Better Together

Think about Saturday. Not the errands or the chores, but why Saturday feels different from a random day off. If you take a vacation day on a Tuesday in March, you still get 24 hours of freedom, but it doesn’t feel the same. Your friends are at work. The restaurants are quieter. The energy is missing. You’re free, but the freedom doesn’t quite land.

Saturday works because everyone is off at the same time. The value isn’t in the day itself. It’s in the fact that millions of people share it simultaneously. Your Saturday is worth more because of everyone else’s Saturday.

In 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin decided that the weekend was bourgeois and inefficient. So, he introduced nepreryvka, or the continuous workweek. It was five days long, with each worker receiving a single, randomly assigned day off. Soviet factories could keep humming 365 days a year. On paper, this was actually a better deal for workers who previously had only Sunday off. Now they got two days off every week.

Workers hated it. Rather than most of the country having Sunday off together, now only 20% of the population was free on any given day. “What are we to do at home if the wife is in the factory, the children in school, and no one can come to see us?” one worker complained. “That’s no holiday if you have to celebrate by yourself.” By 1931, Stalin backtracked and reinstated a coordinated day off. Even in a command economy, you can’t mandate away the human need for shared time.

Economists and network theorists have a name for what Stalin stumbled into. When the value of something increases as more people participate in it, that’s a network effect. The telephone was useless when only one person had it. Every additional person who got a phone made every other phone more valuable. Amazon got better as more buyers and sellers joined. Your neighborhood got safer when more of your neighbors looked out for each other. The network creates the value, and the participants create the network.

I think the same principle applies to us. Right here, in these buildings, with these people.

I walked through the shop floor a while back on a day when a lot of folks were out. The equipment was there. The processes were there. The potential was there. But something was missing. It felt like a phone with no one to call. All the infrastructure of connection was there, waiting for people to animate it. When I walk through on a normal Tuesday and the place is humming, something different is happening. Problems are getting solved in hallways. Someone is answering a question they didn’t know their neighbor had. A joke is being told that somehow leads to a better idea. That stuff doesn’t show up on a process map. It can’t be scheduled.

This is the part that doesn’t get said enough in conversations about where and how we work: when you show up, you don’t just do your job. You become part of someone else’s network. Your presence increases the value of everyone else’s presence. Your colleague’s chance encounter with you this morning might be the thing that unsticks a problem they’ve been carrying for three days. You’ll never know; neither will they. That’s how networks work. The value is often invisible, distributed, and impossible to trace.

The flip side is equally true, and it’s uncomfortable. When people opt out of the network—even for entirely understandable reasons—the network degrades a little for everyone. It’s not personal. It’s not a judgment. It’s just physics. Every node that goes dark makes the remaining nodes a bit lonelier, a bit less connected, and a bit less likely to generate the spontaneous value that can’t be manufactured any other way.

I’ve thought about this in my own life. The years when I was most isolated, I told myself I was fine. I had what I needed. I was managing. What I couldn’t see was what I was costing the people around me by being absent from them, and what I was costing myself by stepping out of the network of human connection that I was wired for. We are not wired to be solo nodes. We are wired for the network.

None of this is an argument for ignoring the genuine complexity of modern work. Flexibility matters. Life is complicated. There are seasons and situations that require all kinds of arrangements.

But I want us to understand what we actually have here. We have a community of people who, on their best days, make each other sharper, braver, more creative, and more capable than any of us would be alone. That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the most valuable thing we have. It doesn’t live in a server or a policy manual. It lives in proximity. It lives in presence. It lives in the daily, ordinary, often unnoticed decision to show up and be here with each other.

Saturday is better because we share it. So is Tuesday—if we work the Bison Way.