same amount to work fewer hours per week results in a happier, healthier workforce with similar or increased productivity. Who knew?

Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy, a UK think tank that co-conducted a study of the trials, said in a statement: "This study shows that the world's largest-ever trial of a shorter working week in the public sector was by all measures an overwhelming success. It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks—and lessons can be learned for other governments."

So what are those lessons we can learn?

1) There's nothing magical about a 40-hour workweek.

Most of the workers in the trial reduced their hours from 40 hours per week to 35 or 36, without any decrease in productivity. In fact, the study found "Productivity and service provision remained the same or improved across the majority of trial workplaces."

Forty hours is an arbitrary number that was initially instituted in the U.S. as a response to the inhumane factory hours workers were forced into at the dawn of the industrial age. And this isn't the first study to show that working fewer than 40 hours isn't some magical, ideal number of working hours. A New Zealand company that cut its hours to 32 hours a week had similar results as this Iceland trial—happier employees and no loss in productivity.

2) Paying people more for their time may actually make them more productive.

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A comic about hard work and depression that everyone should read.

"I do not know what my identity is when I am not working."

Many of us seem to be trapped in a capitalist dichotomy of our work as the measure of our personal value and the need to express ourselves on our own terms and schedule.

Sometimes, that schedule is not so efficient. It runs in a bit of a cycle, too — it's not like being depressed has ever made anyone a particularly efficient person.

I'm an autobiographical cartoonist, among other things, although my work seems to vary between adventure girl to angry feminist to anxious potato. I often write at the intersection of race and the immigrant experience, although it is essentially inextricable from my identity as a brown immigrant woman.

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