If you’ve been following this blog over the past year, you’ve watched my concept evolve in real time. What started as a focused intervention on the 40+-hour workweek has grown into something much larger. And today, I want to share where we’re headed.
From One Intervention to a Larger Conversation
When I first announced The 25-Hour Week back in August, I was convinced the book needed to be a policy argument. A manifesto for reduced work hours. A battle cry against the crushing weight of time poverty.
But as I wrote, as I talked with my book architect Heidi, as I sat with the material and lived into my own transition toward retirement, something shifted. I realized I was writing about symptoms when I needed to be writing about systems. I was proposing a solution when I needed to be opening a conversation.
The problem isn’t just that we work too much. The problem is that we’ve built entire economic and social systems around extraction rather than flourishing. We’ve created cultures where exhaustion is a badge of honor and rest feels transgressive. We’ve normalized a pace of life that leaves us efficient but brittle.
And those systems? They’re human inventions. Which means they’re subject to human choice.
A New Title, A New Focus
The book has a new working title: Room to Be Human: Building a Human-Focused, Time-Rich Future in the Age of Acceleration.
The shift isn’t cosmetic. It reflects a fundamental reorientation.
This is no longer a book about one policy intervention. It’s a book about what happens when progress stops feeling like progress. About the mismatch between what we were promised and what we’re living. About the canaries who have been warning us for two hundred years, from Mary Shelley to Aldous Huxley to Kurt Vonnegut, that acceleration without reflection leads somewhere we don’t want to go.
My father needed to be more present in this story. That realization hit me hard during the revision process. “I believe nothing could have changed my life more than a kinder set of leaders in my father’s life.” That’s the real heart of this book. The impact that leaders have on generations beyond their direct reports. The generational inheritance of toil that so many of us carry without even realizing it.
The Eight C’s
The new structure follows what I’m calling the Eight C’s:
The Crush opens with the lived reality of time poverty. No analysis, just naming what so many of us experience: the alarm that triggers stress before your feet hit the floor, the to-do list that never shrinks, the guilt when you choose rest over productivity. This chapter is about feeling seen, not blamed.
The Canaries establishes the literary and prophetic tradition behind the book. Huxley, Forster, Vonnegut, Shelley, Dickens. These writers have been warning us for two hundred years. Grounding the book in that tradition gives it historical weight without feeling academic.
The Clash moves into systems. How did we get here? The stories we inherited about productivity and success. The fifty-year theft where productivity and wages decoupled. The myth of scarcity. The way every technological revolution promised leisure and delivered extraction.
The Cost raises the stakes. Time poverty isn’t a personal failure. It’s a crisis with measurable costs to our health, our relationships, our communities, and our democracy. A society of time-poor people becomes optimized but undernourished in the things that make life worth living.
The Context answers the question: why now? AI represents both the ultimate threat and the ultimate opportunity. We can accelerate toward efficient emptiness, or we can finally deliver on technology’s promise to free us from drudgery. The difference depends on choice, not technology.
The Choice is the pivot. This is where Norway comes in. Where Agile Six comes in. Where I can share what I’ve learned about designing organizations around trust and wholeness rather than command and control. Not as a prescription, but as evidence that alternatives already exist.
The Cures is where the original manuscript lives. The interventions. Shortened work weeks. Better gig benefits. The time dividend concept, where productivity gains return to workers as time rather than disappearing into shareholder pockets. Teal cultures with flat, organic, autonomous teams. Decoupling healthcare from employment. Universal childcare. These are the practical countermeasures, the things we can actually do.
The Commons is where everything converges. Time as a shared resource, not an individual commodity. The invitation to meet in Rumi’s field, “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” And the introduction of something new.
Introducing The Archipelago Project
Here’s what I’m most excited about.
This book is no longer a standalone effort. It’s the foundation of something larger that I’m calling The Archipelago Project.
The name comes from a lesson embedded in Huxley’s Island. He imagined Pala, a small island society that made different choices. Technology that served people rather than managed them. Work designed around human wholeness. Communities built for presence rather than productivity. Messy, imperfect, but alive.
But Pala fell. It was one island in an ocean of extraction. Too small, too isolated. The forces of the dominant culture overwhelmed it.
That’s the lesson we carry forward: One island isn’t enough.
The answer isn’t to build one perfect community. It’s to build an archipelago: many experiments, connected and supporting each other, too numerous and too networked to be overwhelmed.
The Archipelago Project will include:
The Book – Room to Be Human – launching later this year as the foundational text.
A Podcast – Conversations with fellow travelers. Leaders who are building differently. Thinkers exploring what comes next. People positioned to “define the world for someone else,” as I’ve put it before. Pastors, teachers, CEOs, policy makers, writers, managers, and anyone who shapes the conditions under which other people experience their days.
A Website – A gathering place for what I’ve been calling “transcenders.” Not people who need to be taught or convinced, but people who value open-ended conversations that spark more questions than answers. A space for lonely leaders who want to slow down and talk about where humanity is going.
The Destination: SXSW 2027
All of this is building toward something specific. I’ll be giving a speaking lecture and book signing at South by Southwest in March 2027. Would love to see you all there!
That’s the milestone. That’s when The Archipelago Project officially launches into the world.
Between now and then, I’ll be finishing the book, building the podcast, creating the community infrastructure, and continuing to write here. This blog will remain what it’s always been: a place to think out loud, to share rough drafts of ideas, to invite conversation rather than deliver conclusions.
The Invitation Remains
I’m not positioning myself as someone with answers. I’m positioning myself as a witness. Someone who has experienced both the crush and the alternative. Someone who built a company on different principles and is now stepping back to see what might grow in the space that’s opened up.
The story arc of this book moves from feeling to validation to understanding to urgency to possibility to invitation. And that final word, invitation, is the most important one.
This isn’t about me handing down a blueprint. It’s about opening space for collective imagination.
As Dickens wrote of Fezziwig, we all have “the power to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.” That power extends beyond the office. It shapes families, communities, and the future we’re building together.
If you’ve been reading this blog quietly for a while, thank you. If you’re standing at your own threshold, wondering what comes next, I hope you’ll stay tuned.
The archipelago is forming. And there’s room for you on these islands.
A Call for Collaborators
I’m not building this alone. I can’t.
If you’re reading this and something is stirring, I want to hear from you. I’m looking for collaborators who want to help shape The Archipelago Project from the ground up.
Maybe you’re a podcast producer who knows how to bring conversations to life. Maybe you’re a designer or developer who can help build the digital commons where this community gathers. Maybe you’re a researcher tracking experiments in reduced work hours, or a policy wonk who understands the levers of change. Maybe you’re a leader who has already built something different and wants to share what you’ve learned. Maybe you’re a writer, an organizer, a connector of people and ideas.
Or maybe you’re just someone who feels the crush, who senses that something essential is slipping away, and who refuses to accept that this is just how it has to be.
Whatever you bring, if this resonates, reach out. Comment below. Send me a message at robert@retired.email. Let’s talk.
The work ahead is too important and too large for any one person. We need many hands, many perspectives, many islands working together. That’s the whole point.
Let’s start saving the world. Together.
More soon.
Robert
Better Places 