When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
calnewport.com
When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
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Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#2I try and make a point as often as I can of drawing the line between work time and personal time. Unfortunately being a programmer, my job is also one of my favorite things to do... so I often find myself eyeballing slack messages about the latest interesting problem the team is solving.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#3If it's a truly worthy riddle then you will spend all waking hours solving it. You will feed it your "whole soul".
This is, of course, troubling in retrospect and warrants mulling.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#4I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is important absolutely, but the answer is also not to only work the bare minimum you have to in order to get paid, especially in fields like software development where your job is not to write code, but to deliver a product that currently requires code to be written. When something breaks in software development, you don't wait 12 hours for someone to get back on shift, someone does need to be on that as soon as possible, since if that happens with something as important as say google or AWS, it breaks the infrastructure of most things, certainly most important things, on the internet.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#5I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is imp…
If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#6I’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.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#7In 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.
We don’t realize what we have lost.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#8I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is imp…
That sounds exactly like something an adversarial participant in the SWE market would say to make me burn out and drop out.
Keep that forked tongue in your mouth!
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#9I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is imp…
You should work hard and be productive during your regular work schedule, not doing that is a breach of contract. But expecting to put more hours than required regularly, it's also a breach in contract.
If you need to be available outside of regulars hours, you must be paid. If something must be up 24/7h, hire more people and set proper work shifts so it's covered.
Raises and promotions should come if you do good work, not if you work longer hours. Which will probably lead to burnout or depression.
When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, I don't expect to get a sirloin.
Re: When Work Didn’t Follow You Home
#10I mean this isn't actually a large problem, at least in programming where I am familiar with a lot of trends. It is very common for people to immediately sign off for the day the minute their work day/shift is over and not do anything else after. If people want to do that then sure they can, but they also trade off the ability to earn raises and promotions by doing the bare minimum. Getting a work-life balance is imp…
If people work hard in the hours that they're paid for, that is not "the bare minimum".
If something breaks and suddenly no customer can use the product and its 5pm and the engineers say "Welp sorry, my shift ended a few minutes ago so I'll fix it tomorrow!", that is in fact the bare minimum. If an engineer does that, they can be expected to not be earning any raises for actually doing what they're supposed to do, which is not to sit at a desk for a few hours a day, but to deliver a product