Those people who work from nine in the morning to twelve at night are going to ruin your life.

What doesn’t happen in America is that it doesn’t happen anywhere, as my grandfather would say. I add, his grandson: what is happening now in the United States is going to happen sooner rather than later in your town, if it is not already happening. An example. Microsoft just released a report in which it reveals that they have located a new peak of work outside the usual hours of their workers. Neither in the morning nor in the afternoon. Suddenly, they have found that they are working between nine and eleven of the night.

More specifically, a third of its employees sit in front of the computer (what the study measures is “keyboard activity”) after dinner to answer emails or simply get work done. This seems like a very Yankee thing until you decide to check your email inbox and realize that, indeed, there are a lot of people answering or writing to you at that time when our parents would be watching ‘Pharmacy on duty ‘, football or dozing on the couch.

There are those who connect at the last minute to “take a little look”

It only takes a little informal survey to see why they do it. The most common explanation is that they are parents and can take advantage of those night times to make up for the work they haven’t done during the day. The unsolicited justification (ie, open accusation) is that it is actually a way to make up for the time taken throughout the day to pick up the kids, bathe them, feed them dinner, etc. Seen this way, it is flexibility well understood, unless you are on the other end of the email and that person has decided that you also have to work at night, for example, responding to extemporaneous messages from him.

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Other more ‘light’ arguments admit that they do not mind being in front of the computer for a while because that way they are not so overwhelmed the next day or that they connect “one moment” for “have a look”. Another very nice reason is that people work at night because they won’t let you work at work. It’s amazing how many times lately I’ve heard friends complain that their days are an endless series of ‘meetings’, ‘calls’, reunions and ‘coffees’ that basically prevent them from working. In fact, as I write this, I get an email: “I finally had a morning with less than three meetings.”

I myself have once said that I stay home so I can work. That is also reflected in the Microsoft report. As office jobs (“white collar”, as they say) basically consist of talking (they should also consist of thinking, but that’s it), one goes to the office to chat. If, for example, you dedicate yourself to writing, as I do, it turns out that talking is not writing, so you end up doing something suspiciously similar to not working. Or, rather, to do it at another time. What happens, in reality, is that you work double. First, not working at work. And then doing what you get paid for when you’re not playing. What do you want, get kicked out?

the endless day

What is obvious is that the lockdown accelerated this tendency to spread the working day for the day like a chewing gum, so it’s not so uncommon for someone to spend twelve hours or so connected without realizing it. He does it with a slightly different spirit than others who have done it all their lives, like the booth workers at the April Fair or the nurses. It is a continuous ‘light’ job, a state of wakefulness between productivity and being involved in other things that are not work (something that would be impossible, for example, for a toilet).

The flexibility of some is a change of schedules imposed on the rest

The Microsoft report says something interesting: since confinement we have become accustomed to taking breaks, stopping for dinner or three sit-ups or one, two or three coffees, in an ocean of endless work. There’s a date in a Article published in ‘The Atlantic’ which sums it up well: “Work is no longer a continuous mass of concentration, but an archipelago of productivity in the middle of a sea of ​​tasks, meals, mental pauses and other responsibilities”. So the night, the third peak of Microsoft, are the minutes of bad conscience.

What causes that bad conscience to those of us who like to forget everything when we meet our schedule is that it imposes an extension in our free time. What beautiful flexibility encourages, even without intending to, is to impose a change in the lives of everyone else. The supposed asynchrony of work is, on many occasions, a continuous synchrony, in which it is assumed that no one ever stops working completely.

As those who know me know, starting at eight at night, I am a pain in the ass to communicate. It may take a few hours to answer a message, let alone review the WhatsApp threads of thousands of messages or pick up the phone if they call me. It’s one of my few red lines: as I try to take care of my concentration, the last thing I want to do is spend what little free time I have doing exactly the same thing I’ve been doing for the rest of the day, which is answer messages nonstop.

My punishment is having to spend much of the next morning catching up on all those ’emails’ that have come in the night. A recent example told to me by an acquaintance: someone had thought to schedule a meeting with a client first thing the next morning. But since they had decided it late in the afternoon and announced it on Slack after this person had already turned off the computer, he found that when he turned it on first thing in the morning, all his colleagues were in a meeting that he had no idea about. No one had thought that maybe he wasn’t constantly checkingoutside of your hours, your Slack messages.

Even if they tell us that “there is no need to respond now”, we know that it is not true

What our friends on the night shift have achieved is that we end up working 24 hours, even if we don’t want to. Although in theory they tell us that “man, you don’t have to respond now, there’s no rush”, in practice we know that the notifications are going to crowd our inboxes, that this message is going to stay spinning in our heads until we respond to it. The beach bar never lowers the blind.

We Spaniards know this well, since we are one of the countries that extends their work the most throughout the day, thanks in part to the split day, but also to our fondness for office presenteeism, which already anticipated this post-pandemic era of endless meetings and continuous non-work. The end result is what one can imagine: according to the Microsoft report, the average user works 13% more per day (45 minutes), puts in more overtime (28%) and works more on weekends (14%). . Less and less to go everything is work (but what doesn’t look like it).

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What doesn’t happen in America is that it doesn’t happen anywhere, as my grandfather would say. I add, his grandson: what is happening now in the United States is going to happen sooner rather than later in your town, if it is not already happening. An example. Microsoft just released a report in which it reveals that they have located a new peak of work outside the usual hours of their workers. Neither in the morning nor in the afternoon. Suddenly, they have found that they are working between nine and eleven of the night.

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