I'm going camping! Part 3 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place

 

This is the third article in a series about keeping work in its place. As a reminder: emails are equivalent to messaging and I'm specifically referring to work situations involving remote teachers and students in educational contexts.

My first story about overworking starts with a colleague; she was not a direct report of mine when this story started.  She was a brand new employee and loved the idea of remote full time work! I was tasked with talking with her about her planned schedule.  What was she going to be her work schedule?

“I’m going camping!” she said excitedly.  She proceeded to tell me her planned schedule.

She was going to work Monday through Friday but leave by noon on Fridays.  It was going to be great because she loved to go camping with her husband. She was going to stop work at 12 p.m. (noon) on Friday, pack up the gear, and head out to the wilderness ahead of the Friday rush-hour traffic and be sitting at the campsite sipping a cold beer when the rest of the world was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.

“Oh, that does sound fun” I said.

Then she’s going to relax and probably hike on Saturdays, have another great big camping dinner. On Sunday morning, it will be a sleep-in and then slowly break camp for the afternoon drive back home, throw a load of laundry in the washing machine, and she’ll boot up her work laptop that evening “Just to clear some emails.”

Uh-oh. I could see it coming.

I can do the math.  That was 6 days a week of work.  Well, 6 days of the week containing work. I knew that would not be enough time off.

I tried to talk her out of the Sunday evening email check.  “Just plan to spent an extra hour on Monday or Tuesday catching up...don’t open that laptop on Sunday.” I advised as her teammate.

“No,” she said, “I’ll be fine, this will be great!”

She lasted 3 weeks.

Then she burnt out.

Tearfully, she told me she could not keep that schedule anymore.

I asked her, “What happened?”

Well, it ended up that she’d work on Friday morning--all morning.  Then noon would come...and go...and she’s still be working because emails she was sending out or work she was getting done was coming back in to her in the form of counter-questions or just...more emails. It wouldn’t stop! She felt bad for not helping the next email...and the next...and the next. 1 p.m. would come and go. Then 2 p.m. Then at 3 p.m. her husband who had managed to get out of work early for a Friday walked in the door to her home office and said “Why isn’t the packing done?  We need to leave now or there will be traffic!” and they wouldn’t leave because it was hard for her to shut that laptop down. Finally, in a fit, she’d slam the laptop lid shut and they’d get the campsite late, after having been stuck in traffic, have an unhappy dinner and try to “relax.”

So much for leaving work early.

By Sunday morning, she’d start thinking about those emails again. They were at home, waiting for her on that laptop. Even though the morning was supposed to be leisurely, she’d have that work in the back of her mind.  Gotta get home. Gotta get on the Internet. Gotta answer emails.

She’d get home, open the laptop and sure enough, there was a bunch of emails and she’d work at them. 2 planned hours might creep up to 3 or 4 hours but finally at some point, her Inbox would grow quiet, she’d caught up on everything and she’d go to bed knowing that, at least, there would not be a mountain of emails on Monday morning.

But then Monday morning would come.  And she was wrong.  This was the part of the story that I can personally attest to. Because, while she was working in Pacific time zone as my colleague, I was working in Eastern time zone and no matter how much she “worked ahead” on Sunday night, I had a 3 hour head start on her on Monday and I’d start going through my emails --which meant I was pumping emails into her Inbox for 3 hours before she even booted up. That meant, she’d open her laptop at 8 a.m. Pacific and there would be more emails...piled up...demanding her attention. These emails didn't exist until the east coast came online. But now they do.

No such thing as "clear her emails."

Three straight weeks of this had pummeled her mental attention. She couldn’t keep up. She was getting no true rest and the work just kept coming.

True story: I measured my own Inbox in this job. It averaged over 1 email per hour for every hour. EVERY HOUR. EVERY HOUR EVER.  So a weekend that is 64 hours of not working between 4 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m. Monday meant a normal inbox after a weekend of 100+ unread emails (adding in occasional replies, newsletters, and automated receipt emails).

I became her boss later after this story.  I remembered her struggles. And as her boss, I worked on 3 things to help her:

1) Turn on the Out of Office (OOO) Message the night before leaving work.  This made her planned 4 hours of work on Friday morning much easier on her because she knew that anyone emailing her after she went offline on Thursday evening was getting warned that she might not respond. So this trick looks like it helped her students, but truly, it helped her mindset. She had a backup plan now.  

Later on, this would become a standing rule on my team: 

• Turn on your Out of Office Message 4 working hours BEFORE you go out of the office.  
• Vacation or Holiday Reminders (blurbs at the bottom of emails) go up as early as 2 weeks before the event.

Let's be real folks. Readers don't read or necessarily follow these OOOs. These are tricks that help the sender, not the reader.

2) I asked her to bundle up any remaining emails that she could not address by 11:45 a.m. on Friday morning and send them to me. I would answer them or re-allocate them. Period.  Said another way, I’d do her work to help get her out of the office.  Now this is not a “I’ll fall on the sword for you!” behavior. I was literally working LONGER on Friday than her with my Eastern US hours. If she had any, I was getting them at 2:45 p.m. Eastern. Easy peasy to incorporate into my remaining day. I could pick up the slack. I had the ability so it was easy for me to step in and take this.

3) I begged her to NOT check those emails on Sunday night. I showed her my stats: the emails come in whether you read them or not. So don’t read them. Make all of Sunday a day off.  (It’s really hard for people to understand that true rest brings on GREATER productivity when at work. She could literally answer more emails and answer better on Monday if she didn’t read any emails on Sunday.) This took work for her to implement and I was never quite sure she engaged this tip. Later on, the team built a robust weekend coverage system and she shuttled her clients to the weekend coverage team rather than just pop in to check email.

One more time for those in the back:

You do better work at 40 hours per week than at 45, 50, 60, or 80 hours per week.

Got a problem with that? Talk with your boss. They are responsible for you hitting 40 hours. If you can't hit that, the boss needs to change things. If they can't change things for you (and you've tried yourself), find another job.

Lessons of this story:

If you do work on a day, it's a work day.

Yes, I feel like this is a line from a children's book. Why do I have to go back to children's book language to make my point? Because we have bastardized work to the point that doing work from your smartphone is not only considered OK, it's cool.

I'm telling you, it's not. To me, you look like a person with low self-control.

Just yesterday, I heard an interviewee on a radio show encourage listeners to Keep the Sabbath, regardless of your faith or day of the week. The idea was take a day off. Even better take 2, they're small.

Email and messaging for work is work.

Remote working blurs the lines between what and where messaging is "for work." But just like drunk Facebooking is a thing that we discourage friends from doing, so is emailing or messaging for work purposes from a non-work-as-defined location/device/time.

Remember that work messages sent via your smartphone gives your workplace the rights to examine, load apps on, and monitor your phone.

Doubt me? Read your university's tech policy. I used to edit these policies. I guarantee it has fine print that says that any device "accessing" educational systems is reached out and encompassed by the educational technology security policy.

That means your smartphone.

Load on a keylogger without your permission? Yup.

Screen capture what you see? Yup.

Search through your photos and files. Yup.

Value your privacy? Don't do work outside of work devices/locations/times. (P.S. Not to weird you out more, but the same policy exists at libraries and commercial locations that loan out "free wi-fi!")

Humans are not robots.

We are not allocated a certain number of work hours and life and then we deserve retirement. Some of the most successful, happily retired CEOs report that they 'figured out' work once they knew how to hit 40 hours a week. That's successful people. They don't say "Hey, I worked 60 hours a week for a couple of decades and then I earned early retirement, wahoo!" Nope. They arrived at happiness when they knew how to keep work in its place.

Keep work in its place.

Since OOOs are for you and not for them, write one you like.

This is Heather's top favorite:

2nd favorite

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled

busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building,

flowers budding, leaves thrusting- everything happy, and progressive, and occupied.

And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’

he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these

busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting

yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working. 

Needs some creative OOOs? Try 18 Funny Out-of-Office Messages to Inspire Your Own [+ Templates] I like this one.

This was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher's Right To Disconnect.

Article 1 I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 2: You replied too quickly!

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Article 5: Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong

#KeepWorkInItsPlace #RemoteWork #TimeManagement #SelfControl #EducationIsAnInsatiableMonster #Working6DaysAWeek #Leadership #Success #Failure #Management #Email #OutOfOffice #LeavingWorkEarly

 

This article originally posted on LinkedIn on October 6, 2021.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/im-going-camping-heather-dodds/