Emails while commuting 'should count as work'

Most of my experience is with non-profit orgs, but unlike a lot of people in the NPO space I have a fair amount of for-profit experience. I think people who work for NPOs tend to burn out at even higher rates than people in for-profit orgs because they get emotionally invested in the mission, fail to set reasonable boundaries, and because they typically make less than people who work for for-profit orgs and therefore have more money related stress and fewer resources to deal with stress.

Working for an NPO can be existentially rewarding, but I hear a lot of myths about how NPOs provide better work life balance, etc, and I don't think that's true at all.

I have a theory that a lot of people do things in certain ways in order to keep up appearances. For instance, a lot of startups waste a lot of money on things that are 'business-y' to legitimize themselves as a 'real business'.

To that extent, I find that a lot of NPOs waste a lot of resources appearing 'thrifty' (read: cheap). I've worked with a lot of NPOs that waste tons of employee time and money because they don't want to spend money because of the 'optics'. What this means is that getting anything done takes more time and energy at an NPO.

My specialty is database marketing, and I've literally done thousands of experiments across millions of mailed letters. I've found that for most donors, anything that can make a letter appear 'cheaper' improves response rate and the average donation. Most people interpret similar data as people preferring more 'personalized' letters, but I think that's because there is a lot of overlap between 'low-budget' and 'human touch'.

The irony is that at once place we spent more than three times as much per letter to make them appear cheaper.

This mindset also applies to people who work at non-profit orgs. People would spend 3 days doing stuff by hand rather than paying $100 to have it automated. On a similar note, I was stuck with an ancient Pentium 4 for a long time because the IT department bought them used. They were eventually replaced with Core 2 Duos. They were slow as hell, which was bad enough, but if you did the math the lifetime cost was much higher than buying a new computer due in large part to how much power Pentium 4's used. Not to mention it took them forever to upgrade from CRTs, which use so much more electricity than LCDs.

They must have a generous time allotment in which to bill.

That is a naive assumption - dating back to Marx who failed to see that not all value came from work of means of production and that the means themselves are not fixed. Intellectual work can provide continuous dividends for one. While factory workers may toil day in and day out the engineer who designed it do work.

Investors and management are intertwinned and blurry. Smaller businesses usually have them the same and larger ones must compete with the alternative of starting ones own and thus pass down dividends. Even the most hands off "useless idiot heir" has an indirect management role via who they ultimately choose to support and what they do with it.

Investment has a role aside from funding that they engage in by driving efficiency, expansion and the dreaded counterpart of contraction to match with demand.

We have empirical evidence that while management and ownership often do in fact do useful work. Look at how farm appropriation has ended in reduced yields instead of increased as one would expect when farmhands gain the benefits of more ownership. Instead their production plunged and they started experiencing increased crop failure. Which brings to mind the related fallacy that farming is simple.

It is true that management and ownership and investors are often overcompensated and worryingly self perpetuating at the expense of others - but they do in fact have a legitimate claim to profits.

I am guilty of triaging emails on the underground train in on the morning.

No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is BORING AS HELL.

At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30 seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g. Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a tunnel the whole way! :-)

The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel.

Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that you'll need to read at some point anyway .... too tempting to jump in and start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness outside the windows :)

By giving up more freedom and time and being dependent on an employer? I think women should have the option, but my argument was that the option is no longer there, they HAVE to work now.