Since I am obsessed with all things sartorial, I couldn't help but be riveted by a recent Wall Street Journal story about fabulously powerful people who self-ban the wearing of suits.

Is wearing a suit now the sign of a macher manque?

In the course of my reporting travels during the past year, all of the sources with whom I interviewed who had the most power--wielding the most clout, capital and all-around largest power footprint--were all adorned in anything but a suit.

By contrast, when I recently did a favor for a friend and picked up her repaired Tag Heuer at Tourneau, the watch salesman was donning a three-piece summer-weight number that was decidedly NOT off the rack. A lucre side gig? Family money? Power user of Woodbury Common?

I've noticed this a lot in the service sector: they are all dressed up, while we in Corporate America are all dressed down. Even the halls of once-starchy P&G and once white-shirt-only IBM are filled with some awesomely casual gear.

The upshot is that if you want to see someone turned out in the above-shown Gekko gear, you are more likely to see it on the body of a Barney's salesman than in the lobby of a midtown hedge fund. In these circles, the new uniform is the dry-cleaned, many-hundreds-of-dollars jeans paired with a bespoke shirt and couture jacket. The women are rocking the jeans with the mini blazer.

The power suit is becoming powerless. Wearing whatever you want now seems to be the new emblem of a new kind of power. As in, I am so incredibly amazing and fabulous that corporate dress codes and social norms do not apply to me.

Is this one more upside-downism in a world that seems increasingly topsy turvy?

Jeans (albeit crisp and pressed): the New Power Wear?

With the rise of designer gas prices, no one is getting slaughtered more than the fastest-growing group of commuters: extreme commuters. Soon, they may well have to flee suburbia.

This made me think of a study I came across a few years ago when I was writing a piece about the epidemic of extreme commuting.

The research came from a fascinting reserach duo in Europe, who proved the Faustian Bargain of commuting in a paper called The Stress That Doesn't Pay: The Commuting Paradox.

The researchers, economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, of the University of Zurich's Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, found that most people travel long distances with the idea that they'll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school.

They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters.

A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, Frey and Stutzer found. People usually overestimate the value of the things they'll obtain by commuting -- more money, more material goods, more prestige -- and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health.

Says Stutzer, "Commuting is a stress that doesn't pay off."

Something else to think about in the era of couture gas.

I am deep in a fantasy. It is a new kind of fantasy for me, having nothing to do with the obtaining of something Marc Jacobs or the receiving of a free night's stay (room service included) at the Four Seasons.

No, this fantasy is of an entirely different order. It involves the new currency in the workplace. The cushiest and most lusted after: the ability to control one's time. The flexibilty to sculpt one's schedule.

It is with the thought of this new benefit in mind--and in heavy withdrawal from an extra-luxe vacation--that I am filled with the fantasy of taking next summer off.

I first learned of this workplace micro-trend last summer, when I wrote a piece about the shape of perks to come.

In reporting this little ditty, I learned that more women at consulting shops like Deloitte and Touche and Ernst and Young were slicing and dicing their schedules so as to take the summers off to spend with their kids.

At around the same time, I heard the lovely story of a former colleague who has swung at deal at her employer where she works full time during the school year and then takes the summers off to dabble a la plage with her two boys. In return she receives 80% of her paycheck. Believe me. This girl is good. They would do anything to keep her.

Heaven knows most working women--save the trustafarian ovarian-lottery winners--can't afford this kind of flexibility. Not without big-money-man husbands.

And many jobs wouldn't lend themselves to such an arrangement.

But work with me. With the prospect of having the summer off, I know I for one would practice an entirely different kind of spending discipline so as to salt away enough to afford such largesse. I'm also waging that there are more kinds of knowledge-worker jobs that could be arranged to take advantage of such scheduling paradise.

Does this sound lifestsyle redesign sound delicious to anyone else?

Simple answer: No. That’s an old game.

While well-meaning politicians, corporate executives and school administrators begin exploring, and even mandating, “four-day workweeks” to fight the pain at the pump, we scratch our heads. Why not shift the work environment to one where physical presence, the quantity of hours one works, and the commute itself are rendered obsolete?

It’s time to start viewing office work as something we do, not related to a place we go.

Merely showing up at a job doesn’t deliver business results. People are showing up at their jobs today, and may or may not be getting anything done. A four-day workweek only sustains this system of time equating to productivity.

Yes, we agree that reducing your commute by one day may save some money, but let’s offer people the opportunity to experience some real savings – and for businesses to unleash the full potential of their employees.

Final note: check out this nifty calculator that lets you figure out whether or not you should move closer to work in order to save money on commuting costs. You’re supposed to fiddle with the cost-of-the-new-house variable and the distance variable, but we played with the number of commuting days a week. Moving closer to work can make a difference…but only driving to an official physical office space two or three days a week saves you BIG.

When you think about work-life balance, don't blame your work. It is a misconception that you need a great job for a great life. The connection between a good job and a good life is tenuous. So you should just worry about the basics:

Do you have goals you can meet?

Do you feel challenged by your work?

Do you have control over your workload?

If you answer yes to all these questions, then your problems in life probably don't stem from work. They are probably personal. So stop thinking chaning your job is going to change your life.

In fact, the thing you really need to be happy is sex. Once a week with the same person. That's way more important than your job, or the money you make or the friends you have. (Although, doing well at any of those things does give you a wider range of people to choose from for sex.)

When it comes to work-life balance, then, you're not really looking for balance. Really, it's impossible, and you know it and you have never met anyone who honestly could say they had it. You are really looking for peace and happiness. And those things are attainable, if you stop focusing on money. You only need $40,000 a year to reach peace and happiness. Really. Even in New York City. Because happiness is about your optimism levels and your sex life and not about your job.

So get a job that doesn't undermine your ability to have peace. And then focus on your sex life. And when you hear your friends talking about work-life balance, recognize that at their core, what they are really talking about is that if they approached life with more optimism then they would be more likely to be happier with their choices: Whether or not they are balanced.

Before you get up in arms, please realize that the hardest workers in the office are usually the most lame. So you should never aspire to be that person. I mean, really, if you are working the hardest, you gotta ask yourself why. Are you dumber than everyone else? Slower? More of a doormat? Or maybe all three, but in any case, any answer is bad.

So aim to be only a sort-of hard worker. This will give you great thinking time, for one thing, but for another thing, it'll allow you to focus on only doing stuff your boss will notice.

Hold it. Are you about to tell me that you do great work and that is how you'll get ahead? Forget it. People get promoted for being liked. And the hardest worker is seldom the most liked because you need to take time to walk about the office doing nice things for people in order to be liked.

The bad news is that the way to get what you want out of work is to be great at office politics. The good news is that office politics is about being nice. Most of you probably want some feeling of work-life balance, and you will get that by doing less work at your desk and spending more time being nice.

(Newsflash: People would rather work with someone who is incompetent and likable than super-competent and a jerk. So you are safe trading long hours for long lunches.)

The most important component of managing up is figuring out what your boss cares about and then doing sub-par work on everything your boss gives you to do but does not really care about. If your boss doesn't care, then you should not care either, right? Make sure you get some work that is super-important to your boss, and do a great job on it. Then tell everyone what a great a job you did.

Your good work is like a tree in the forest: If you don't yell, no one will hear it, and then there will be debate about whether you really did it. Squash debate. Toot your own horn. This is the key to feeling like you have control over your life.

If people think you do great work, you will get more control over the work you take. Superstars have control over their lives because superstars are hard to replace. You can only be a superstar if you are careful to do what matters to people above you. There is not really flextime in the workplace. There is accommodating hard-to-replace workers. So be one. By managing up.

Believe it or not, according to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey, the following are the top ten “most unusual” excuses given for being late to work (and by the way, one out of four workers admits to making up fake excuses – at least they’re honest about lying):

1. While rowing across the river to work, I got lost in the fog.
2. Someone stole all my daffodils.
3. I had to go audition for American Idol.
4. My ex-husband stole my car so I couldn’t drive to work.
5. My route to work was shut down by a Presidential motorcade.
6. I wasn’t thinking and accidentally went to my old job.
7. I was indicted for securities fraud this morning.
8. The line was too long at Starbucks.
9. I was trying to get my gun back from the police.
10. I didn’t have money for gas because all of the pawn shops were
closed.

We appreciate someone trying to get a laugh, but when you use the ROWE mindset, none of these excuses are funny. Because there is no such thing as a good excuse, a bad excuse or an unusual excuse in a ROWE. The only thing that matters is whether or not the work is getting done.

When we’re trying to explain ROWE, we often talk about socially acceptable excuses and socially unacceptable excuses. Socially acceptable excuses are the most common: traffic, getting the kids ready, etc. Socially unacceptable excuses would be something like “drank too much last night and needed to sleep it off” or “the thought of coming in and doing this soul-stealing job had me nailed to the mattress as I hit the snooze bar repeatedly until the fear of getting fired motivated me to get out of bed.”

In all those cases, the person might come in a half hour or an hour late. In all of those cases, the person might have gone on to have a very productive day. The person may have even missed a meeting, but was still able to recover that lost experience and contribute to the bottom line. In the end, the nature of the excuse doesn’t really matter. In fact, many managers might even wonder if the excuses are even true.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine taking excuses entirely out of the workplace. Employees don’t give them. Managers don’t ask for them. What happens? Do people start coming in later and later and later? Or do they come in more or less at the same time? Are people more productive or less productive? Or the same?

Finally, we did find a ray of hope in the CareerBuilder article, which notes that “43 percent of hiring managers say they don’t mind if their employees are late as long as their work is completed on time with good quality.” We think this is great news for all of us who are passionate about ROWE. That means that almost half of the population generally believes that results are more important than time.

Maybe with a little work we could get that number north of fifty. We think that would be a change for the better.

Recent work history points to colossal work-life-balance failure. For example, the baby boomers tried it, and ended up inventing the term latchkey kids. And when the latchkey kids grew up (generation X) and became parents themselves, they became the most hands-on parents the world has seen – inventing terms like the opt-out revolution and shared care parenting.

But generation Y sees both these options, largely, as failures. In the eyes of the millennial generation, it's a failure to never be home with your kids, and it's a failure to give up your career in order to parent. You could say that these young workers will see things differently when they have kids. But that's probably not true.

Generation y sees work and life as blended rather than competitive with each other. Who, after all, really wants work that competes with their life? It makes sense that they would complement each other.

And this is where technology comes in. The Blackberry is a source of information overload to people who experience information overload – mostly those over age thirty. To those under age thirty, they are so good at managing the fast and endless flow of huge amounts of information, that they do not experience a feeling of information overload. They are in permanent sift-and-synthesize mode.

This state of information processing at all times means that work and life blend as a mélange of ideas and connections that are coming through, largely, the same sources. Are you wondering if you are going to be able to manage your work and life in a way that you don't have to feign that balance is possible? Are you wondering if you can manage connections for both people and information in a way that makes a blend of work and life possible? It comes down, not really, to when you were born, but how you use media.

So figure out how to use social media and productivity tools in a way that blend your work and your life so they help each other. And if you want to know what generation you are really part of, here's a test.

Here’s the deal: *Our beliefs about work – forty hours, Monday through Friday, eight to five – are outdated, outmoded, out to lunch. Every day people go to work and waste their time, their company’s time, and their lives in a system based on assumptions – about how work gets done and what work looks like – that don’t apply in today’s global, 24/7 economy.

We go to work and give everything we have and are treated like children who, if left unattended, will steal candy.
We go to work and watch someone who isn’t very good at their job get promoted because they got in earlier and stayed later than anyone else.

We go to work and sit through overlong, overstaffed meetings to talk about the next overlong, overstaffed meeting.

We see talented, competent, productive people get penalized for having kids, for not being good at office politics, for being a little different.

We go to work in the Information Age, but the nature of the workplace hasn’t fundamentally changed since the Industrial Age.
But most of all – most tragically of all – we play the game.

We play the game even though we know in our heart of hearts the game doesn’t make any sense.*

We’re going to go out on a limb and say something controversial: We want people to live. We want the workforce to be filled with alive, mostly healthy people. And yet, according to a recent study, a third of the population of the U.K., and over 40 percent in the U.S., regularly sleep less than five hours a night, and that lack of sleep can be deadly. Get that little sleep and your risk of “cardiovascular death” doubles.

Studies like this make us wonder: How much worse does life have to get before people push back? How much freedom and control can our jobs take from us before we say “Enough”? It’s not as if employers aren’t getting anything out of the employer-employee bargain. You are doing your job, not collecting charity benefits. And yet people are giving up sleep in order to work longer hours in the hopes their “dedication” will be rewarded.

We need a new way of thinking about, and doing, work. We need work environments where your work performance is not judged based on time. We need environments that look past the old game of flexible work schedules and trust – really trust – people to control every second of their day.

If you need sleep, then you can get sleep. If you want to have breakfast with your child, you can – without asking anyone’s permission to come in “late”. There is no need to be up at 6:30 a.m. just because you have to be at work at 8:00 a.m. You can take a nap in the middle of the day. As a result, you work when you’re rested and ready to contribute, and you rest when you need to rest. As long as you get your job done, you are not a slave to the clock.

The answer is a Results-Only Work Environment.
Any takers?

*excerpt taken from Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson

Taking a long weekend is not a vacation.

It is a fauxcation.

Wheeler-dealering above on his cell phone--in medias massage--is a lawyer I wrote about last fall on a blog post called "Hey, Guess What? This Man is on Vacation!"

The entry went:
"Meet fancy, big-time, argues-before-the-Supreme Court lawyer Robert Greene Sterne. Here he is last May in Acapulco at Water Ski Paradise, going in for a waterside deep tissue. Ah, vacation. Only…woops. The first morning of Sterne’s first day a la plage, he got word from his law firm—DC-based Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox— that his first case before the Supreme Court—a high-stakes patent affair—had finally landed a decision. Yes, that’s him—-getting the news from his office while enjoying some lumbar pressure pointing. What multitasking! The rest of Sterne’s fauxcation consisted of a montage of the the swim-trunked executive on a dock, a boat, and pool—all with cell phone in hand chatting up the press and other lawyers."

Such is the new epidemic, vacation disease , that has taken hold of Corporate America. Fauxcation takers are those who eke out an extra day for one of those long weekend, bring-your-laptop affairs spent in a Treo trance. These ersatz getaways never deliver on the great decmopression researchers say is necessary for peak performance.

Last summer I wrote a story for BusinessWeek called "Do Us A Favor, Take A Vacation." The story detailed many of the psychological reasons why you, boss--yes you!--should please, please get out of here so that we all can, too.

Remember: peak performance demands down time. Down time is not a long weekend. Nor a few extra days here and there.

Do us a favor, take a vacation. (As in at least one week and preferably more). Not a fauxcation.

Do you have an fauxcation abusers in your office? Does it mess with your work-life balance? Please. Do tell.

Work/life balance is important. We know that. It’s something people want to make sure they’ll have when they start working or get a new job.

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to go ask about work/life balance in interviews. What catches our eye (aside from how generally discouraging and depressing the advice is) is the number of statements that strike us as being completely wrong.

In a recent career advice article, we saw the advice as being sound, but still wrong. It happens to pertain to a world governed by a set of assumptions that are completely insane.

And so, we thought we’d translate the advice we saw in the article so you can see what’s really being talked about:

“Be careful about telling interviewers that you’re president of the local hockey association and that you coach four teams,” says one of the career counselors in the article. “If you do, they probably aren’t going to hire you.’”

Translation: In addition to owning your ass for 40 hours a week, your job also has a right to dictate your life outside of work.

“Naturally, if you’re a C-level candidate or a physician, you can’t expect to have much work-life balance.”

Translation: Balance isn’t for losers. Strangely, balance isn’t for winners either. We’re not sure who it’s for, but it’s certainly not for everybody.

“[I]f you’re interviewing for less senior jobs at more mature companies, ask questions about the employer’s culture and the job responsibilities instead of bringing up the issue [of having balance] directly.”

Translation: In very rare cases (certain jobs at a certain level in certain companies at a certain place in their business life cycle) you might be able to achieve some balance, but the subject is still so taboo that you can only talk about it in code.

“A more subtle query might be whether the company allows computer log-in access from home. If they say no and that you have to be here for security reasons, you can make up your own mind.”

Translation: Under no circumstances are you to stand up for yourself, push back against antiquated and misguided work policies, fight for your time, or in any way ask someone to make an exception to the rule. When in doubt: cower.

“It’s best to [ask about work-life balance] once you’re sure that the company wants to hire you.”

Translation: Who are we kidding? Your prospective employer is doing you an enormous favor in paying you the least amount of money they can in exchange for the most amount of work they can get out of you . . . while also controlling your life. Better to not ask about work-life balance until you’ve already been at the company for two years. By then you may have earned the right to even bring it up.

Is there smoke coming out of your ears?

Ours, too.

So let’s do something about it.

One of my favorite workplace stories was about how two HR renegades staged an underground coup to secretly topple the face-time, butt-in-chair, analog culture at the headquarters of Best Buy. The story--Smashing the Clock (No Meetings. No Schedules. No Joke.)--detailed Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson's very un-HR-like experiment. Their workplace psyops ended up radically altering the corporate culture at Best Buy.

Now they are working on doing the same at other companies. Their book, Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It, is landing in bookdstores now. It details the experience at Best Buy and how other companies can go about dismantling industrial age cultures that no longer work in the digital age.

I'm thrilled that Cali and Jody will be serving as our as experts here to address all of your work-life challenges. The work they have done at Best Buy is some of the most important, groundbreaking work going on in HR in the world. They are disruptive innovators in the best sense of the term.

Go ahead, ask them how they can help you.

They look so so good. Polished. Pressed. Accessorized. There is no late-school drop off for this crew. No weakening in front of the vending machine. Or missed deadlines. Or excuses. Or sub-par performance reviews. Or thought that isn't elegantly articulated.

There is a sub-class of the worker species who seem all Nietzsche super class when it comes to finessing their work-life balance. They bathe. They comb their kids' hair. They are on time. They shake it at work. That's just how they roll. A lot of people want to be them.

Are these super humans human? Or a super myth? Is one born this way? Or can the super human work-life thing be learned?

Please tell us your tales from the work-life firing lines. We want to help our readers feel less psychotic when it comes to their work life balance. Let's start with this: does anyone really have one?