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The After-Work Email Quandry

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Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#31

Post by thecatspaw »

stronglikedan wrote: post #29
thecatspaw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

Unfortunately, most companies think that they own you 24/7 as soon as they put you on salary. To them, you are getting paid for it. A guy at my job got written up for not responding to emails on vacation, even though he had an autoresponder directing people to his boss, and told everyone ahead of time that he'd be dark for a few days. Management's excuse is that you are 24/7 unless it's otherwise defined in your empl…

what? If that was my job, I'd be looking for a new job faster than you can say "check your mail". In my holidays (2 weeks in summer usually) I dont respond for the whole time. No once-a-day mail checking, nothing. Never had problems so far luckily

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#32

Post by kstrauser »

stronglikedan wrote: post #29
thecatspaw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

Unfortunately, most companies think that they own you 24/7 as soon as they put you on salary. To them, you are getting paid for it. A guy at my job got written up for not responding to emails on vacation, even though he had an autoresponder directing people to his boss, and told everyone ahead of time that he'd be dark for a few days. Management's excuse is that you are 24/7 unless it's otherwise defined in your empl…

Screw that. Unless I've specifically negotiated otherwise - and trust me, you'd be paying me handsomely for it - my work day starts upon arrival and ends upon departure.

Now, that's not a hard and fast rule. If something breaks at 2AM, call me. If there's an upcoming hard deadline, count on me. I've come up with plenty of work solutions while taking a shower at home. I pitch in extra because I believe in my company, enjoy my work, and want it to be successful. But if you want the right to my out-of-office hours, break out the checkbook. And frankly, you can't (or won't want to) afford that sort of arrangement.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#33

Post by odonnellryan »

JohnDoe365 wrote: post #5

> Why do we find ourselves reading emails during vacation or sick days, even when we don't have to? Because we fear to get sacked?

Whenever I've done this in the past it was because of a desire to do a good job.

Whenever I find myself working for someone where the majority of what I do is because I fear retribution I've also found that I've generally grown unhappy with the situation and should move on.

Work isn't 100% fun, and it probably shouldn't be. There are going to be tedious things that you HAVE to do because it is your job. However, if you're doing everything because you HAVE to, not because you want to do a good job, there is a problem somewhere and you should examine it.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#34

Post by cballard »

thecatspaw wrote: post #26
jwmoz wrote: post #22

Come 17:30 work ceases to exist to me and my normal life takes over. I work to live, not vice versa. It saddens me this isn't the way for most.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

I don't "check" my email, it comes over push notifications. So it doesn't discriminate between personal/work emails.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#35

Post by jwmoz »

thecatspaw wrote: post #26
jwmoz wrote: post #22

Come 17:30 work ceases to exist to me and my normal life takes over. I work to live, not vice versa. It saddens me this isn't the way for most.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

Nail. Head. I'm a contractor, you pay for my time. Want more work? Pay me.

I find permy types to be the ones that can't shut off from work.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#36

Post by Afton »

enobrev wrote: post #28

I've been working remotely for the past fifteen years, five of the most recent being a full-time employee for a large company. Because of this I've grown very accustomed to sending emails that start with "Don't read this until morning". Eventually my coworkers learn that they're going to get late-night emails from me, and that I don't expect an immediate reply - nor should they. After all, email is meant to be asynch…

Outlook 'delay delivery' option (or whatever your email client supports) is an even better way. If you don't intend someone to read and act on it until morning, you can enforce that trivially!

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#37

Post by zensavona »

enobrev wrote: post #28

I've been working remotely for the past fifteen years, five of the most recent being a full-time employee for a large company. Because of this I've grown very accustomed to sending emails that start with "Don't read this until morning". Eventually my coworkers learn that they're going to get late-night emails from me, and that I don't expect an immediate reply - nor should they. After all, email is meant to be asynch…

I have been working remotely for about 2 years now and have taken on a very similar approach. We communicate with HipChat more than email though. I have irregular working hours and sometimes I'll be online in the middle of the night, which might be the middle of the day in the office.

Write me a message or receive a message from me anytime, if I don't respond right now, that's ok.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#38

Post by abakker »

zachsnow wrote: post #27
hawleyal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what email is for already. An out-of-office message just reiterates the fact that email is not reliable and not time-sensitive anyway. There's no point. Every single email could have an out-of-office message, saying if you need urgent help to call/text/send something else.

Why does texting or calling have a different "urgency" level? Historical? (Email not historically being pushed to you wherever you might be). Cultural? In the microcosm of my work life they are on similar planes (especially given Google Voice), perhaps because they do the same thing: make my phone vibrate. Maybe every text or call should autorespond saying if you need urgent help to come find me in person!

I'm not sure about texting, but calling is both synchronous and verbose. These are incredibly relevant criteria for determining whether something is immediate. While email can be verbose, it seldom is, and if anything critical is going on when multiple people are involved, a phone call is still the best way to communicate real-time. If you disagree, see whether you do or do not adjust what you are saying on the phone vs what you would type. I know that I favor fast-to-type sentence structure when emailing, which isn't always the most illuminating/explanatory.

Right now, I think the pendulum has swung away from phone calls and too far toward emails. Maybe this is because minutes on phones used to cost money, maybe it is because conference call spam devalued the speed of communication too far. But I think a one on one call is hard to beat and can often accomplish what a whole thread of email can in a fraction of the time. Phone calls are good for communicating fast and figuring out what to do. Emails are good for having a written record and working asynchronously.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#39

Post by Disruptive_Dave »

cballard wrote: post #34
thecatspaw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

I don't "check" my email, it comes over push notifications. So it doesn't discriminate between personal/work emails.

Best move I ever made was turning off every single push notification other than the messaging app my GF and I use with each other (she's wonderful at not abusing it). That's personal choice, obviously.

Re: The After-Work Email Quandry

#40

Post by amyjess »

stronglikedan wrote: post #29
thecatspaw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont know why people feel the need to check their emails after work. I feel the same way you do. It makes no sense to me to do something for work without getting paid for it

Unfortunately, most companies think that they own you 24/7 as soon as they put you on salary. To them, you are getting paid for it. A guy at my job got written up for not responding to emails on vacation, even though he had an autoresponder directing people to his boss, and told everyone ahead of time that he'd be dark for a few days. Management's excuse is that you are 24/7 unless it's otherwise defined in your empl…

I work for a defense contractor, and pretty much the only good thing about our (government-mandated) insanely bureaucratic timekeeping policies is that you will never see something like this happen at my employer.

Edit: Giving some details about defense contractor billing.

For those not aware of defense contractor timekeeping, every single paid hour has to be billed to exactly one thing, and each employee needs to explicitly bill the hours themselves on their timesheets.

If you're on vacation, you bill your hours to vacation. If you're working on a project, you bill your hours to the contract that funds the project. If you're sick, you bill the hours to sick leave. If you're working on a purely-internal project, you bill the hours to internal projects.

Billing hours to the wrong project is legally considered fraud, and it can get the company in serious hot water. Besides, no defense contractor would want to bill working hours to vacation: the company makes no money from hours billed to vacation, while the company makes money for each hour billed to a contract. Now, if they want to interrupt your vacation by making you bill hours to a contract, they can, but that eats into the amount of available hours they're allowed to bill for that contract (hours which would be much better being billed when you're in the office and are able to sit down at a work computer and do real work), and you get to keep your vacation hours, so you can prolong your vacation.

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