I believe this creates a constant "attachment" to work, and does not allow you to detach. Especially on holidays you should be able to detach and be able to forget work for a few weeks. (Besides: It also serves as a good practice to the workplace: What if this person is not here anymore due to illness/finding a different employer.
As for me, I always to keep work at work. I don't work weekends, and I never work on holiday. I am a software developer, and do keep on date on aspects regarding software development. But this is because I want to, and often involves subjects which are not relevant to my work (I developer ASP.NET web applications, but privately I like to do stuff with assembly and C++, or fiddle with an Arduino or Raspberry pi)
It's the most straightforward means of signaling relative dedication to the company - Joe the most insecure programmer can attempt to compensate for his skill insecurity by showing more dedication by working longer hours.
That then means that Jane feels implicit, unspoken pressure to work longer because "Joe is doing it". Then this 'arms race' dynamic takes off and eventually it becomes expected and long hours become part of the culture.
It's at its absolute worst when management aren't technical and have to use various "rule of thumb" proxies to determine who is performing well and who isn't, because in the absence of deep technical knowledge guess how they measure you all?
I don't want to let down others (with whom I have a good relationship) but I also don't want to kill my personal life because management has set an artificial deadline so I have a made a conscious decision to limit overtime only to the times when I actually have something to do.
The overtime cult is an insidious force that's hard to resist. Once a few people start doing it there is a lot of peer pressure on others to do it too. I guess it's a dynamic management can exploit to get more work out of workers by playing them against each other.
Many people see their value directly tied to their career and one of the major ways to make you (feel) important is to be present. It also helps your career since many old companies value presence over other criteria.
I'm three weeks ill now and for the first time, I begin to understand that I've never been detached from work. In the first two weeks I actually became so depressed because I couldn't work. I need to do something, don't know what yet. This is bad for my relationships and for my mental health.
For a lot of my colleagues, this is their only phone, because why wouldn't it be? Many of them habitually check their work email all the damn time, and I can see them online in Skype for Business, even when they're on vacation. I used to do that as well, compounded by a manager who expected to be able to reach us at any time.
So I bought a phone and personal subscription for myself, and most days I leave the laptop and work phone in my locker at work. Now when I'm off work, I'm off work, period.
A few trusted colleagues have my unlisted personal phone number, in case of serious emergencies only, but they haven't had to use it yet.
As for what to do with yourself, you need a hobby :-) Something completely unrelated to work, like bicycling or video games or woodworking. Something you do for yourself and/or your family.
I'd read (fiction), play sports, trek, travel, watch films, just saunter around, listen to music, or just have hours of sleep but I don't work after office hours (or even try to up-skill myself by coding in the field I work on, or some other interesting field). So far I have not really faced any problem because of this, but I am really concerned that it might start to show after I gain more years under my belt; or it might already be showing, it's just that it hasn't hit me yet.
Managers in the chain start bugging people about taking time off as soon as extra hours are worked. Setting the culture for the team early on, _and_ enforcing it, is critical. Luckily I've been there since the team was formed, and have enough seniority that people listen.
That said, there are co-workers that just won't stop working all hours, but they've at least stopped pushing code reviews etc at all hours of the day.
As a DevOps guy, you have to bail people out of situations or assist with a scary release (because things are rarely sufficiently automated, it takes years to convince management and fix tech debt, especially in a startup). For that and other reasons, there's an expectation that 'it's just part of the job' to 'be available' in case someone in the globe needs you.
After suffering such things for well over a decade, I've chosen the stubborn consulting route. My health care sucks and it's hard to find roles, but once I do I get paid hourly and well, and let me tell you something about company behavior when you're on the clock: suddenly they volunteer OTHER people for off-hours work, suddenly they're reluctant to let you work more than 40 hours.
That realization should clue you workaholics (employee workaholics, not founder workaholics) in on what's really at stake here, and the real reason you're checking Slack nervously at 3 pm Saturday before your colleagues do: it's free overtime for your company.
And quite frankly I think many of you are doing your colleagues a disservice by setting availability standards too high. There's no reason to race to the bottom.
Never again.
As a guy who was also on-call in rotations for many years (which is why I wrote the rant above), the biggest issue with on-call was waking up and not being able to sleep, even when the problem (eg., disk partition filling up) took 5 minutes to fix. The way I dealt with that was coming in late the next day. Like very late. Sometimes at 2pm, to leave at 6. Even if the problem took 5 minutes to fix, my insomnia cost me 4 hours of sleep, so now the company better pay up.
And I encourage everyone to behave this way.
https://www.thesleepdoctor.com/2017/08/10/understanding-cbd/
I suggest we instead say using the same parts of your body and mind to the exclusion of the other parts is what is bad for you.
Knowledge workers probably shouldn't spend 6 hours a night learning or coding after an 8 to 10 hour day in the office. Trade job workers probably shouldn't go home and perform more tasks that are physically comparable to their day job without mixing it up.
A construction worker should probably attend night school or study or write code at night. A coder should probably go home and socialize, be active out in the world, or do home renovations etc. A manager probably needs to make time for meditation and non-social activities.
In my experience, the problem with overworking is not the activity itself. It's the mental state of doing a thing because of some sense of obligation, duty, or politicking/competition (or maybe threat, if you're doing it because you're anxious about job security).
Now that said, I totally agree that physically doing the same activity for endless hours every day is not going to be healthy -- including mental health. I think you're totally right to suggest balancing out job tasks with contrasted activities. It is good for your body, and keeps you from getting stuck in ruts mentally. As appealing as it sounds sometimes, I'm not just a brain in a jar. Using the muscles and talking to other humans is also important for being fully human.
Those I have seen to work on side projects almost every day acted similarly to people who worked long hours - eithet got burned after a while or their hourly productivity at work went down (they chatted and socialized more at work, we're more talkative during meetings, procrastinated and wasted time with play tasks instead of doing real task).
Of course you cannot code for 14h every day. You have to vary your work. Personally I can concentrate for only 5h if I want to maintain that for several days in a row. I felt very burnt out after 8h of coding. It took me a while to understand that it’s okay to just concentrate for 5h and use the rest for communication and socializing.
I also do solve personal problems during work time that would otherwise block my mind from working correctly. Just like let work issues spill in my free time if they are serious.
Now lots of it is stationary thinking, whereas in the past practically all of it has been mobile gathering, hunting and building (if not just preparing for, and waging a war). Those who can't partake in those activities do other beneficial things. Refine resources, raise and teach children etc.
Is it not so that we humans can sustain better productivity over time in physical work than we can in mental work? It seems to be a fact, that physical activities stimulate mental ones. When you walk outdoors, your mind is more creative than when you sit still inside a building. Is it because of brain getting more oxygen? Is it because of psychological processes inside our brain react to different environments differently? Probably both, and then some.
I think there is more to things like ecopsychology[1] we tend to overlook. And understandably so -- from a profit-seeking perspective plants and animals are perhaps the last thing to seek help from to productivity problems within society, or a company.
It is all too easy to also dismiss it as mere idealistic hippery. I think if we were taught to explore this angle, some things we like to live in denial of would be laughably obvious to us.
Also it seems like you define socializing as ‘work’. If so, then why not define sleeping as work or even death as work, that way your statement that working non-stop makes sense.
I can code without concentration but did you ever measure your productivity and and error rate over time? For me 5h is a sweet spot after that error rate goes up and productivity goes down. If the errors are significant they could cost much more time later on. If the job isn’t that sensitive of course you don’t have to concentrate.
A little surprised to see this line. In Germany, there is a law (cannot recall the name), that effectively states that you cannot be fired if you don't reply to a work email or phone call between 6pm and 9am. If you want to, you can, but it cannot be held against you.
I find a distraction works, for me that's chess.
