Summary

We wrongly apologise for switching off from work or work related communication, when we have enough reason to do so. Such apologies undermine our professional contracts and set us back in our attempts to achieve work-life balance.

In the last week, I spent a few days on the road and working with some colleagues and stakeholders in person. While it was fun to meet and hang out with some people in real life, much of the work didn’t derive any additional value from us being in the same place. We suffered from a divided focus and an inefficient workflow—more on that in a future post.

Today’s post results from a trigger from another incident. One of my friends was on vacation a few weeks back. While spending time with his family, he received some calls from a colleague, which he missed. When he saw these calls, he promptly called back his colleague. And guess how he started the conversation? “Sorry to miss your calls,” he said. 

Sorry? Why? For being on vacation? Following the apology, which my friend’s colleague accepted graciously, the two had a full-fledged conversation about work. My friend then attended to a bunch of work-related tasks, mid-vacation. 

I won’t judge anyone for gravitating to work during vacations. I’ve done this enough in my life to stand in judgement of others today. But I have a problem with how we feel apologetic for just living our lives. Let me give you examples of what I mean.

• Amar receives some emails during his vacation. Some of them were time-sensitive. However, Amar had applied for his leave well in advance and informed his manager and team about it. He’d even set up an out-of-office message. Yet, when he returned, he responded to the emails with, “Sorry I missed your emails when I was on vacation…”.

• Shabana blocks out four hours of focus time on her calendar to finish a complex piece of work. A bunch of messages fly around on the team’s IM channel. A few of them @mention Shabana. When Shabana sees these messages a few hours later, she responds, “Sorry I didn’t see these messages on time…”.

• Prithvi closes his laptop for the weekend and heads out on a trip with his friends. His boss sends him an email on Friday night, asking for a document to send to a client. Prithvi sees the email as soon as he returns on Monday morning and shares the document, but not before he types, “Sorry, I was out of town and didn’t see your email…”.

• Leia plans to have lunch with her friend on a Tuesday. She blocks out the hour on her calendar, well in advance. At 11: 30 on Tuesday, a teammate sets up a meeting overlapping with Leia’s lunch appointment. Leia still meets her friend, but apologises to her teammate saying, “Sorry I have a prior lunch commitment…”.

Do you see the pattern I’m pointing out? While I’m using fictitious names here, the behaviour is real. I’m certain all of us have been there, and done that. Somehow, there’s still an implicit expectation that our lives are subservient to our work. I hope we shake off this subservience sooner than later.

Our employers control 40 hours of our week. If you’re on a four-day work week or in certain countries, a six-day work week, your contract will be different. The fact remains that it’s a contract - one that we must execute professionally. We have a responsibility to be transparent about how we spend our 40 hours. We do this through a variety of means.

• Task boards to detail our work. 

• Calendars to signal our availability.

• Status messages that signal what we’re up to.

• Document and code repositories to store our work outputs.

• Out-of-office messages that signal when we’ve disconnected from work.

The mechanisms I’ve mentioned above are available in almost every workplace. If we’re transparent about our work, working the number of hours our contracts stipulate and signalling our availability clearly, then we needn’t apologise for switching off from work. One doesn’t apologise for exercising their rights - it’s as simple as that.

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”

The slogan above was a rallying call amongst workers of the 1880s, fighting for reasonable work hours. Indeed, many countries including India commemorate International Workers Day on May 1. That day is a reminder of the bloody events of May 1, 1886, when the police in Chicago opened fire on a peaceful protest by 10,000 workers; killing four of them. Many generations of labour movements have since fought to institute this separation of work and life. We knowledge workers are the labour elite, and that privilege comes with the responsibility to preserve some of these hard-fought victories of past generations. Let’s not cede our rights through undeserved apologies. Our lives are ours to live, aren’t they?