Work at home

“The 40 hour work week is a relic of the postwar era where the wellbeing of an employee outside of work depended on the unpaid labor of a spouse for cooking, cleaning, and shopping“

I saw that quote on Twitter and have been thinking about that a lot, especially lately as the entire tech world works from home. It’s absolutely true when you put it into perspective. A single 25-year old worker living in a metropolitan city today is expected to work 40+ hours a week, work out regularly, shop for ingredients and cook healthy meals, keep up a social network of personal and professional friends, and keep their apartment clean and tidy all while being pressured to hustle and work on “side gigs” in their spare time (assuming they have any).

The reality is that the idea of that “perfect” lifestyle is entirely unsustainable and impossible to achieve. The tech world makes a really big deal out of “maximizing” your lifestyle in pursuit of this ideal way of life. But it’s far too much for one single person to be doing. This can very quickly lead to burnout and depression because on the outside, it looks like you’re checking off all the boxes, but on the inside, you feel like you’re barely scraping by and not really being rewarded for any of it. You feel like you’re just doing the bare minimum to be accepted in this stage of society, so you end up feeling like you could be doing more and that you’re missing something that currently isn’t there.

The limiting factor, aside from money and energy, is clearly time. There just isn’t enough of it in the work week. And everyone will pretend that it’s entirely okay and totally expected to be working 40+ hours every week because that’s the way it has always been. That excuse never works for justifying why something is right, and it sure as hell falls apart here. Maximizing daylight may have made sense during the agricultural revolution, and working set shifts for a continuous number of hours may have made sense during the industrial revolution to maximize the cycle time of a machine, but it makes little sense now in the tech world.

Every attempt to reform this in some fashion is struck down with some excuse of how it has always been this way and how financial projections assume a set amount of labor. The massive, glaring fallacy here is the assumption that more hours equals better output. Time and time again, this has been proven to be wrong. Employees will decrease in productivity and will prolong the work to “fill” the time if there’s a set number of hours they’re expected to work.

This brings us to the next point, the idea of the unpaid labor of a spouse. 60-year old executives will brag about how “back in their day”, they were able to easily pull off 50-hour work weeks to slowly work their way up to the top of the company. This line of reasoning completely discounts the dramatic change in social and family demographics over the decades. The nuclear family unit is dying rapidly. Today’s families and domestic partnerships look very, very different than what they did in 1970.

There are more single parents today than ever before. Parents who are raising kids typically don’t have their own parents around to help with childcare due to needing to live closer to work. Women, who made up a good chunk of the “unpaid spousal labor” category in 1970, are today flourishing in high-paying careers. So yeah, bragging about how you worked 50+ hour work weeks in 1970 while your wife had a warm dinner ready for you in a spotless house when you got back after your grueling 8-hr shift will do little to convince any millenial to “put in the extra hours” of sitting at a computer all day.

Never has this become more obvious than now, when the entire tech industry works from home. There are countless people in my circle of tech acquaintances who are feeling a newfound sense of relief and freedom due to the forced work from home situation. There is no pressure to work till 5:00 PM and “clock out” to prove that you did a full day’s worth of work to appease some archaic notion of false equivalence between time worked and output delivered. Due to the pandemic and everything else happening in the world, most employers in tech are being very flexible with their employees’ working situation, allowing for variable hours that work with their families’ schedules.

I personally am not working 40 hours every week. I have a lot of stuff on my plate every week, and I just aim to get all of that done as best as it can be done. Sometimes it takes 30 hours. Sometimes it takes 40 hours. As long as the work is done and done well, I don’t bother “filling up” the time to hit some arbitrary number of hours to feel good about how productive I was that week. This unit of measurement has always been wrong, and is especially wrong to measure creative work. I was hired to perform good design work, not to work 40 hours every week. Granted, the way projects are estimated and how work is assigned usually works out to it roughly taking around that much time every week anyway.

A lot of folks are reporting that “work from home” feels more like “work at home”, where the separation between work and life has been severed so much that they can’t distinguish it anymore. The commute to an office added a level of physical separation from the first place (home) and the second place (work), and the office environment of being around colleagues added an artificial layer of mindset separation of a space being designated for a certain type of mental activity. Home is for relaxing and for leisure, while the office is for working and seeing co-workers.

Now, a lot of people have been forced to convert their tiny one-bedroom studio apartments into home offices. Our beds are literally inches apart from our desks. All the “WFH Pro Tips” articles online about designating a specific place in the house for a home office are entirely irrelevant if you’re in NYC or SF and have a tiny apartment with literally no room. If you’re sharing a space with roommates who are also working from home or have kids who need to attend school online in this type of environment, then you’re in a special kind of hell.

With all the chaos of this year, it’s unsurprising that people haven’t been feeling their best. They haven’t been able to do their best work, and they know it. When your home environment and the people closest to you fall apart, there’s not much reason to continue trying to execute and fill up 40 hours in a work week to appease “the man”. The clarity and time that this pandemic has provided has seriously led a lot of folks to reconsider whether going back to the hectic lifestyle of commuting to an office and then attempting to live some semblance of a “normal” life outside of a 40+ hour work week is even worth it or not.

I personally am finding that I greatly prefer working remotely to going into an office. The open office environment is filled with tons of distractions, and I could barely get any time to focus on my work in between interruptions and meetings. Now, I just put my phone, Slack, and my computer on Do Not Disturb, put on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and crank out designs for hours. It’s pretty great. There are downsides though. I don’t really feel like I know my co-workers as people (I started a new job remotely a few months ago), there’s less room for casual interaction, everything feels overly formalized in video calls, and freeform collaboration is much harder than it was when it was possible to just jam on a whiteboard or use sticky notes to capture talking points.

Despite all that, I still like working from home. My ideal situation would be a hybrid model where I go into the offie 2 days a week and work from home 2 days (yes, this would be in a 4-day work week). If I’m able to schedule all my meetings and in-person syncs during the two days that I’m in the office, the other two days become entirely heads-down time, which is more than enough to get a ton of design work done. And after a 3-day weekend to recharge, we do it all over again. This is the new normal I want to strive for, not go back to the way we had it.

We’re working in a tech sector today that employs various disciplines and expects them to collaborate with each other — design, engineering, product, QA, operations, data science, finance, business, etc. All the workflows are different. And yet we expect them all to work the same number of hours a week? It’s silly, and frankly, as I get older, I’m starting to prioritize my own wellbeing and sanity over some arbitrary requirement of how long one is “supposed” to be working. This work from home experiment has clearly laid that out for me, and I’ll certainly be seeking that hybrid model of a 2-2-3 week for all my future roles going forward. Because we need that sanity and balance in order to live our best lives, and better late than never.