
Flexible working can make you ill, experts say - e15ctr0n
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/02/work-life-balance-flexible-working-can-make-you-ill-experts-say
======
grecy
My last company tried very hard to make me "on call" without any extra
compensation.

I think it's very important to separate your work life from your home life so
you have time to switch off and decompress. Never give your personal phone
number(s) or email address to bosses at work - carry a separate work phone if
you must, and turn it off or leave it at the office. Also don't check your
work email from home, ever.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) where work pay you a pittance to use your
personal cell as a work phone is a joke. There is no universe where it's good
for you.

If you set this expectation from the very beginning, it will be much easier
than trying to change to this down the road.

~~~
samstave
Wrt: byod- what I want is complete number mobility.

And the ability to have multiple numbers on the device.

I should have a phone in this era that allows me to have calls inbound on the
employer number show up as work - and have any personal number calls be
differentiated easily.

In the same manner as I have three email boxes in the damn mail app - which
are easily deleted or locked once I leave a company, why can't I bolt
additional phone numbers onto the phone during the time I'm employed there!?!?

~~~
beambot
Google voice with call forwarding. It's a life saver.

------
jedberg
I was just thinking to myself yesterday how sometimes it would be nice to have
one of those jobs where when you are away from work, there is no work to be
done. Like working in a factory or something, where there is literally nothing
I can do during the off hours other than relax.

This through crossed my mind because I had just finished two weeks of vacation
where I literally did nothing related to work, and it was really relaxing.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Exactly.

So the take away is that in order to avoid burnout you need to mindfully
develop the skill of 'stopping work'. While that is easy when you work on a
factory line and you can't bring the tools home, and its really really hard
when your job consists mostly about thinking about how to solve a problem.

I found early on that since I really enjoy programming I couldn't "stop"
instead I had to shift to one of my projects so that it would be more
enjoyable for me. That works a bit but not as much as sitting on the deck of a
mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity does :-).

But the bottom line is figure out a way to "not work", whether it is by
reading, exercising, or doing some hobby, so that you don't let the stress of
work overwhelm you.

~~~
macNchz
>sitting on the deck of a mountain cabin with no Internet connectivity

As someone who often struggles to 'turn off' after work, this is my favorite
way to disconnect. I try to make it out fairly regularly to camp deep in the
backcountry–there's no better relief from work stress than sitting by a
campfire in the forest, a full day's hike from the car, parked an hour's drive
past the last trace of cell service.

The feeling of freedom is intoxicating–the feeling that there is literally no
way that some work 'emergency' could crop up and demand my attention. It's
something I used to get on airplanes, but with the increasing availability of
in-flight wifi it's not quite so peaceful.

~~~
derefr
Since I live in a city where my ISP has a bunch of "public for customers" wi-
fi hotspots (Vancouver), I've considered dropping my cell-phone plan and just
using a VoIP provider for calls/texts. You can find the wi-fi hotspots near
most places you might _need_ Internet (e.g. when shopping), but they don't
extend into public spaces like parks, and you can't use them when moving in a
car/bus/train (or even when walking at a reasonable clip.) It seems like it'd
separate life into connected and disconnected spaces, rather than forcing a
constant decision (that's "on you") to disconnect—and I quite like the sound
of that.

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vox_mollis
This strikes me as very odd.

For the vast majority of human history, work has always been something that
was interwoven into our lives. From hunting and gathering, to farming and
ranching, to woodworking and blacksmithing, and so on, up _until_ the
industrial revolution, nearly everyone "worked from home" and I'm unaware of
any documented ill health effects from this. Intuitively, I'd suppose that
aggregate stress levels actually _rose_ with the advent of commuting to
dedicated factory/office workplaces, as factory quotas and office
micromanagement are far more psychologically demanding than the farm or home
workshop in which you ( or your remote, usually undemanding lord, in the case
of feudal work relationships ) set your own schedule and degree of
competitiveness.

~~~
cjfont
In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven
into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a
laptop computer. If you're a farmer, woodworker, etc. you still need a
separate place of work from where you live, be it a workshop or the fields. In
the evening when the farmer returns to his house to rest, there is no question
he's done for the day, and he can fully relax and sleep.

The dangerous mindset is that if you're capable of working whenever and
wherever you are, then why should you ever really disconnect? This problem is
an epidemic with people who don't know how to create a mental separation
between work life and everything else, and I would argue that although it's
easier to fall in the trap if you work over a VPN, it can also happen for any
worker that is permitted/encouraged to work at any time of the day regardless
of the situation.

~~~
mikestew
_In each of those cases, none of those occupations can be really be interwoven
into your life as tightly as a job where +90% of your labor is done via a
laptop computer._

Software development is not a special occupational snowflake, and I'm going to
guess that you've never been within the property boundaries of an actual farm,
let alone actually done farm work. Your job is interwoven into your live so
much because you choose to allow it, and don't know when to say "no" to your
boss. Close your laptop. There, work's over. Farm work? Yeah, well, those
fences aren't going to mend themselves.

You don't live at the office, do you? Not metaphorically, I mean literally
sleep there. No? Guess where the farmer sleeps? At work. Every day.
Extrapolate from there.

~~~
s73v3r
At the same time, you probably own the farm if you're living on it. Someone
who's doing unpaid overtime for their company isn't getting any benefits from
it.

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cjfont
Well this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has been following what others
have mentioned is a best practice for working from home: Set work boundaries,
both in terms of time and physical location, as to what constitutes work and
what is otherwise personal/family time.

Enforce set hours as to when you are actually working as opposed to when you
are doing something else, and let others in your household know what they are.
Create a separate physical environment that you can mentally associate as
being where you perform work, and work only, and take any other activities
such as social life and games out of it -- preferably using a different
computer altogether.

Setting virtual walls where work begins/ends can greatly reduce the cognitive
overhead your brain has to endure when trying to separate what is work from
the rest of your life, and thus lower overall stress.

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Retric
This has little to do with Flexible scheduling. A waiter may have a flexible
schedule, but there not going to worry about checking there work emails.

It's really a problem with always being available, a 9-5 worker that checks
there e-mail every night is going to have the same issues.

------
paublyrne
From working in co-working spaces, I've met a lot of freelance people, and
some people have it worked out. Set hours, strictly observed. The same days
and hours each week, whatever they may be, and then life can be planned.

It's very easy to slip into 'flexible' hours when doing freelance, which can
often mean working all day, any day of the week, not taking proper breaks, for
weeks on end.

I've done that, felt awful for long periods, and needed time to recuperate
afterwards. My body gave me a lot of signals to communicate that this wasn't
good for me. I overheard another guy in one office who was doing similar hours
to me, telling his Dad on the phone that he was sleeping really badly, a
problem he hadn't suffered from before.

And of course that made perfect sense.

~~~
kilroy123
Same here. I can be somewhat flexible about when I work during the day. I
choose not to. Instead I often work out of a co-working space and work the
same hours daily.

------
BuckRogers
Instead of all these methodologies for managing programming teams, I've often
wondered why no one came up with methodologies for managing employees working
from home. That seems to be an untapped market for the "methodology" folks.

I've worked from home for years, and not as a freelancer. I just have my work
hours like I would in any office.

It's worked out well for me, but it would be difficult for many people to hack
it due to the extra discipline it requires. I can see why companies don't want
people doing it but there's definitely big economic potential held back, and
environmental/mental harm done from the daily travel into the office.

I grew up in rural Iowa and worked the typical farm boy jobs, went to school
all the way through in Iowa then lived in Chicago, Nord Pas de Calais (France)
and now Austin. The majority of the population that doesn't come from a
similar diverse cultural background (talking true, meaningful rural cultural
diversity here not skintone) and there's a lot to be said for having "grit"
ingrained in who you are, it helps with handling remote work in my opinion.

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artpepper
You really do need to set boundaries, so the article's not wrong. On the other
hand, I couldn't juggle my child's preschool and my spouse's teaching
schedule, if I didn't have flex time.

~~~
pc86
The article isn't actually talking about flex time or flexible schedules. It's
talking about "grazing" your work, always being available, keeping track of
work emails after hours or answering work calls outside your scheduled time,
etc.

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sreitshamer
I just read this interview with Brunello Cucinelli and found it inspiring. "In
this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes
for the evening. The day after, when you turn up for work, what are you like?
You are a still person. You are better." [http://pi.co/brunello-
cucinelli-2/](http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/)

------
thegayngler
I usually try to learn/use a language I don't use at work. Then take a
leisurely approach to learning the new language. Many times it works. Many
times it doesn't. I try to do things I know I won't be doing at work right
now. The stuff I do outside of work is just because I'm interested in it. I
also workout, watch TV and meet up with friends etc... which involve not being
at work mentally.

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kevingadd
I've been on an always-on project for the last year or so where taking time
away from work means that there's more to catch up on when I come back, no
matter what. In some cases taking too long away from the project means a huge
pile of other people's mistakes have accumulated, and I have to go in and
clean them up.

Incidentally, I've also spent a portion of the last year on medical leave. The
two have interacted pretty poorly so far, and I can definitely confirm part of
the article's argument, at least in my case: When your work and personal lives
are intertwined like it describes, the stress never goes away and you're
constantly amped up. It's not good.

I am happy to note that nobody sent work emails over the holidays, so that's
nice - at least then you get a chance to use that time to disconnect and get
some distance from things and spend time with your family.

------
JoeAltmaier
Hm. Fixed working can make you ill, too. Better of two evils.

------
Spooky23
The place I worked in a few years ago handled this the best. We had a level
2/3 support team embedded in our division who handled 90% of calls.

The calls were taken by junior folks who were overtime eligible, they rotated
1 week cycles and received 20% of their hourly rate, plus a 3 hour minimum for
time worked. They handled all vendor dispatch, all telco callouts.

For the resolver groups, there was a severity-1 process, with an on-call
manager & call tree to the higher skill people. People were on call for two-
week cycles, but any call-out to these people was treated as a defect in the
process.

The average was 2-3 escalated calls to senior staff on different teams per
month, out of about 5-7000 calls total.

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sz4kerto
It can. I just worked through Christmas, without any real external pressure.
As always, putting in extra hours requires much more extra effort than the
reward you're getting for it, so it does not make too much sense.

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ianstallings
If you work from home you have to set boundaries and go out of your way to
_set the tone_. Meaning, everyone knows you are working those hours at that
place everyday. When you're not within those hours you're not working, period.
This is how I worked from home when I telecommuted.

Being a startup founder now, I don't really find a good balance and my health
is suffering. So I'm trying hard to follow my own rules this year. It's tough.
There is so much work to do.

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forrestbrazeal
If you work in ops, you will get paged sometimes, and you'll handle
maintenance windows/unplanned emergencies during off hours. It's the cost of
doing business. I don't see this as "flexible work", necessarily - we don't
say that a nurse on a 14-hour shift has flexible hours. That said, if you
handle a midnight outage, your boss had better be ok with you coming in late
the next morning.

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VLM
The article is incredibly unclear or muddled:

> "but If I wasn’t at home with my kids it costs me something."

> "To create free evenings, Veenendaal limited the working day"

Or is it more like:

> "evening events like a recent programme of talks on the food chain."

Is it:

> "Flexible working policies can also raise the risk of poor working
> conditions"

Or is it more like:

> "And past the table a dozen people work at long desks on chains."

Is it:

> "while the blurring of lines between work and home life is stressful for
> some people."

Or is it more like:

> "for staff lunches, yoga classes" (Seriously, I can't get away from work
> even to eat or sweat?)

