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Aug 2, 2023·edited Aug 2, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
I love the practicality of this piece, but I believe there's a subtext at play as well, which is that for most of us, there's a natural energy dip in the late afternoon. I think even people without caregiver concerns find themselves less mentally alert in the 'dead zone.' The 9-5 (or 8-6) is just a construction from the industrial revolution when people NEEDED to be at a factory. But it has never matched most of our innate rhythms. I think that's why so many people are finding 4-6 to be an ideal time for other pursuits like working out (studies show peak performance occurs at 4pm for many athletes) or doing other, non-cerebral activities. How could things not improve in the workplace if we allowed employees to work WITH rather than against their natural periods of peak concentration? (With the added benefit of greater satisfaction, nervous system regulation and family needs met to boot?)
When I read that WSJ piece, it once again reminded me that so much of corporate America is stuck with the idea that the 9-5 construct is the only way to work. I freelance, so I’m here to get my teenager from one place to another, which is often at some point in the afternoon. When I worked in an office, the stress of getting home & making it to a school or sporting event was exhausting. The 9-5 construct has not been effective for a long time. Some people work best during non-traditional hours, and that should be widely accepted. Conversely, someone could be in the office from 9-5 and be completely ineffective.
Your point about how it was at Buzzfeed late in the day is similar to what it was like in a book publishing office during the same hours. Nothing got done because we were all exhausted!
This is not a dead zone issue directly, but related to how the workday does not need to be that long for us to be productive: A few weeks after my kid was born, I went back to work half-time. We were going to be moving across the country and I was trying to stretch my parental leave until we got to the new place. Working half days made a lot of sense because I worked from home, so I wasn't losing time to a commute. We hired a babysitter who had the baby in the next room.
Anyway, after a couple weeks I realized that in my half day, I was very measurably producing more like 75% of a normal full day's work, because I was just head down, working, and around the time I might have had an energy dip I was off for the day anyway. So I asked if we could count me as working more than half time so I'd get longer leave. My supervisor had no problem with it. I didn't have the impression the department head had a problem with it. But they talked to HR who talked to a lawyer who said there could be some kind of legal problems if they allowed it. So there I was, doing 75% of the work on half the time, and my parental leave not reflecting it.
OMFG yes. The corporate workday, office design, and whole culture are designed for and by the people who "succeed" in that kind of environment, and that's not most of us.
Back in the eighties, my employer ran an ad showing a picture of a guy in a diner doing paperwork while the cleaner leaned on her mop staring at the clock hitting midnight. "Customer commitment means missing your kid's birthday party".
In 1990 I had missed too many birthdays; I was in the middle of a divorce and about to have my kids for six weeks of summer. When offered money to leave, I took the money and left. That's the last time I worked for a corporation.
When most "jobs" are producing nothing but carbon dioxide and billionaires, the whole concept of "work" is fundamentally unsustainable.
I don’t know about y’all, but some of my own personal afternoon gap comes from working on a HIGHLY distributed team. In order to catch my Indian and Jordanian colleagues I’m frequently online starting at 7 am. Most of my US team is based on the east coast, which for me in Mountain time means their two o’clock meetings take over my lunch hour, but they’re all gone by about 3pm. When no one is on the same time, the performative work day loses all meaning, and pretending it still matters just seems insane.
Can we please stop saying "at least for anyone with caregiving responsibilities"? The rest of us still have to care for ourselves and doctors, dentists, post offices, banks, etc also "assume availability during those times."
I know things are more complex for caregivers, but it feels like it just fuels the "us vs them" mentality to keep caveating like this when in actuality so much of the "traditional workplace norms" don't work for ANYONE.
I have been a parent for a decade now and I still really clearly remember the decade of work I performed before I ever had a child. I remember working in an organization that had exactly ZERO parents or caregivers on staff, long before the pandemic - maybe even before the Great Recession honestly - and I remember very clearly that this dead zone existed then as well!! Every damn day!
As a parent now, I appreciate and celebrate the flexibility that some work has created to allow parents to tend to the impossibility of caregiving in modern society. But also, I wish that we could focus more generally on the fact that equally, caregivers and non caregivers alike, we are not computers to plug into a terminal at 9 am until... ??? unclear on the end time.
Productivity has skyrocketed and working hours have only gotten longer and fuzzier. It is unreasonable to expect that anyone will have a full 10 hours at one high level of productivity throughout the day, regardless of your age, marital status, parental status, etc. Allowing for downtime to cool your brain computer off and potentially engage in something that means something to you reminds me a bit of AHP's recent newsletter pointing out the lack of measured rest in the game-ification of fitness. Let your employees close their restoration rings, caregivers and non-caregivers alike. Or deal with the fallout and cost of high turnover, lower quality work, and a general ick vibe at your organization. Which I guess is what a lot of CEO's are doing right now.
Ugh! We should all be allowed to work less and then we'd get more done when we are working! Four day weeks! Or 5-6 hour workdays!
Employers just like to have control. They want to control their employees' lives, and they can do that best when they have them in the same physical work environment for long stretches of time.
Ugh that last point about the four day workweek really struck home. From 2020-2022, my employer gave some of us ONE Friday off a month. Everyone in the org took it off, so there was no pressure to not take it. Folks, I LIVED for that Friday, especially as a caregiver who just needed a break or a chance to catch up on sleep. It’s been a struggle in the months since it was taken away. Way less happy. I’m convinced it went away bc of power and someone seeing it as a “problem,” just like people keep insisting that the 4-6 dip is a problem.
Aug 2, 2023·edited Aug 2, 2023Liked by Anne Helen Petersen
It's wild how many articles like this legitimize hand-wringing about flexible work, and how many commenters/people on social media respond as if they're gospel! It really looks like those folks don't care about what their employees get done. They care that their employees are holding up the performative norms about work that they are used to and comfortable with. If what actually mattered was that I completed my tasks by their deadlines, then no one would care what I was doing between 4-6 PM. So many corporate jobs don't actually *do* much of importance. They *exist* to justify budgets and hierarchies...and resistance to flexibility reveals that pretty starkly.
After a two hour presentation today, I spent 10 mins getting water and going to the bathroom, 10 mins sending meeting notes and catching up with emails and then nearly 15 mins lying head down on the floor. The ruthlessness of 8 hour timesheets meant that time came out of the ‘end’ of my work day and will stretch into tomorrow am. There’s no give or recovery- just endurance.
Thank you for this topic! I’ve been questioning the 9-5, 8hr work day long before COVID. In my privileged, managerial, salaried, white collar job I usually don’t have tasks that can consistently fill 8 hours in a row. A lot of times I send an email, make a call, have a meeting, delegate. Then wait for something to happen. Put out a fire. Repeat. There are times where there is literally nothing I can do until someone gets back to me. Where is the benefit to sitting in a cubicle vs. sitting at home and maybe tossing in a load of laundry? Yes, there are plenty of times when I need to be in person but overall the 9-5 concept is so outdated and ridiculous. I mean really, who made up 40 hours a week?! Why not 36, why not 42 (not to say we need more, ha).
One of my students (I teach writing to college students) wrote a paper last year about how new technologies allow companies to track how many hours you are actually working vs breaking, thinking, conversing, staring off into space, etc. His take on it was that generally it was a good thing, and it would increase productivity. But I think that's an easier argument to make if you've never worked in an office before.
As a corollary, did you see the Bloomberg column in WaPo, essentially saying that we all need to go back into the office to preserve the vitality of cities.? LOL. The comments excoriated him for trying to guilt us all into preserving his bank balance and placing the burden of urban planning on the backs of office workers. So much of the call for in person is rooting in greed and the rest in bad management. It's in everyone's best interest not to listen and for those of us in management to retool our thinking. To paraphrase Jim Wright, if we want a better society, we need to be better citizens.
I love the practicality of this piece, but I believe there's a subtext at play as well, which is that for most of us, there's a natural energy dip in the late afternoon. I think even people without caregiver concerns find themselves less mentally alert in the 'dead zone.' The 9-5 (or 8-6) is just a construction from the industrial revolution when people NEEDED to be at a factory. But it has never matched most of our innate rhythms. I think that's why so many people are finding 4-6 to be an ideal time for other pursuits like working out (studies show peak performance occurs at 4pm for many athletes) or doing other, non-cerebral activities. How could things not improve in the workplace if we allowed employees to work WITH rather than against their natural periods of peak concentration? (With the added benefit of greater satisfaction, nervous system regulation and family needs met to boot?)
When I read that WSJ piece, it once again reminded me that so much of corporate America is stuck with the idea that the 9-5 construct is the only way to work. I freelance, so I’m here to get my teenager from one place to another, which is often at some point in the afternoon. When I worked in an office, the stress of getting home & making it to a school or sporting event was exhausting. The 9-5 construct has not been effective for a long time. Some people work best during non-traditional hours, and that should be widely accepted. Conversely, someone could be in the office from 9-5 and be completely ineffective.
Your point about how it was at Buzzfeed late in the day is similar to what it was like in a book publishing office during the same hours. Nothing got done because we were all exhausted!
This is not a dead zone issue directly, but related to how the workday does not need to be that long for us to be productive: A few weeks after my kid was born, I went back to work half-time. We were going to be moving across the country and I was trying to stretch my parental leave until we got to the new place. Working half days made a lot of sense because I worked from home, so I wasn't losing time to a commute. We hired a babysitter who had the baby in the next room.
Anyway, after a couple weeks I realized that in my half day, I was very measurably producing more like 75% of a normal full day's work, because I was just head down, working, and around the time I might have had an energy dip I was off for the day anyway. So I asked if we could count me as working more than half time so I'd get longer leave. My supervisor had no problem with it. I didn't have the impression the department head had a problem with it. But they talked to HR who talked to a lawyer who said there could be some kind of legal problems if they allowed it. So there I was, doing 75% of the work on half the time, and my parental leave not reflecting it.
OMFG yes. The corporate workday, office design, and whole culture are designed for and by the people who "succeed" in that kind of environment, and that's not most of us.
Back in the eighties, my employer ran an ad showing a picture of a guy in a diner doing paperwork while the cleaner leaned on her mop staring at the clock hitting midnight. "Customer commitment means missing your kid's birthday party".
In 1990 I had missed too many birthdays; I was in the middle of a divorce and about to have my kids for six weeks of summer. When offered money to leave, I took the money and left. That's the last time I worked for a corporation.
When most "jobs" are producing nothing but carbon dioxide and billionaires, the whole concept of "work" is fundamentally unsustainable.
Anyone else looking at that Illinois law saying kids can't be left alone until age 14 and thinking "but I was babysitting before I turned 14?"
I don’t know about y’all, but some of my own personal afternoon gap comes from working on a HIGHLY distributed team. In order to catch my Indian and Jordanian colleagues I’m frequently online starting at 7 am. Most of my US team is based on the east coast, which for me in Mountain time means their two o’clock meetings take over my lunch hour, but they’re all gone by about 3pm. When no one is on the same time, the performative work day loses all meaning, and pretending it still matters just seems insane.
Can we please stop saying "at least for anyone with caregiving responsibilities"? The rest of us still have to care for ourselves and doctors, dentists, post offices, banks, etc also "assume availability during those times."
I know things are more complex for caregivers, but it feels like it just fuels the "us vs them" mentality to keep caveating like this when in actuality so much of the "traditional workplace norms" don't work for ANYONE.
I have been a parent for a decade now and I still really clearly remember the decade of work I performed before I ever had a child. I remember working in an organization that had exactly ZERO parents or caregivers on staff, long before the pandemic - maybe even before the Great Recession honestly - and I remember very clearly that this dead zone existed then as well!! Every damn day!
As a parent now, I appreciate and celebrate the flexibility that some work has created to allow parents to tend to the impossibility of caregiving in modern society. But also, I wish that we could focus more generally on the fact that equally, caregivers and non caregivers alike, we are not computers to plug into a terminal at 9 am until... ??? unclear on the end time.
Productivity has skyrocketed and working hours have only gotten longer and fuzzier. It is unreasonable to expect that anyone will have a full 10 hours at one high level of productivity throughout the day, regardless of your age, marital status, parental status, etc. Allowing for downtime to cool your brain computer off and potentially engage in something that means something to you reminds me a bit of AHP's recent newsletter pointing out the lack of measured rest in the game-ification of fitness. Let your employees close their restoration rings, caregivers and non-caregivers alike. Or deal with the fallout and cost of high turnover, lower quality work, and a general ick vibe at your organization. Which I guess is what a lot of CEO's are doing right now.
Ugh! We should all be allowed to work less and then we'd get more done when we are working! Four day weeks! Or 5-6 hour workdays!
Employers just like to have control. They want to control their employees' lives, and they can do that best when they have them in the same physical work environment for long stretches of time.
That headline that refers to school runs as a "COVID era habit" like wtf?! That makes no sense. Who writes this stuff?
Ugh that last point about the four day workweek really struck home. From 2020-2022, my employer gave some of us ONE Friday off a month. Everyone in the org took it off, so there was no pressure to not take it. Folks, I LIVED for that Friday, especially as a caregiver who just needed a break or a chance to catch up on sleep. It’s been a struggle in the months since it was taken away. Way less happy. I’m convinced it went away bc of power and someone seeing it as a “problem,” just like people keep insisting that the 4-6 dip is a problem.
It's wild how many articles like this legitimize hand-wringing about flexible work, and how many commenters/people on social media respond as if they're gospel! It really looks like those folks don't care about what their employees get done. They care that their employees are holding up the performative norms about work that they are used to and comfortable with. If what actually mattered was that I completed my tasks by their deadlines, then no one would care what I was doing between 4-6 PM. So many corporate jobs don't actually *do* much of importance. They *exist* to justify budgets and hierarchies...and resistance to flexibility reveals that pretty starkly.
After a two hour presentation today, I spent 10 mins getting water and going to the bathroom, 10 mins sending meeting notes and catching up with emails and then nearly 15 mins lying head down on the floor. The ruthlessness of 8 hour timesheets meant that time came out of the ‘end’ of my work day and will stretch into tomorrow am. There’s no give or recovery- just endurance.
Thank you for this topic! I’ve been questioning the 9-5, 8hr work day long before COVID. In my privileged, managerial, salaried, white collar job I usually don’t have tasks that can consistently fill 8 hours in a row. A lot of times I send an email, make a call, have a meeting, delegate. Then wait for something to happen. Put out a fire. Repeat. There are times where there is literally nothing I can do until someone gets back to me. Where is the benefit to sitting in a cubicle vs. sitting at home and maybe tossing in a load of laundry? Yes, there are plenty of times when I need to be in person but overall the 9-5 concept is so outdated and ridiculous. I mean really, who made up 40 hours a week?! Why not 36, why not 42 (not to say we need more, ha).
One of my students (I teach writing to college students) wrote a paper last year about how new technologies allow companies to track how many hours you are actually working vs breaking, thinking, conversing, staring off into space, etc. His take on it was that generally it was a good thing, and it would increase productivity. But I think that's an easier argument to make if you've never worked in an office before.
As a corollary, did you see the Bloomberg column in WaPo, essentially saying that we all need to go back into the office to preserve the vitality of cities.? LOL. The comments excoriated him for trying to guilt us all into preserving his bank balance and placing the burden of urban planning on the backs of office workers. So much of the call for in person is rooting in greed and the rest in bad management. It's in everyone's best interest not to listen and for those of us in management to retool our thinking. To paraphrase Jim Wright, if we want a better society, we need to be better citizens.