Work-Life Balance and the New Night Shift By Brad Stone August 07, 2014 Illustration by Jan Buchczik I’m toiling away on my laptop, getting lots of work done. Notes are being reviewed, interviews are being prepared, and I’m exchanging instant messages with two colleagues. This productivity is great! But I feel so, so tired. Like I should be under the covers instead of checking off my endless to-do list. That’s because it’s bedtime, 11 p.m., and I’m home in my striped pajamas. This isn’t an anomaly or the result of a new deadline or an unusually busy week. It’s my normal nighttime routine—and probably yours, too. Work has been leeching onto people’s off-duty time for years. E-mail makes it easier to communicate and more likely that annoyingly ambitious colleagues will respond to every message, at length and in real time. (In-box volumes are increasing by about 15 percent a year, according to global data group Experian (EXPN).) With the growing irresistibility of the smartphone and the ubiquity of cloud collaboration, evening work for many professionals has become standard. We come home from the office, change into more comfortable clothes, put the kids to bed, and maybe open a bottle of wine. And then we grab our laptops and log back in. “This is now a common thing,” says Beth Livingston, an assistant professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, who cites the growth of salaried jobs and types of work that can be accomplished outside the office as factors behind the new night shift. “We don’t produce anything that is easy to see, so the only way to measure our output is by working It’s ridiculously easy to find fellow adherents of this regimen, mostly because they all obsessively answer their e-mail within five minutes. Jilliene Helman, 27, practically jumps in recognition when I mention it. She’s the co-founder and chief executive officer of a startup in Los Angeles called Realty Mogul, which lets people pool their money in real estate investments. Helman, who doesn’t have children, typically ends her day with a business dinner or some other work-related event at 10 p.m. Then she jumps on her computer, finally getting to bed at 2 a.m. Sixty percent of her work e-mails are sent during those late hours. When the boss is a workaholic, that timetable inevitably gets passed on, viruslike, to subordinates. “We set expectations with employees up front,” Helman says. “This isn’t an environment where people only work 9 to 5.” How to Leave Work at Work. Mostly7 of 7 Illustration by Jan Buchczik Spend Friday afternoon scheduling time to complete mandatory projects for the next week. Nancy Rothbard, a Wharton School management professor, says it’s the unpredictability of nighttime work that causes extra stress. Illustration by Jan Buchczik An hour before leaving, decide what your team should finish by the next day. Laura Vanderkam, author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, asks, “If an evil villain cut the power, what would you still do?” Illustration by Jan Buchczik Make social and brainstorming rounds while grabbing food, rather than as you say bye and dash out. “That way you get interaction, but you can still deal with anything that comes up before quitting time,” Vanderkam says. Illustration by Jan Buchczik If you need to finish something, tell your partner how long it will take. It helps you keep to a deadline and mitigate guilt, Rothbard says. Don’t be above bargaining with the kids: “If I work now, we can play all weekend.” Illustration by Jan Buchczik While still at your desk, figure out what’s possible at home. “Getting to the bottom of the in-box isn’t going to happen,” Vanderkam says. “Preparing for two meetings the following day is something you could do.” Illustration by Jan Buchczik Endpoints encourage focus. William Powers, author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry, allots himself 90 minutes, after which he must close the laptop. Or just set an alarm so you stop a half-hour before you go to sleep. Illustration by Jan Buchczik Earmark two nights a week when you watch a movie or visit friends while avoiding e-mail. Working until bedtime every night puts “you on a hamster wheel that isn’t good for anyone,” Powers says. Part of the problem is that modern workplaces make it so difficult to do any actual work. Employees spend an average of four hours per week in meetings, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. E-mail provides a constant distraction: The average worker spends 28 percent of her time managing her in-box, according to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute survey. And the incessant buzz from the guy in the next cubicle—about 70 percent of offices now have open floor plans—makes deep thinking impossible. “I try to block out sections of the day when there are no calls or meetings. Otherwise there are just too many distractions,” says Jaclyn Baumgarten, 36, CEO of Cruzin, an online boat rental startup. Baumgarten says she has to work each night until her “head hits the pillow.” Forget about trying to take some time off from the grind. “I took three weeks off for my honeymoon and have literally worked every single night since,” says David Mars, 38, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm White Owl Capital Partners, in a conversation that happens late on a Monday when, naturally, we’re both still working. Mars’s bête noire is e-mail, which flows in at all hours from his portfolio companies in China, Europe, and North America. “It’s a nonstop merry-go-round,” he says. “It really is a global economy. And the global economy is destroying all our personal lives.” Arlie Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, blames the 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift on the rise of international competition and the loss of job security. “People are a little more anxious to be the visible hard worker, the one that stands out,” she says. “It leads to a kind of low-grade anxiety, which has animated the drive for longer hours.” Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. He is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown; October 2013). Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:27:15 +0000
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