[anthropocene_x]

In unrelated news, birth rates are declining in most developed nations. Government policymakers are puzzled as to why. They are offering tax breaks for daycare and longer maternity leave.

[ChicagoConservative27]

I check email when I’m on vacation...😬

[MinorityRepublican]

birth rates are declining in most developed nations

Due to modernity, secularism and feminism.

[stanne]

My friends join me at my house for brunch , coffee, movie nights. Women. They will refuse to put their phones away. They don’t have corporate jobs they are mothers, wives, sisters.

Yes bosses interfere but they’re not allowed to. There are employment laws, boundaries. If my boss texts me after or before hours it’s once a year and I have a high level job generating a lot of revenue

People work after hours because they allow it I know people with PhD’s with more appreciation for the value of down time than my above mentioned friends

I know people with massive real estate they’ve earned who put their phones down and visit with their families at dinner

Boundary setting with co workers and superiors

Being present for oneself reading, reflecting, hobbies uninterrupted

Good movies and programs - people are now texting in the theater
Interrupting everyone - who pay a lot for the theater experience

This is very important

Take time off. The brain simply does not function without regular down time, leisure time

Families do not thrive with constant distraction of parents. They are misguided and they make a huge mistake

[struggle]

Ah, it’s great being a teacher...so many days now of getting paid to do nothing.

[matt04]

If I have to concentrate, I keep my text notifications muted. If all you hear, is ding, ding, ding......ding, ding it us usually something stupid or that could have been a email.

[Republican Wildcat]

remote access and its consequences...

people aren’t ‘working from home’ - they’re living at work.

[webheart]

I hardly ever checked my email. I would sign in twice a day on most days. I prefer a face to face meeting, if someone sent me an email, i would go see them and say, I am responding to your email. If they called me on the phone, I would answer right away unless i was in the bathroom. I don’t feel right talking to someone while I am sitting on the toilet.

As an IT professional, you would think that I would be keen to get on email, but no, I like human contact. I use real cashiers instead of self checkout. I like to order food from a real person, not from a kiosk. I use the mcdonalds kiosk because they will have a tough time staying in business with 20 dollar per hour employees.

[fastrock]

I worked for a great company that took very good care of me. Great raises, benefits, lots of latitude.
I was a valued employee and I reciprocated by checking projects while traveling, on vaca and evenings and early mornings. We were a global company and I took calls any time of the day. I only time I felt stress was when I didn’t have access to tidbits of info when checking in or when I took a call.
I know this may not happen in every company, but I took the approach that if the company was profitable then I would prosper and that more profits would result in more prosperity for me.

[T.B. Yoits]

From the article: 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without calendar invites

This behavior is infuriating. It's the same as self-centered asses who'd just tromp up to someone's desk and start right into what they need.

Thankfully, you can set Microsoft Teams so that you won't receive call notifications. No meeting - no call.

[LegendHasIt]

Isn’t it nice that Microsoft knows all of your business!!!!

[T.B. Yoits]

From what I've seen, the chat functions are for people lower performing individuals and those on mobile phones who are sitting in other meetings.

Short snippets, not well thought out, require back and forth volleyball to get to what the slacker really wants - all of which could have been avoided with one well-written email.

As it is, I often have to take some twit's chat messages, rewrite them for clarity and legibility, and then email them to someone else anyway - while courtesy copying the twit who sent the chat message.

[Myrddin]

Working from home was a big productivity improvement for me. No interruptions from people randomly walking around the office. No interruptions from loud phone conversations in adjacent offices. Almost no "meetings" where you are drawn into a conference room for no reason to listen to yammering that isn't getting your tasks done. No time lost to commuting to/from the office. More efficient meal breaks with the food in the kitchen instead of driving away from the physical office to a food joint.

There is a down side to "working from home". The down side is that you are always at the office. Co-workers in other time zones don't respect time boundaries on the work day. It's particularly bad when you have project team mates in Australia, Oregon, Ohio, Massachusetts and Paris, France while operating from Idaho. My last project had team members from Hawaii to Pennsylvania. Less stressful than the addition of Europe and Australia.

Working from home is a "win" for the customer. There is no overhead charge for a physical office for staff on the project. The staff members shoulder the expense for phone, internet connectivity, electricity, office space.

The narrow focus on "checking e-mail" is a nothing burger compared to updating 7 git repos with multiple gigabytes of download, then 40 minutes to rebuild the software suite to the point where you can just do the first login. By the time I returned to work last November, my i7 laptop with 64 GB RAM and 2 TB NVMe was insufficient to run the suite. Too few CPU cores. Too little memory. Beyond running out of budget to pay me, the hardware provided to support the project had been eclipsed. It was $8000 new and no longer up to the job. Almost everyone remaining on the project was going to need more capable hardware.

[Myrddin]

When I worked at PacBell, multiple productivity studies were conducted on the software development staff. The person doing the studies was Larry Constantine. His discoveries were published in "Peopleware". A key learning was productivity was very related to achieving "flow" in the thought process. Getting to flow state typically takes 15 to 20 minutes. An environment that interrupts getting to flow every 15 minutes destroys productivity. The more densely office staff is packed in an office, the more probable that noise from a phone or conversation will interrupt getting to "flow". Controlling interruption from phone calls is critical to productivity. At 46 square feet of floor space for an employee, the noise density destroys any hope of "flow".

Peopleware is in a 3rd edition now with DeMarco and Lister as the principals. The latest version builds on the original principles learned. Certainly worth having as both a software developer or team leader.

In the context of the modern office, a cell phone loaded with apps that send notifications falls squarely in the realm of controlling interruptions from your phone. If it is interrupting you at least every 15 minutes, your productivity is going down the toilet.

[maddog55]

Considering there’s very few people who actually work in the workplace I wouldn’t consider checking emails before or after work as work.

[9YearLurker]

That’s absolute hell for employees whose job it is to think rather than answer emails.