Evenings and Weekends

The modern family

So there I was at home at 10:35 in the evening, minding my own business, when I got an email from a student wanting help registering for classes. Not much of a problem, really, so I shot off an email to her and to the registrar’s office taking care of the issue. Then I got another email from a colleague about another student problem, and we emailed back and forth.

Then I got another email from a different colleague about a different student, and by the time the electronic dust settled it was 11:10 and it had become perfectly clear that even at home, even in the evenings or on weekends, I am not minding my own business. I am minding everybody’s business. In fact, everybody, I suspect, is minding everybody’s business. Thanks to the wonder of email, there is no home anymore. There is no evening, no weekend. There is only business.

This got under my skin to such a degree I decided to gather a little data. Just how many emails connected to my work (as director of the Champlain College Professional Writing Program and Editor-in-Chief of the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, to be exact) do I deal with on evenings and weekends? How much of my job follows me home?

Finding an average period during an academic year is not easy, so I picked a lighter-than-average period, avoiding the registration-period madness and the end-of-semester stampede: I studied the four weeks between Friday, January 15^th and Thursday, February 11^th.

I defined “weekend” as, well, Saturday and Sunday, and “evening” as any time after 7 p.m.

In those four weeks, I sent 328 college-related emails in my “off-work” hours, 150 on weekends and 178 between 7 p.m. and going to bed. The latest outgoing email was timed at 2:33 a.m.

What were those emails about? They broke down as follows, though the categories sometimes overlapped:

General college administration: 30

Program administration: 76

Student classwork: 53

Student administration issues: 16

Publishing Initiative: 128

Miscellaneous: 23

Okay, now for all the footnotes and asterisks.

*Above all, I don’t want to give the impression that I think I’m exceptional. My point is that I’m not an exception. At Champlain, that’s certainly true: I’ve had emails even from the Registrar and the Assistant Provost as late at 10 p.m. I got an email from my assistant dean while I was writing this column on Sunday morning.

*I used Sent mail not to brag how hard I work but because it was easier to gather the numbers. I couldn’t count my incoming mail because I like to keep my Inbox down to a scannable number of emails (generally 60-100), which means I delete a lot and sort most of the rest to other directories. I almost never get around to deleting Sent mail; I just don’t have the time.

*The single largest category is work for the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, which may seem like an extravagance or an exercise in masochism, but in truth, everyone at Champlain does add-on work that falls under the heading of “service.” For another faculty member it might be committee work, for example. I dread to think how many emails the folks on the curriculum committee send out on evenings and weekends.

*These figures don’t include reading, grading or replying to student papers, much of which I do online. Fact is, all teachers take papers home to read and grade—that’s evening and weekend work that just comes with the job description.

*They also don’t include the full range of out-of-hours work I do. They don’t include phone calls (which tend to take more time than emails: one of them, yesterday morning, lasted 45 minutes), and nor time spent on my own writing work.

*And, rising rapidly up the charts is the missing work ingredient of the future: Web traffic, which may soon eclipse everything else. A single post on the Champlain College Publishing Initiative site may generate a thousand hits over a weekend, spawning dozens of responses and questions. Within a few months, running that site alone could be a full-time job.

So what does this little clutch of figures tell us?

I’m honestly not sure. I don’t know, for example, whether these work patterns are characteristic of Champlain, or of everyone in higher education, or of everyone, period, these days. I’d very much like to hear from you in this respect, whether you have a subjective impression, or you’ve actually stopped to do the math yourself.

I’m not sure how to convert these figures into an equivalent number of hours worked, because an email may take seconds or hours to compose. One of the seductive qualities of email, in fact, is that we feel we can take a quick peek at our Inbox and fire off a swift reply to anything urgent. What this means, of course, is that the habit of checking email becomes reflexive: even when we’re all sitting around the living-room, apparently being a family together, one of us will duck into a laptop or thumb away at an iPhone every few minutes. The walls between family time and work time, or more generally between the inner world and the outer, are thin, and are breached easily and often.

And I’m not sure whether this is simply a 21^st-century technology thing, and everyone is being seduced by our devices. I suspect not. When I was doing my notorious hitchhiking trip around the country (if you don’t know what I’m referring to, click here), I discovered a major difference in levels of anxiety. Put simply, people who work with their minds were, across the board, more anxious than people who work with their hands. The calmest and happiest person I met was a master stonemason who was doing all the specialist stonework for Toledo cathedral. The knuckles of both his hands were barked and scarred, but his work gave him the tremendous satisfaction of being able to see and fix mistakes. He lifted and placed a stone, squinted along his sightlines, and if the stone was out of position, he moved it.

At the time, that struck me as the most important benefit of his line of work—the satisfaction of being given a series of challenges and being able to work on them until he got them right.

Now I wonder if as important a benefit might be that when he left work, he left work. It’s hard to email a 40-pound slab of granite. His evenings and his weekends were his own.