{"id":5054,"date":"2016-09-03T19:36:19","date_gmt":"2016-09-03T18:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=5054"},"modified":"2016-09-03T19:36:19","modified_gmt":"2016-09-03T18:36:19","slug":"flexible-working-or-never-switched-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2016\/09\/03\/flexible-working-or-never-switched-off\/","title":{"rendered":"Flexible Working or Never Switched Off?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A number of years ago I noticed that the secretary to the committee I was chairing was regularly sending me emails late at night. Concerned the organisation was overloading the woman so that she could only catch up by working 10 or 12 hour days, I inquired gently what was going on. \u2018It\u2019s my choice<\/em>\u2019, she said, \u2018I like having time at the end of the school day to be with my children so I make up the hours by doing email late at night from home. I\u2019m not being overworked.<\/em>\u2019 I was reassured in this case. Nevertheless, creeping hours of work can (and often do) affect many of us.<\/p>\n

It is hard to know when flexible working ceases and never switching-off starts. I no longer have children at home to worry about, but I still like the flexibility academic life offers: flexibility to go shopping not at a weekend or over lunch, or to stick a visit to my mother (or now my mother\u2019s emptying house) on the end of a London morning meeting. Flexibility not to feel guilty for doing so. Then when I work at the weekend or during the evening I think nothing of it. I\u2019m not counting the hours. For me, that works fine. I\u2019d like to think other people similarly choose to work to suit their own lives but realise this is an impossible luxury for many.<\/p>\n

However maybe my expectations aren’t always so clear. As a leader perhaps I am conveying the wrong message by emailing at times to suit me. This was brought home to me when, after returning from a trip away and trying to clear my email in the evening, I fired off an email while things were fresh in my mind. It wasn\u2019t urgent; the need for a reply was not pressing. Imagine my embarrassment when I got up the next morning to find the recipient sending me a reply at 0730 apologising for the delay. No, I thought, that wasn\u2019t necessary. I replied and pointed out that, just because I chose to work at night, I had no expectation others would or should. However, that may not be sufficient to reassure junior colleagues \u2013 and I certainly don\u2019t automatically put such a health warning on every message sent outside core hours. Nevertheless, I believe \u2018forbidding\u2019 out of hours emails will make things harder for those who want to tailor their own hours of work to suit their circumstances, at least as much as ease the burden who those who feel a pressure to be forever online.<\/p>\n

Holiday provides another decision minefield. Your thought might be \u2018I\u2019m just keeping an eye on things<\/em>\u2019; or perhaps \u2018the world will grind to a halt if I don\u2019t know what\u2019s happening and respond even though I\u2019m meant to be totally relaxing and forgetting the cares of work<\/em>\u2019; or (the old-fashioned form that I suspect fewer and fewer of us adopt) \u2018I\u2019m on holiday; I don\u2019t want to know<\/em>\u2019. It used to be the norm for people to vanish for a few weeks over the summer and, when communication was via snailmail or landline, that was that. These days this view may be commoner in Poppleton University<\/a> than in any real institution. Perhaps your working world can carry on fine if you genuinely forget work for a week (or two), but expectations of rapid turn-around of correspondence are higher than they used to be. For me, the question is whether it is better to know what is being stored up against your return and know that it\u2019s not so bad, or to spend a week resolutely not checking the inbox but still worrying about what\u2019s unknowingly arriving. Now I have a PA who keeps an eye on things in my absence, I can rely on her to text me if there\u2019s something I really do need to know (possibly even act upon) which can take the pressure off the sneaky peeking at the inbox. Nevertheless, the real drawback is if you peek and then find that there is a major disaster looming, a situation I am glad to say has not yet hit me.<\/p>\n

Email is a fantastic boon and simultaneously a nightmare incubus\/succubus (I am unsure of the gender of email!). It sucks life out of our free time, means we are in danger of never switching off, and yet also means that when a swift response is needed, the means is there to achieve it. One only has to read depressing nineteenth century novels, especially those pre-dating the telegraph, to realise the extent of misery caused by the absence of rapid means of contact. Your son might be lying in a wretched state, critically injured in the Crimea, but the turn-around of weeks first to hear the sad news, and then the necessity of relying on boat to take you back to watch him potentially breath his last must have added immeasurably to the pain of loss. Now email\/text and aeroplane (not to mention modern healthcare) would lead to a totally different story.<\/p>\n

I come down on the side of thinking out of hours working to fit in with the other elements of personal life is a plus. I like the freedom to choose my modus operandi <\/em>of examining my inbox and hope recipients of my messages understand that I appreciate others may not choose the same way of life. However, holidays\u2026..for me personally the jury is still out as to the optimum way of proceeding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A number of years ago I noticed that the secretary to the committee I was chairing was regularly sending me emails late at night. Concerned the organisation was overloading the woman so that she could only catch up by working … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[965,182,1055,1073],"class_list":["post-5054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-culture","tag-careers","tag-email","tag-part-time","tag-pressure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}