
Emails while commuting 'should count as work' - onuralp
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-45333270
======
PeterStuer
After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per family
on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level it was
at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working' hours are
down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were brought en
mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company clock for a
family significantly.

The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is
now 'required' for many.

I personally feel that the relative recent introduction of 'work from
anywhere' technology for the knowledge worker class, has indeed lead to yet
another expansion of salaried-time, even when no 'salary' is provided for it.

We should also ask ourselves if the stance on 'working-from-home', which
should be a normal evolution of the technology, hasn't been hampered by a
standing tradition of externalizing the costs of commuting by companies to
employees.

Commuting in itself is for many parts an anachronism that lost its grounding
with the introduction of personal computers and the internet. It should be
seriously questioned why this is allowed to stand, when it comes at great
costs to both the employee's health as well as the environment.

(P.S. Before you go 'but even for knowledge workers nothing beats working
together', you can be right, but do we need the 'gold-standard' of
collaboration every working day now that the alternatives are for most
business activities more than good enough and still getting better with each
year?

As in many things it is a trade off. Yet often, we see that in those trade-
offs were companies are left holding the bill instead of the employee (office
furniture and architecture, IT equipment, ...), the balance goes in the
direction of 'good-enough' rather than the 'best-of-the-best'.)

~~~
yomly
>After declining for nearly one and a half centuries, the time spend per
family on salaried employment post WWII has gone up back to around the level
it was at the end of the 19th century. While per person average 'working'
hours are down in large parts of what we call the Western world, woman were
brought en mass into salaried employment, raising the time on the company
clock for a family significantly.

>The cost-of-living has adapted to this situation, and a dual-salary income is
now 'required' for many.

These two facts often make me ponder whether we are regressing as a society
but simply blind to this fact because various quality of life things have
become cheaper (e.g. going on holiday and electronics).

Meanwhile, we are mostly collectively losing at the wealth game and I am quite
convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite many people's
attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I lack data and
drive to prove this point sadly). As such, social mobility also seems to
regressing as who your parents are seems to be more important now than it
might have been 50-60 years ago - I need only to look to my parent's
achievements (and their peers) to be reminded of this fact.

~~~
jstanley
> I am quite convinced we are losing at the wealth game globally - despite
> many people's attempts to illustrate that global poverty is decreasing (I
> lack data and drive to prove this point sadly)

So what is it that has convinced you that we're losing, in the face of
evidence to the contrary?

~~~
yomly
I apologise for the following unstructured stream of unconsciousness. It would
be interesting to know what age group you are in as that could well colour
your perspective.

For me, my anecdata leads me to believe it is very hard to get on the wealth
ladder. I have built this perspective from associating with people ranging
from backgrounds of very working class to ultra high net worth people. We live
in a world where (thanks to things like QE) it's easy to make money if you
have money - equity markets have gone through a sustained bull period and
housing prices have seen a sustained period of growth which has only in the
past few years cooled down.

An easy thing for many people to relate to is house prices (which is often
most people's entry into wealth). If you live in a major city like London,
good luck buying a house without parental help. The past decade has seen
growth which has basically been faster than most people can save at. What's
even more crazy is that the gap is small enough to see within (half) a
generation - I have an older brother and people in their mid 30s face a very
different situation to people in their mid 20s now. If you got on the housing
ladder around or before 08 you'd have made widened the gap between those who
didn't in a stepwise fashion.

Meanwhile, my father was able to buy a house and have a kid when he was 27
after arriving in the UK with nothing on his back - he didn't even have a
university degree. Contrast that with today, people who work in classically
"elite" jobs live paycheck to paycheck in the city. Do you know any junior
doctors in London? Most of them are amongst the most miserable people I know -
they work all kinds of crazy shifts (night oncall) then have 1-2 hour commutes
home.

So if you're in a situation where most people are struggling to move out of
home, let alone get on the ladder, while it is known that the rich are getting
richer can we say that we live in more equal times?

~~~
T2_t2
What is your comparison point? Things get better all the time, but it really
depends on what apples you compare which oranges to, and which flavour you
prefer, how the comparison is viewed.

So, is the comparison point Roman London? During the Blitz? When Pea Soup was
a common pollution issue
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog))?
Or is it a period post war until about 1980 when assets hadn't caught up to a
booming economy?

Some parts of life are more expensive in a few world cities that are more than
their local population, places like London, SF, NYC, Paris. In such places,
housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost everyone, as the market
size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth north of $USD 10 million
in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than even ten years ago, and
has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer foreign assets over local
ones. On the flipside, supply has not kept up, as most world cities have
housing approval procedures that are glacially slow, and held back by NIMBYs.

But even then, the London of 1950 wasn't the place it is now, and lots of
things like air quality have improved vastly, as has what is available to do -
from eating to drinking and general entertainment.

Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could
make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex
moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so >
$100K with expenses under $1K a month.

~~~
yomly
>What is your comparison point?

I guess my parent's generation i.e. post-WW2. Your insight about assets not
catching up is valid, although social mobility was very high for the times.

>In such places, housing is likely prohibitively expensive for almost
everyone, as the market size (aka demand) is every person in the world worth
north of $USD 10 million in the entire world. That market is a LOT larger than
even ten years ago, and has a motivated population (the Chinese) who prefer
foreign assets over local ones.

This is presentation of facts I've previously struggled to articulate so thank
you for framing it much more lucidly than I ever could have. This particular
insight unfortunately somewhat agrees with my viewpoint that "global
inequality has gone down but local inequality has gone up globally". Like I
said, I haven't got any data to prove it, but I would willingly put money on
betting that there is some Simpson's paradox schenanigans going on here.
China, if anything, is a great example of this - the Beijing middle classes
are doing "o.k." and there are tonnes of billionaires in China, but equally,
there are plenty of people still living on 100USD a month (or less).

>Ironically, I think what you parents did is the same way everyone today could
make great wealth - move to a city in another country with opportunity. My ex
moved to Beijing and made 1st world money while spending like a local - so >
$100K with expenses under $1K a month.

I think that is a fair point, the only difference I'd argue, is that my
parents came to the UK and did well for themselves by playing the same game as
most the people around them. Sure, I could move to China on an expat salary (I
have recollections of 200k PA USD for "english teachers" in South Korea being
passed around a while back, or teachers at Harrow Beijing getting paid 100k+
PA) but is that really something any of the locals can do there? That's almost
soft colonisation in my eyes. I recently had a chance to discuss local
software engineer salaries with a local mainlander and he quoted salaries of
20-30k USD for fresh CS grads in ShenZhen. And he scoffed as if that was a big
number. Really puts things into perspective when you compare that to Ivy CS
fresh-grads in SV (120-200k when I last checked)...

------
stephengillie
Please don't read/send email while driving.

Use your bus/train time to study things that will help your career, at this
job and the next. Don't just give that time away to your current employer for
free - unless your employer is a charity.

Edit: Even if you work for a charity, giving away your time for free may not
be a good idea. ;)

~~~
dagw
_Use your bus /train time to study things that will help your career_

Or leave 45 minutes early and work those 45 minutes on the train.

~~~
loup-vaillant
That one is less socially acceptable, if at all.

~~~
reitanqild
Luckily for me acceptable where I work.

Nice deal for everyone: they get access to a larger pool of potential
employees. I get to live where I want.

And I make sure I only write the hours I actually work while commuting. (Right
now I'm reading HN instead.)

------
ChuckMcM
I disagree strongly with this statement in the article:

 _" There's a real challenge in deciding what constitutes work," said Dr Jain,
from the university's Centre for Transport and Society._

"Work" is anything I would be doing while sitting at my desk in your office
building. So if I'm doing that on a train or in your office they are both
"work." And if my train ride takes 1.5 hours to the office and 1.5 hours home,
I'll get on the train around 8AM and leave the office at 3:30 to arrive at the
other end by 5PM and count that as an 8 hour work day.

On the other hand, if I am in my car driving, I don't think of it as work
until I can actually concentrate on doing work.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Possible alternate definition: Anything that you wouldn't do if you weren't
paid for it.

This would include driving to the office.

~~~
caymanjim
It's not reasonable to expect your employer to pay for your commute time if
you don't use that commute time to work. You can work for them on the train.
You shouldn't work for them on the train if you're not getting paid for it,
but you're generally also not expected to work on the train. You can't work
for them while you're driving. You can think of that driving time as work, but
you shouldn't expect your employer to consider it work.

Where you choose to live and work are up to you, and need to be factored in to
the burden. Commuting is only "work" if you're expected to do something during
the commute.

~~~
punnerud
In Norway you have to be paid when you ‘are available to the job’. If you are
on standby the minimum pay is 1/3\. If you have to work outside your normal
workhours the pay is minimum 50% extra.

If you are «forced» to drive, example as a consulatant normaly based in the
city and have to comute longer than normaly, the comute is paid.

~~~
outside1234
That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be
competitive on cost. The rest of the world can't pay for overhead like that.

~~~
naravara
>That works when you can pump oil to pay for everything and don't need to be
competitive on cost.

When you can offload the consequences of poor planning or lack of foresight
onto your employees (in the form of making them stay late, come in early, be
on call or have arbitrary schedules, etc.) at zero cost, that's going to
discourage good management and honest project planning.

If I don't have to pay a price for underestimating how long it will take to do
something, then am I not subtly incentivized to lowball estimates for
everything knowing that it's really no skin off my back if it takes longer
than expected? It's all coming out of my employees' hides. There may be fuzzy,
unquantifiable effects on morale, psychological health, creativity, etc. on my
staff that hurt the organization in the long run, but compared to the hard
data on quarterly returns they don't weigh as heavily.

------
AndrewDucker
Well, obviously.

Doing things which are part of work counts as work is hardly an innovative
statement.

The question is, how did companies persuade people that they should work for
free on the way into the office?

~~~
craig1f
I don't think it's this black and white. First, I'm sure plenty of companies
are basically stealing from their employees, but this is also situational.

I answer emails and slack whenever I can. On the flip side, I get work from
home privileges, I show up when I want, I leave when I want, and I get put on
exciting projects instead of boring ones. People who don't check their phones
after-hours cannot be trusted to lead projects with demanding clients. I
typically don't bill time until my laptop comes out.

I'm two-minds about this. Companies really do abuse their employees and try to
get all the work they can out of them. This is a problem that leads to abusive
employers. But employees also look for ANY entitlement they can receive,
whether or not it is useful to their professional development. This is also a
problem that leads to lazy and useless employees. It's sort of a feedback
loop. It's also probably very different outside of my field (and probably most
people's field on this site), which is software development.

~~~
Xylakant
> People who don't check their phones after-hours cannot be trusted to lead
> projects with demanding clients.

Why not? Requiring off-hour access is admitting project management failure.
That’s what on-call is for, and on-call engineers and management should rotate
and be paid for on-call duty. For them, it’s working hours. When I’m on call
for a client, I bill _for being available_, so basically for keeping the phone
on.

~~~
sandworm101
"Demanding client" doesnt mean unlimited funding. i find that the most
demanding ones also look most closely at their bills.

~~~
Xylakant
“Demanding client” is usually code for “behaves like a spoiled child because
nobody dared to tell them no.” The most demanding clients I’ve witnessed were
mid-level managers from MTV and Universal Music. Called for work being done on
a weekend just because they felt like.

The way I usually approach these discussions is “ok, you can have the feature
built this weekend, this means people need to work their weekend, that costs
50% extra and means that the people working extra hours will be unavailable
some time in the future.” Same thing with 24/7 support. It just costs money.
Staff needs to be available. 90% of the people decide that Monday will be good
enough.

The hard fact is that someone needs to pay for 24/7\. It’s either the client,
the employer or the employee. It’s just that a lot of employees don’t realize
that they’re getting shortchanged here with talk about engagement and promise
of better projects and I’m trying my best that this doesn’t happen in my
company on my watch.

~~~
sandworm101
Then they may go elsewhere, to someone not on a 9-5 monday-friday culture.
Many now space people out (ie some on a w-th weekend) so the company can
provide 7-day service at normal rates. I used to work in film/tv. 7-day
service is a norm.

24-hour is harder, but when you have clients across different time zones, it
is also a norm. Again, with big films scattering themselves across the globe,
it is expected that someone in authority picks up 24/7 because your 3am is
sometimes the client's 10am.

You can charge more for this, but the client doesn't want to hear complaints.
You will be judged on service rendered for a given price. The firm down the
street, the one who can provide people on a sunday without overtime, will win
the next contract.

~~~
Xylakant
You may have misread what I wrote. I’m not at all opposed to flex time, work
schedules that include the weekend, people preferring off work hours. If
someone prefers to work weekends and have weekdays off, fine. If someone
prefers 6x6.66 hours instead of 5x8, good with me. People that work on
drilling platforms or on ships have even more extreme schedules. Still, this
is all fundamentally different from constant availability for a single person.

------
vesak
If your employer tracks you by the hour, then _of course_ email while
commuting is work. Also thinking about a design while taking a shower in the
evening is work. Also waking up in the middle of the night and not being able
to fall asleep because work issues are bothering you is work.

Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour is
beyond my understanding.

~~~
phillc73
> Why employers (in the knowledge business at least) track people by the hour
> is beyond my understanding

Because in some countries it is a legal requirement. Where I work, in Austria,
there is currently a legal limit of 10 working hours per day and a total of 50
hours per week, except in exceptional circumstances. Therefore, all employees
must log their working hours.

I found the process odd when I first moved here. However, over time I have
come to appreciate the advantages. I have absolutely no pressure from my
employer to work excessive overtime and there is no default culture of long
working hours. After 14:00 on Fridays, every week, the office is 90% empty.

I hope this small example helps you to understand why employers in some
locations have to track people by the hour.

~~~
cco
Are you salaried or are you paid per hour?

~~~
phillc73
Salaried

------
11eleven
I feel one of the aspects of this that's not covered is:

Yes while the employer may not be able to legally force you to handle emails
outside of official work hours and doing so counts as working...

Depending on your job, if you don't check and reply to some time sensitive
emails outside of work hours, you might a) become a roadblock on someone
else's project that's due soon b) be late to respond to "emergencies" and this
can affect how people perceive your overall effectiveness and performance.

Of course, company culture can minimize last minute requests, unrealistic
deadlines, etc. to minimize these "emergencies" that need quick replies but
many don't.

~~~
Cthulhu_
You could just bounce that back with "A lack of planning on your part doesn’t
constitute an emergency on mine". If a project is due soon and needs your
attention outside of work hours, it should've been planned earlier.

Yes I know that's an ideal world etc. But how did people handle that before
there was email? That's right, they didn't, and it had to wait until tomorrow.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Before email there were phones, and from speaking to older friends in
manufacturing it was pretty common for people to be called at all hours of the
day and night to fix critical machinery (on the phone or to attend site in
person) whether officially "on call" or not.

This is not a new phenomenon.

Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm not trying to justify this behaviour. It was
wrong to intrude into people's personal lives and expect unpaid work then and
it's wrong now.

------
SketchySeaBeast
Does this open the door for me billing my evening shower when the design
finally clicks in my head?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Depends - what did you do at work while that design didn't click?

I was on HN, not doing much work worth paying for.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I believe the answer to that is "dealt with the thousand distractions an open
office floor-plan encourages while answering intrusive emails". The shower
would have been the first time all day I could think for 10 minutes
uninterrupted.

------
cmurf
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." Wernher von
Braun

Of course lawyers bill for research, phone calls, and emails. So do
consultants. Why would considering work emails during commuting counting as
work be at all a controversial? What's the contrary argument?

------
sxp62000
If you reply to emails before 9 and after 6, you're telling your
manager/client ... hey! I am at your disposal 24/7\. By the way, if your boss
gave you a "work laptop" you're already screwed.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Not just your manager / client, but your direct colleagues too.

~~~
sxp62000
It's shocking to see people take pride in staying up all night to finish a
presentation before a 7am call. We're all suckers.

------
perlgeek
We have an electronic time sheet, and I've always added answering emails
during commute as work time. Nobody ever complained.

Maybe it's different in the UK, but I don't understand the big deal.

~~~
lbriner
It's not a UK thing, it's a company thing. For billable companies like legal
and accounting, you are more likely to bill hours wherever you are. For most
others, it is "up to you" if you want to do work outside of paid hours but if
you don't, maybe you won't keep up, maybe the boss won't like you etc.

------
j45
The question I often ask clients is, are they busy doing other people's work
from their mobile emails?

Looking at the types of emails we send/recieve, a trend seems to emerge, some
people ask a lot more question using email, and some emails require us to do a
lot more answering.

Today's email habits are still rooted in the blackberry culture that created
it - there was no structure and framework around email use.

I still believe mobile emails are more beneficial for the people asking the
questions, and not so good for people who have to answer answering the
questions, often on their own time to keep up.

How does poor planning on someone else's part require you to reply instantly,
or within the same business day? Very little should be that critical if the
organization is truly-proactive.

Processing several hundred emails a day used to be a norm on a few recent
projects. A few trends emerged to manage sanity:

\- Poor emailing habits exist. Triaging is incredibly important, on top of
GTD. Those 2 minute email replies can really add up, scheduling replies is
important.

\- The more we try to get ahead and email in our off time, the more replies we
recieve in a vicious cycle. The more we send emails. Our time will never scale
to meet the available time of all the people we simultaneously communicate
with.

\- I try to use mobile email only to read emails and to write as little as
possible.

\- Where I do have to write mobile emails, especially after hours, I consider
if I want to be at the top of the person's inbox or not, and that's probably
best achieved by scheduling an email to go out at 7 or 8 AM instead of the
night before.

\- The email scheduling feature in Aquamail is invaluable. I wouldn't be able
to switch back to iOS without a comparable email client. Boomerang is handy
too for automatic follow ups that can be scheduled at the time of sending.

\- Try to centralize communication as much as possible and check email 1-3
times a day. Email can be followed up on, it isn't always the case with Slack.
Slack/Chats are extremely valuable for realtime input.

I'd love to hear any other tips or strategies folks are using to manage their
email flow.

------
Nasrudith
Really these sort of metrics are missing the point in my opinion along with
"employee engagement" and "focus" tracking. What they should care about is the
deliverables and not some puritan pennywise pound foolish get as much toil out
per dollar.

IT is one classic example with the lazy sysadmin is a good sysadmin. If
everything is secure and operational and all desired expansions are either met
or properly analysed as not worth it then their slacking off doesn't matter.

------
mattlondon
I am guilty of triaging emails on the underground train in on the morning.

No one seems to have mentioned my perspective: Its not that I feel compelled
to do this (far from it), its more that the commute is _BORING AS HELL_.

At least for London, the wifi and network is only available during the 30
seconds you are in a station (i.e. not in the tunnels), so more productive
things that need a persistent network connection wont work very well (e.g.
Duolingo, netflix etc). You cant even look out of the window since its in a
tunnel the whole way! :-)

The other alternative to doing emails is reading cached news articles (I
actually do this a lot - load up a series of 10-15 articles before getting on
the train), or desperately trying to connect to the wifi then load a webpage
in the 30 second window you have before you are back in a tunnel.

Or you can get paid-for Duolingo or download netflix shows the night before
etc. Its all a bit of a faff though really, while your inbox is sitting there
full of juicy unread emails from your colleagues in another hemisphere that
you'll need to read _at some point anyway_ .... too tempting to jump in and
start triaging when your alternative is staring at the floor or the blackness
outside the windows :)

~~~
Fnoord
Duolingo? Netflix? Why aren't you replying e-mails? Tunnels are no excuse,
mortal [1]

[1] [http://www.offlineimap.org](http://www.offlineimap.org)

 _(Wink)_

------
zaphar
I absolutely consider time commuting as part of my work hours. I leave the
office early and count the 45 minutes on the train as work time. Whether it's
answering emails, writing some code, or working on documentation it's
definitely work.

~~~
eximius
I don't log hours so it's kind of not relevant, but I mentally count lunch,
especially if with coworkers. I can't quite bring myself to count the commute
(also 30-45 min here). Counting both reduces 'real' working hours
considerably.

Picking one or the other would be nearly equivalent anyway.

------
mirimir
As a consultant, I've billed for work, regardless of where I did it. At home.
On trains and planes. On the beach. In Internet cafes in Amsterdam. Why not?

But on the other hand, I recall being shocked (this was some years ago) when a
seriously enterprise-level customer service rep emailed me at midnight.
Because, you know, I was billing for reading her message, in 15-minute blocks,
but she was paid on a salary basis.

------
thx4allthestuff
I’ve largely disconnected from email, both work and personal. I guess one day
I just smelled another internal phishing campaign and decided that it would be
the last I participated in. After that I informed my bosses that if they
needed to reach me then to do so in team chat. The unspoken part of that was,
“and if that’s a problem, then fire me, please.”

------
wayanon
Was expecting a mention of BMW who were forced to switch off their email
servers after working hours I think after a court ruling brought by a union in
Germany.

------
unixhero
Of course it does. I charge hours in my in transit because I am emailing and
interacting with people at work and in my client projects.

------
deevolution
If you take into consideration the near future of autonomous cars where people
will be capable of working during their commute, which some people have up to
3+ hour commutes - absolutely this should count as working hours. Hopefully it
also means less hours in the office.

------
collyw
Should surfing the web for a couple of minutes during work hours be deducted
then?

------
browsercoin
Slack should count as work too while commuting. I'd prefer emails but now you
are de facto on call when you have Slack on your phone.

~~~
Fnoord
Problem is that not everything on Slack is... "productive"... (Though the same
could be true for e-mail.)

~~~
browsercoin
I'm not talking about shooting the shit but video conference calls eating up
precious data, panic support channels to fight fire....

I feel like companies use Slack exactly for this reason...it tethers your
employees to a very intimate possession-your smartphone and it's far more
invasive than a phone call or email and your are expected to respond
_immediately_.

It has all the dynamics of any email or regular office conversation. Somebody
has a grudge in the office and want to make you look bad for remote working?
Call them and immediately hang up and tell managers 'so and so isn't
responding in real time' or take a convo out of context where emoticons play a
far more conflicting messages to the receiver. For example, somebody using a
animated flashing parrot and mistaking it as a slight.

I feel like Slack has been more times counter-productive than advertised.

------
Kluny
I still don't understand why half the threads on HN talk about how there's not
as much work anymore due to automation, and the other half talk about how
people are overworked and working longer hours. We can't have UBI because that
would encourage people to be lazy, but all jobs are bullshit anyway. When are
we going to rise up and seize the means of production?

------
adultSwim
If engineers had our own unions, we could actually have these discussions with
our employers.

------
adultSwim
_Commuting should count as work_

~~~
megablast
Oh no, lets not reward people who do not value their time, and choose to live
further from work than others.

~~~
3chelon
I've lived where I live for 18 years. I've been in my current job less than a
year. Does that justify pulling my kids out of school just before they do
their exams so I can move house?

Where you live is not a simple choice for many of us. History of previous
jobs, family commitments, schools, house prices, etc., etc... Like lots of
things, it's a compromise.

------
devmunchies
Women joining the workforce increased the labor supply which decreased wages
on the whole. This makes it so many women HAVE to work as opposed to GET to
work. A double income for many families is required nowadays.

~~~
User23
Women joining the workforce lead to a long term decrease in the labor supply.
The only reason wages haven’t gone up is a massive influx of foreign born
workers that keeps supply high.

~~~
tejtm
... because they were not home having babies?

~~~
tejtm
please not that this is not a rhetorical question on my part. down voting
statements looking for more information/ clarification seems out of place here

