Take 48!

At John Battelle's place of work, they are trying something new with email.

The three senior leaders of the company - the CEO, the COO, and the Publisher/CRO - have agreed to not send a single email to any member of the FM team from 6 PM on Friday to 6 PM Sunday.

He said:

It’s hard for us to do - we’re used to managing by email, and particularly used to getting “caught up” in the weekend down time.

But there’s nothing in the rules saying we can’t DO email over the weekend, just that we can’t SEND it during the weekend. If the servers blow up in Chicago, well, someone can pick up the phone, after all.

We tried it out last weekend, and by golly, it really worked. Emails from senior staff usually creates orders of magnitudes more email from other staff members, and it folds into itself. But last weekend, it felt as if FM [Federated Media], as an institution, was taking time to breathe, to contemplate, to relax and feed itself. Maybe even take a nice hike on Mt. Tam.

Perhaps other companies should follow suit?  There was a time -- I remember -- when we did disconnect from work...
 

Comments

[Steve Oberg]

Jill,

This is a big issue, actually, and not just regarding downtime and work/life balance. I know there are some legal proceedings that relate to whether employees should be paid overtime for reading and responding to email (e.g. on Blackberries) during the weekend. See e.g. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/04/22/are-blackberrys-the-next-battleground-in-wage-and-hour-litigation/?mod=WSJBlog