On disconnecting

A few days ago I was out at lunch with a colleague and a couple internet-ops-friends when my colleague asked me how the work-life balance was at Etsy. I thought for a few minutes and found that my answer was that it had been hard for me to adjust to it, but in a really good way. There's been much more of the life side of a work-life balance than I'd been used to in the past few years, which is a pretty good problem to have.

The first time I got sick after I started working at Etsy, I went into work that morning to get my work laptop (since I don't have any VPNs or other work-related things installed on my personal laptop) and took it back to my apartment to work from home. Within half an hour of me getting back on IRC, two coworkers threatened to revoke my VPN access temporarily if I didn't quit working and go play video games and snuggle cats instead. The third threat to do this made me think that maybe this wasn't empty posturing, maybe these people really did want me to go rest up instead of trying to work when I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. So I did. Then, of course, my body decided that now was a great season to make up for all the sick days I didn't take over the past few years (either that or my immune system is no longer cut out for an office with a few hundred people after so many years of only having to deal with the germs of tens of startup employees) and I've spent much more time sick the past few months than I'd like. Being home sick is really boring, y'all! But it's forced me to deal with the guilt I was feeling about taking time away from work.

Shortly after that first sick day I decided to try an experiment that would have been unthinkable to me a year or two ago - I took my work email off of my personal phone. Well, first I turned off work email notifications. Then a few weeks later, realizing that I can't have an email account synced to my phone and not check it when I get bored, I deleted the account entirely. I did feel guilty for a while, but after seeing plenty of emails from colleagues saying, "Hey, I'm going on vacation and won't be accessible at all so here's who to talk to instead" and realizing that that was okay, I started to feel not the worst about not working when I wasn't at work.

The one issue that I've had to work around was that of calendars. For every week except when I'm on call, I only use my personal phone, which now has no work-related accounts on it. But sometimes I go out to lunch with my team and I want to know if I have an afternoon meeting that I need to get back for. Our email settings won't let me share the full details of my calendar with non-Etsy accounts like my personal gmail, and exporting and importing the entire calendar doesn't deal well with events changing, and Google currently has no way to sync just the calendar without having the email and the rest of the account synced as well, so I currently have a makeshift solution where all my work events are synced to my personal calendar, but all they say is "busy". I don't know if any particular "busy" is actually really important or some recurring event that I don't really need to worry about, but it's better than nothing.

But there is still lingering guilt about the fact that, I don't know, I have an immune system that isn't perfect, or something. And it's not because of anything that Etsy has done, but rather the expectations, whether formal or informal, that got drilled into my head at companies past. The informal expectations were hardest to deal with, actually. If someone said to me, "Hey, this is a big project/deadline/whatever coming up and you need to pull 60 hour weeks until then to get it done," or "Hey, you're the only one on call so get used to never having time to yourself again," we could at least discuss that. But informal expectations are more insidious than that. Those are what comes from when you start at a new company or on a new team and you see new people working until 9 or 10 or 11 pm every night, when you get emails from your boss in the wee hours of the morning, when there are no gaps in your company's chat logs because everyone has the chat client on their phones and nobody ever logs off.

There, people might say, "No, we don't expect you to work all night and check your phone 24/7, of course not," but when that's what everyone else is doing, it stands out when you're the only one who actually does try to disconnect. You want to have work-life balance, but you don't want to be seen as not pulling your weight. So no matter what you choose to do, it eats at you and it throws off your idea of what normal or healthy is.

Especially this time of year, when there's holidays to celebrate, families to see, and festive cookies to eat, I'd like to encourage everyone to take a look at what your work habits actually are and consider the expectations that you are setting, intentionally or not, for the people around you. Managers especially should consider what their own work habits might be saying to the people they manage. None of us work in a vacuum (even if you're a one-person ops team), and our behaviors do affect the people we work with, whether we realize it or not. Those kinds of expectations, especially when combined with the effects of impostor syndrome, can lead people to work longer and longer hours to the detriment of their health and happiness because they feel guilty for taking time that is deliberately separate from work. Yes, a twenty-person startup might require more sometimes from its employees than a company that's established and profitable, but we should be asking ourselves how much of our off-hours work is actually necessary, and how much we're doing just because we've gotten stuck with these habits and have forgotten how to disconnect.

Mathias Meyer recently wrote about switching to a minimum vacation policy, away from an unlimited one, which I think is an excellent idea. I'd also like to see more companies adopt some sort of "minimum time away from work-related stuff per evening" policy where people are encouraged to shut off their VPNs, quit writing code, and go play with their families or really engage with their friends or just snuggle their pets and watch a movie without constantly interrupting themselves by checking their phone/laptop/smartwatch. Most people I know, myself included, do better work and are more engaged when they don't have the low-level mental drain that comes from always being "on". We need to give ourselves time to relax and recharge, and encourage the people around us to do the same.

So this holiday season, and this upcoming year, think about how much you're "on" and how much you really need to be, and find the time to truly disconnect when you need to.