I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key:
1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it.
2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it.
3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm.
With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.
Point 1 is very important, I can confirm with also a decade of doing this.
One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working.
I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe.
Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences:
- Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs.
- Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
Anecdotally, I don’t find point 1 to be necessary at all. Points 2 and 3 are vital, however. As long as I cut work off at the end of the day, I’m fine.
Would be interested to know which lighting products you are specifically using. I've started dipping my toe into the pool of improved lighting, but the number of products out there is quite overwhelming.
To extract one bit from that: I'm a huge fan of separate devices for separate purposes. Work laptop vs personal laptop. Work phone vs personal phone. Games device vs reading device. Social media device vs productivity device.
I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task.
E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.
My recommendation (working 100% remote since 2018).
2b - have a separate work phone
If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right?
2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.
> Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door.
A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone.
For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies.
When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.)
(One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)
Good points. I religiously turn on my laptop at 9 in the morning and turn it off at 17:30. During that time I am always reachable but after that the laptop is off and I have no work related apps on my phone.
Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.
> Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.
If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.
Yep point 1 I think is the most important, but if you don't have the luxury of an office at home, having a start of work process, and an end of work process is really important e.g. at end of day, close laptop, put away in a drawer, and tidy up work paraphernalia, then sit down and have a cup of tea while reading a book. It mentally bookmarks the start and end of work, and allows your mind to reset from work mode.
These are all valid point if that's your thing. It reminds me of coffee brewing advice where the very first stated goal is "make repeatable brews" and the expert explains a very meticulous protocol they've repeated and perfected for years now。
It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it.
When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades.
Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.
For sure, a lot of the things you're describing boils down to the flexibility -- as a perk -- you get from working from home.
But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life.
And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation.
For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.
1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you.
2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work.
3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working.
I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.
The not having work on my personal phone was a big gamechanger for me as well, even before I worked from home. Not sure when or why I made the decision but very glad I did.
I feel like the other 3 points above all help with this. That's not to say that I don't log off, and still think about something I'm working on, or wake up thinking about it (this depends on what I'm working on, how much pressure I'm feeling, and how complex/interesting it is).
But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me.
I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.
> How do you disconnect and shutdown the problem solving part of your brain?
I dont.
Instead, I substitute MY OWN projects and goals and things INSTEAD OF work's goals. So instead of killing my innate curiosity and problem solving, I change its focus to serve me.
You need to do this even if you don't subscribe to the idea of work life separation. You'll find better solutions to complex problems if you can rest, exercise, pursue a hobby or other distraction for part of each day. The subconscious needs recruitment for anything non trivial. Log it and state the problem that isn't yet solved explicitly in writing. Then affirm to yourself that you will come back with a solution.
The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.
I leave my home office and connect with my kids or go outside. Just the action of getting up and leaving the work space and starting a new activity seems to do the trick for me, YMMV of course.
We’re witnessing a categorical shift in how people sell their time.
Once upon a time, maybe a hundred years ago, people worked “days”. This was a product of the available technology at the time. The average labourer didn’t have a pocket watch to know exactly what hour it was to clock in and out. If someone worked Tuesday, they worked from sun up to sun down. They got paid “a day’s wage”.
As time-keeping technology became more prevalent, people started working hours, not days. People started to work “8 a.m. to 5 p.m.” In this period, the constraint was now commuting. The average person lives approximately 30 minutes travel from their work and this has held roughly true for most of history. If you need to travel to work, you’d better earn enough hours’ wage to make it worth it.
Now we’re seeing something new as commuting evaporates. People are working on the order of minutes. E.g., “I have a 30-minute meeting at 2 p.m., then I’m making lunch for the kids. After that, I’ll put 60 minutes into project X before the repair guy comes by to fix the oven.”
To get the same work done, people are starting to distribute it across a full waking day (even if subconsciously). Our systems and ideas haven’t caught up to this new world yet. We aren’t earning “a minute’s wage”. But it’s hard to not see the progression now that I’ve noticed it.
In the 1990s, even as a software developer, I never answered emails after working hours. Why? Because we didn’t have access to the office mail server outside the office. It was physically impossible to work from home. Add to this the fact that I didn’t have a cell phone or a pager, so when I left the office, nobody could get in touch with me even if they wanted to.
On reflection, the separation of home and work was so natural that everyone took it for granted. Time moved more slowly. You felt more free because you could just disappear for an hour by going for a drive or a walk.
I'm honestly surprised that more companies haven't invested in broader vacation policies. My experience has been that the constant "on" state wears you down. The only way to get to "off" is to be OOTO officially for a week+. Add in parental responsibilities and you really don't have any headspace for yourself.
Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.
Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids?
I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far:
1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids
2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids
3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in, you get ~16 people and only one other person has kids.
And it's not like these teams are mostly college new grads or anything, it's usually people like me in their 30's.
I always wonder how much of a disadvantage it is that other people get to clock out of work, enjoy an evening, sleep through the night, and then wake up and go to work. Whereas a parent is going to clock out of work and clock in to parenting, and then when it's kid bedtime, you finally get 2-3 hours to fit in personal time that's usually still not "you" time but is you spending time with your partner.
I'd never trade my kids for my career, and I find the time I spend with them incredibly fulfilling, but it's definitely extra load. And I do depend on being good at my job to help feed them and stuff. And I did opt into this, so it's hard to say it's "unfair". But I feel like our society doesn't need more reasons not to have kids given fertility is already below replacement rate.
> Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.
At least 1 week of vacation per quarter (in addition to normal holiday time) has been fairly standard for every senior-level tech job I’ve had in a long time.
I had one job with a generous vacation policy that resulted in some people taking 8-10 weeks of vacation or more per year, in addition to normal
holidays. They had a great time, but honestly it started to become a burden for everyone else to work around them.
Toward the end it was getting bad enough that some projects were basically stalled because you could never get everyone on the project to be available at the same time. We’d push the project forward as much as we could, then wait a week for another round of people to come back to work, then push it forward as much as we could while working around the rest of the people on vacation this week, then repeat.
It would have been okay if it was a lifestyle business where delivering quickly didn’t really matter much, but it was a less established business where we were slowly running out money. They tried hiring more people but that only increased the burn rate.
The end game was that they clamped down hard on vacation time. A lot of the people who were only there for the lax vacation schedules left. Ironically, it was more relaxed to actually do work there after it became more predictable and you could depend on people actually being available to work.
There’s probably a good middle ground but it’s not as easy as just letting everyone take a lot of vacation all the time.
It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while the contractor is doing stuff.
It's a tradeoff but, for me, not a bad one overall. No one expects me to jump into action at 9 at night but if I'm watching the TV and can solve someone's problem in 5 minutes I can do so--if I feel like it.
> when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE
Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours".
Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.
I agree. I feel a lot more OK to take time to run errands or grab lunch offsite because I know if someone needs me, I can just answer on Slack. Similarly, I can work from a coffee shop or other location and know that they can reach me if needed.
It's still like this in some limited cases. My brother-in-law is a glazier. He clearly needs to be on-site to do this. Work can't follow him home. My wife works in software just like I do, but she's worked exclusively on classified projects for 20 years, so work can't follow her home because she can't legally receive any of the relevant data at home. Work phone and work e-mail are on airgapped networks not accessible from home.
In the late '80s, my coworkers would work at night by answering emails (proprietary network) and looking through code on hardware supplied by the employer.
Indeed. Work fills the time allotted to it. If you know (even subconsciously) that you can take work home with you, it becomes easier to give yourself permission to dilly-dally during work hours. And it becomes easier for everyone to dilly-dally at work during work hours and in such a way that they feel less guilty disrupting others because, hey, you can just work later just like I can, right?
This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section.
But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place.
We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.
It's alright for us oldies who already have firm boundaries on this kind of thing, but the new batch could use our support here. Always-contactable is becoming (has become?) normalised, and it's just not on.
My practical advice:
- Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ...
- Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call
- "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours"
I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P
I remember reading the following quote (origin lost to me):
"Look at photos of businessmen on the streets of New York in the late 1890s. Then compare them to photos of people today.
One of the first things you'll notice is how little they are carrying e.g. no briefcase, laptop bag etc. This is because in those days if you left the office there was no expectation of doing work. Everything you would need to be productive only existed in your office. Plus, you were completely unreachable once you stepped outside so why bring anything work related?"
Now, sure, a messenger could be sent to find you at lunch and you could argue that a business lunch is still 'work' but I've always like the idea of "out of the office, out of touch".
Seeing the amount of people that answer late night chats from people in other timezones upsets me. What upsets me more are the people on vacation answering chats as soon as they’re pinged. That behavior changes work culture and expectations the more it happens. Bad managers love this sort of thing. I learned a long time ago that to keep my sanity I need a wall up between work hours and my personal life.
Having managed teams in Asia from the US, let me provide the alternate view.
You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.
You are faced with:
- being blocked all day till US business hours
- trial and erroring your way through the problem
My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."
Readit News
Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36402076 - June 2023 (138 comments)
1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it.
2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it.
3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm.
With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.
One note I'd like to add is pay attention to your lighting, have a special "work-mode" set of lights that you turn on when you work and then turn off when you are no longer working.
I use the same work desk for non work stuff, but I turn off my "office lights" and it's a completely different vibe.
Everyone's tastes will be different but as for me, these are my preferences:
- Office lighting: at least 20k lumens of 5000K light with high CRI. For me I like to approximate the brightness of daylight. It's especially useful during the cloudy days of winter. My office is in a basement so the cheapest way to do that is string lights (like for outdoor patios), but with high quality LED bulbs.
- Personal lighting mode: regular house lighting, 3000K (so skewing towards a more yellowish, incandescent-like light). I still enjoy high CRI because I can't stand things looking bland but that's less important. More spot lights, less ambient light.
I'm much better at contextually driven focus than I am at working mentally to keep things separate. Which I've come to be ok with, in that a lot of my creativity comes from divergent thinking, from jumbling and sorting out things. But that flexibility is a pain when I want to really focus. Different devices help me be clear about what I'm choosing, raise a barrier to distraction, and make it way easier to notice when I'm off task.
E.g., I only use HN from what I think of as my distraction laptop. Social media, fun Slacks, and HN only work on this device. Which is old, so its battery doesn't last, and which is plugged in and kept in a hidden niche next to a not-super-comfortable couch. Taking this approach let me turn off the noprocrast setting here while keeping my fuck-around-on-the-internet time in check.
2b - have a separate work phone If people choose to send emails outside business hours it's their choice, but you don't have to answer. If you do, as part of your contract... Well, you saw the contract before you agreed right?
2c - Set clear boundaries between when you're off work, off, but on call and at work. How? Personally I don't mind being "on call" for <25% of a time, but I absolutely positively have to have extra money every single hour I'm on call(lets say 10~20% of normal hourly rate), and 150~200% rate for incident response time. That's the only way I can do it. But what if your employer pays you double the hourly rate all the time and "implies" it's a 24/7 on call commitment? Isn't that even better financially? Well, yes, but it's definitely not better for my peace of mind. Somehow I don't mind being on call when I see a tally for it at the end of each month, if it "just happens" (and frequently) I quickly start hating it.
A small-apartment version of this is to have a work laptop at home (or carry it home from in-office), but to keep it in a drawer when not in use. Same with a work smartphone.
For people who have to be reachable in emergencies, a real radio pager (best privacy, still company-issued, and it could maybe also go in the drawer), or their preferred automated emergency contact method to their personal smartphone (SMS, email, app). Optionally with a de jure on-call human in the loop. Or just a work-issued smartphone or tablet that can be configured in software to only alert on emergencies.
When emergency contacting personally-owned devices, to minimize taint with business information, the only information conveyed is to check work laptop within X minutes. (The company should also have be a rock-solid log of each such contact, for various reasons.)
(One early startup, where I was leading engineering and had bespoke MVP appliances as part of a factory production line halfway around the globe, and I hadn't yet set up a better alerting method, I just used an iPad for this. The iPad had 2 purposes, about the only things it could do: (1) compartmentalize the sketchy videoconferencing app we used, away from the Linux laptop that was early-startup powerful; (2) be a fairly discreet "picture frame" display in the evening, so that I'd notice emails from factory management or our alert system. With more time this could've been polished to be better for my nerves, but it was still definitely better than having the work laptop visible 24/7.)
Also: when I am on vacation I am gone and won’t work. My team has my phone number for extreme emergencies but that never happened so far.
If you're already doing #1 (don't take your laptop out of the office) and #2 above, then this is automatic. But yes, those should especially be followed when you're on PTO.
It's nice and fine if you never get bored of it.
When people bring their laptop in the kitchen or closet, or go to coffee shops, libraries etc. it's often not because they haven't found a perfected routine, but because they don't want to sit/stand in the same exact spot in the same posture 8h a day every weekday for decades.
Point number 2 also has caveats: with a family it can be easier to allow semi-random interruptions a few times a day and work a bit after everyone's asleep than sticking to an ironclad schedule and being absolutely unavailable when your kid's having tea time or needs a quick help.
But I believe it's the flexibility that make it hard for people to mentally disconnect -- it blurs the lines between work and life.
And, to your point, that's totally fine if that's your preference. I think what we're both saying is that the three points I make above are, in a way, sacrificing some flexibility in order to maintain that separation.
For me, I'm completely fine giving up some of that flexibility so that I can maintain the mental separation. But, to me, I have the best of both worlds in that I still have the option of flexibility in cases where I really need it. But I only try to exercise it when I really need it.
I would also add
1. disable notifications, if you can't get rid of work-connected devices: perhaps your work computer is your only computer, and you want to watch a movie on it, just configure chat/mail whatever to only work in _pull_ mode rather than _push_. Don't worry, if something is really important it will reach you.
2. enforce time boundaries through routine. E.g. go to the gym at 17:30 every day so logging off means physically detaching yourself. Or pick up your kids, or take the dog for a walk. Make yourself accountable to non-work.
3. corollary to 2: start work when work start, not before. Do not work in pajamas, do not check your email during breakfast. Do your own things, then start working.
I have not been 100% good at doing all of these, but even doing this a bit has had massive positive effects to not doing it.
It took me 6 months to adjust to it and I can't even think about going to an office anymore nowadays.
I’ve found that writing a log or a daily summary, a core dump, if you will, helps me disengage. But not always.
being able to decompress walking around a leafy park is much better than trying to decompress stuck in a busy train with no seats.
But honestly, this doesn't feel any different than it always did. Pre-smartphones, I still would sometimes drive home and think about what I was working on on the way home, or "bring work home" with me.
I think the brain thing is (mostly) independent of the WFH/WFO thing -- as long as you're doing the other three things above. Otherwise, the brain thing is compounded.
I dont.
Instead, I substitute MY OWN projects and goals and things INSTEAD OF work's goals. So instead of killing my innate curiosity and problem solving, I change its focus to serve me.
The best thing I've found is Logseq. Any other note taking app would probably do, but the important thing is that it's a "daily journal" style where I brain dump relevant things into bullet points. This has come in really handy for many other reasons as well.
Once upon a time, maybe a hundred years ago, people worked “days”. This was a product of the available technology at the time. The average labourer didn’t have a pocket watch to know exactly what hour it was to clock in and out. If someone worked Tuesday, they worked from sun up to sun down. They got paid “a day’s wage”.
As time-keeping technology became more prevalent, people started working hours, not days. People started to work “8 a.m. to 5 p.m.” In this period, the constraint was now commuting. The average person lives approximately 30 minutes travel from their work and this has held roughly true for most of history. If you need to travel to work, you’d better earn enough hours’ wage to make it worth it.
Now we’re seeing something new as commuting evaporates. People are working on the order of minutes. E.g., “I have a 30-minute meeting at 2 p.m., then I’m making lunch for the kids. After that, I’ll put 60 minutes into project X before the repair guy comes by to fix the oven.”
To get the same work done, people are starting to distribute it across a full waking day (even if subconsciously). Our systems and ideas haven’t caught up to this new world yet. We aren’t earning “a minute’s wage”. But it’s hard to not see the progression now that I’ve noticed it.
On reflection, the separation of home and work was so natural that everyone took it for granted. Time moved more slowly. You felt more free because you could just disappear for an hour by going for a drive or a walk.
We don’t realize what we have lost.
Would love to have 5-8 weeks per year, that would let me take at least 1 week's worth of time per quarter to recharge from the constant 24/7 rush.
Out of curiosity, how many of your coworkers have kids?
I have 3, and I've always found it a bit ominous that even when I'm on large teams (8+) I'm typically still the only person with kids. So far:
1. job 1, team of 8, only 1 other IC had kids
2. job 2, team of 10, nobody else had kids
3. current job, team of 8, nobody else has kids. If you expand it to the suborganization we're in, you get ~16 people and only one other person has kids.
And it's not like these teams are mostly college new grads or anything, it's usually people like me in their 30's.
I always wonder how much of a disadvantage it is that other people get to clock out of work, enjoy an evening, sleep through the night, and then wake up and go to work. Whereas a parent is going to clock out of work and clock in to parenting, and then when it's kid bedtime, you finally get 2-3 hours to fit in personal time that's usually still not "you" time but is you spending time with your partner.
I'd never trade my kids for my career, and I find the time I spend with them incredibly fulfilling, but it's definitely extra load. And I do depend on being good at my job to help feed them and stuff. And I did opt into this, so it's hard to say it's "unfair". But I feel like our society doesn't need more reasons not to have kids given fertility is already below replacement rate.
At least 1 week of vacation per quarter (in addition to normal holiday time) has been fairly standard for every senior-level tech job I’ve had in a long time.
I had one job with a generous vacation policy that resulted in some people taking 8-10 weeks of vacation or more per year, in addition to normal holidays. They had a great time, but honestly it started to become a burden for everyone else to work around them.
Toward the end it was getting bad enough that some projects were basically stalled because you could never get everyone on the project to be available at the same time. We’d push the project forward as much as we could, then wait a week for another round of people to come back to work, then push it forward as much as we could while working around the rest of the people on vacation this week, then repeat.
It would have been okay if it was a lifestyle business where delivering quickly didn’t really matter much, but it was a less established business where we were slowly running out money. They tried hiring more people but that only increased the burn rate.
The end game was that they clamped down hard on vacation time. A lot of the people who were only there for the lax vacation schedules left. Ironically, it was more relaxed to actually do work there after it became more predictable and you could depend on people actually being available to work.
There’s probably a good middle ground but it’s not as easy as just letting everyone take a lot of vacation all the time.
As an EU person, the existence of places where people never stop working is mind boggling.
It also meant that, when I was "in the office," I pretty much needed to be IN THE OFFICE. I couldn't really disappear during the workday on a regular workday by going for a walk or being available at home for this that or the other thing without making specific arrangements. I had the flexibility to do that from time to time but it wasn't a casual I'll be in my home office while the contractor is doing stuff.
It's a tradeoff but, for me, not a bad one overall. No one expects me to jump into action at 9 at night but if I'm watching the TV and can solve someone's problem in 5 minutes I can do so--if I feel like it.
Well, we're getting back to that anyway... they're pretty much demanding that we all drive 45 minutes to sit at a hoteling spot that we reserved ahead of time in a noisy open office so that we can get on zoom calls with our remote coworkers all day (and be asked to "please mute because your background noise is very distracting") - and then drive home and still be available "after hours".
Glad I spent years of my life getting an advanced degree for this, I guess.
This is especially true when you are young and single. Some people have families and they do not have the time to drag out their tasks until the late hours of the night because of the severe consequences of neglecting their other responsibilities. Young people are also often under the delusion that only the moment exists, and that they will live forever and stay young forever. Nope, you only ever get older and you will be old sooner than you realize. And then you'll be leaving annoying comments like this one in the comment section.
But even single people should be able to appreciate how stretching things out means you can do less with your time. It's not like you fill those in-between moments with valuable activity. You usually procrastinate doing worthless things. Besides, task switching isn't free. You have to build up context which allows sustained deep work to take place.
We've lost the culture of maturity and seriousness. FOMO is a symptom of that. Self-promotion and social media are a symptom of that. We prefer engaging in shallow put-ons instead of being adults.
My practical advice:
- Do not put Slack / work e-mail / any comms to do with work on your personal phone. When they ask "why don't you have X on your phone", the answer is that you have a security policy to keep your personal accounts safe, but if they'd like to buy you a work phone, and pay for the contract, you'd consider carrying it. Which leads me to ...
- Establish whether you are being paid for on-call. If not, then you are not on-call
- "I sent you a message", isn't the same as "I spoke with you and made sure you understood the message I relayed outside of work hours"
I realise that these things are easier here in Europe than in the U.S.A. where labour laws are a little less fleshed out, but well, I can't help there :P
"Look at photos of businessmen on the streets of New York in the late 1890s. Then compare them to photos of people today.
One of the first things you'll notice is how little they are carrying e.g. no briefcase, laptop bag etc. This is because in those days if you left the office there was no expectation of doing work. Everything you would need to be productive only existed in your office. Plus, you were completely unreachable once you stepped outside so why bring anything work related?"
Now, sure, a messenger could be sent to find you at lunch and you could argue that a business lunch is still 'work' but I've always like the idea of "out of the office, out of touch".
Keep to a standard schedule.
You are in Asia and it's 10am HKT/10pm ET. You are facing a problem/issue that you are 90% sure someone in the US knows the answer to.
You are faced with: - being blocked all day till US business hours
- trial and erroring your way through the problem
My view as the manager was always "I trust you to send me a message up till 10:30pm if you need something and I will respond. Don't abuse that but I'd rather be contacted late once in a while vs you being blocked all day."
If I need email comms for an important document regarding to something super tight. I can't just wait till tomorrow.
Information can be crucial at times and emails can cause break down in communications.
Spreadsheets need to be spread and PowerPoints need to be pointed.
Work yes, you can step back from, communication you can't just shut off.