More evidence your work/life balance has gone to $%£*: Atlassian says user-interface interactions show hours tacked on to workday An Atlassian data scientist has published research gleaned from the company's analytics, that points to work-life balance being skewed thanks to the surge in remote working. The publication follows other reports confirming that for many, the 9 – 5 grind is a thing of the past as boundaries blur and work seems to expand to fill …
We turn off our company phones when we leave the office and we can leave the company laptop at work.
If we are in home office, we still have to keep to the 8 hours in our contracts, if you do more than the 8 hours, questions will be asked about why and why it couldn't be done on the next working day.
A new acquisition needs weekend support. My manager explicitly said, until the compensation package has been agreed with the board, we aren't to do any out of hours support.
(Obviously there are times, like new server farms being installed, new switches, ERP updates etc. that can't be done during normal office hours. But once the work is completed, we have to work shorter hours, until our overtime is back to 0.)
I must admit that measuring the first and last events is highly suspect.
We have a lot of people working from home here and I know for a fact that, for many, working from home affords a more flexible attitude to working hours.
Longer lunch break, the opportunity to do the shopping when it is quieter during the weekday, doing more activities with the kids and then working later in the evening.
I have no doubt that for some, there are more work hours being done, but I would be very suspicious of drawing too much from those statistics.
I'm with you on this one. Due to the nasty nature of my commute pre-Covid (Liverpool <> Knutsford) my day used to be:
6am Alarm
7am Leave House
8-8.30am Logon
20 min lunch
4-4.30 Leave desk
5.30-6.30 (Depending on whether anyone had decided to break one of the motorway junctions by playing bumper cars) Get home
Now its a lot lot easier but I log on before 7often and am sometimes still logged on at 6.
But I take 'a-Rhodesian-Ridgeback-is-for-life-not-just-for-Covid' out for the best part of an hour once the sun is coming up and again for 90 mins before the sun goes down.
And my weekends are now free of laundry and housework.
I do not miss the motorways. At all. Much better to be having fun in the park with my pup.
I suppose I could be accused of being a 'clockwatcher' but the idea of responding to work calls and emails outside of work hours is a complete non-starter for me.
Voicemail and email is there for those times I am not 'at work', even when I'm working from home. Once you start down that slippery slope of essentially being on-call at all waking hours, it's hard to claw your personal time back. Before the pandemic, I might have taken my laptop home with me less than a half-dozen times in 5 years, while my co-workers did nearly every night. Still don't understand that mindset.
Responding outside of hours... Then you are like me, you don't mind having a peek at the stack of email that has come in since 5pm, but do not respond. I like to know what shit storm I may see at 8am...
I will respond to messages from my team after hours, but not user cries for assistance.
It's a joke when Atlassian, of all companies, makes statistical inferences about use of their products.
The activities captured included events such as creating a document or commenting on a code review.
The time spent clicking, and waiting and waiting, then clicking again 5 times (with attendant waiting), to get a simple Jira issue opened, or cross-linked, or a report written is just too much. Jira is such a piece of 1990s work. Yuch.
It's no wonder people have to work longer. They are waiting for Jira to catch up to their slow human reflexes.
- Error message saying it lost the token and attachments may be lost or somesuch nonsense.
- Click retry.
- Retry fails.
- Refresh.
- Not allowed to see ticket. Told to log in but not given a username and password prompt.
- Click on login in the top right, fill in login fields (or browser autofill), click on submit.
- Now hit back in the browser history to go back to the ticket.
- Refresh to get a new token.
- Retype comment.
Repeat this nonsense three times a day.
By the way, in the 1990s there were simple textboxes. This has some customised slow edit box which screws up styles too.
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