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 this story on sleep and health, 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.

In a ROWE, your work performance is not judged based on time. If you need sleep, then you can get sleep. 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.

Make sense?

We were recently at the 10th annual Forbes Executive Women’s Forum in Washington, DC. We heard some good insights into what is traditionally called “work/life balance”. We also heard some stuff we frankly couldn’t believe. Like how women should consider freezing their eggs so they could focus on their careers.

It reminded us of a story we saw a few years back in San Francisco magazine. The assumption is that if you want both a career and a family you should freeze your eggs, focus on your job, then unfreeze them when you’re established enough to have the time to raise a family.

So why stop at eggs? Why not just freeze our kids until it’s more convenient to watch them grow up? Or freeze your spouse until it’s easier to have a meaningful relationship?

We’re not judging people for having this conversation. We’re judging our culture for allowing this conversation to take place at all.

We only have to make these kinds of choices if we give ‘face time’ and putting in hours the same weight as actually getting your job done. In a Results-Only Work Environment, the choice between career and family isn’t as stark. You can be good at both. If you are delivering the goods at work, then you have the freedom to work from wherever you want and whenever you want. People in a ROWE can be there for their kids and their company.

We don’t have to freeze our lives. What we can do is change the conversation. Have you heard people say insane things about postponing their life in order to further (or even keep) their job? Let us know and we’ll discuss them in a future post.

Big corporations have a hard time letting go. Check out this pilot program from Intel. The intention is to give people the “quiet time” they need to be thoughtful and creative:

“The pilot group – 300 engineers and managers, located in two US sites – will adopt a ‘Quiet Time’ agreement. Every Tuesday morning they will all set their email and IM clients to ‘offline’, forward their phones to voice mail, decline all meetings, and isolate themselves from ‘visitors’ by putting up a ‘Do not disturb’ sign at their doorway. Thus, for half a day each week they will have the ability to focus on the ‘thinking work’ that researchers have shown is critical to creativity, innovation, and to faster, better production of output.”

Okay, so let’s see if we’ve got this straight:

Quiet time agreement entered (check).
Email set to “offline” (check).
Meetings set to “decline” (check).
Doorway set to “do not disturb” (check).
Engage Tuesday morning thinking work… now!

But, of course, like any top-down, non-organic effort to manage change, what the company gives with one hand it takes away with the other:

“Of course, all this is tricky stuff. These people are doing a critical job as a team, and messing with their communications culture is not something we do lightly. There will certainly be permitted exceptions, and the pilot is being monitored closely to find out what they are and how to optimize the methodology for best effect.”

So, in other words, Intel is all for this quiet, half-of-Tuesday thinking stuff, but we also need “permitted exceptions”. And it will all be “monitored closely” lest things get out of hand. So go head employees! Rock it out! And, maybe—if you’re really, really good—after quiet time, you’ll get a graham cracker and a half pint of milk.

In a Results-Only Work Environment, you don’t have to deal with this kind of well-meaning nonsense. You are not treated like a child. Employees have complete control over when they work, and as a result they have the power to decide how to best use their time. At Best Buy, this has led to an unprecedented level of engagement and commitment. It’s also common sense. If you have to monitor and control how a knowledge worker thinks, then why did you hire him or her in the first place?