Can you come in early tomorrow? - #429

May, 2 2025 by Nathanael Yellis

I hadn't looked at work emails all weekend. That fact matters for what happened on Monday morning. It was early Fall in DC. With the windows finally open, I woke up early. After breakfast and coffee, I walked to work through our neighborhood, still feeling a little brisk. Getting to the office building, I was boisterously greeted by the receptionist, buzzed in, and, instead of the elevator, I took the stairs. Quickly up four flights, breathless, I barged into our office. About half the desks were already full. Not surprising, but the few who also worked for my boss greeted me with an odd look. He called me into his office with a question, "did you see my email?" I hadn't, I was sorry, what did I miss? "I told our team to come in early; I don't have time to catch you up; don't let this happen again." Somewhat deflated, I walked over to my desk amidst the smirks from the strivers on our team: not even 9 am and Yellis is already in trouble! I found the email: a classic Sunday evening missive. It was a few vague paragraphs: the organization generally had a lot going on, there were many (unlisted) important things to do, we should all be fighting hard, so can everyone come in early tomorrow?I was conflicted. The inner voice that always wanted to be both on top of things and recognized for it was the first to pipe up. How could I not have read this email and how could I be the last to know about our important week? How could I not have predicted it was coming and just showed up early anyway? Didn't I know that 8:45 isn't early enough anyway? This inner voice is the one you can generally silence after a workweek but generally is louder on a Monday. Another inner voice, the one that helped me preserve weekends for not working, was offended. If this vague set of priorities was so important, why didn't the boss call me? Or at least text? What kind of boss sends an email on Sunday evening, expecting immediate reads and replies? I was in my late twenties and I still hadn't realized the tradeoffs. If you listen to the voice that tells you to disconnect during weekends, then you will fall behind the people who stay online. My boss and the office strivers were these sorts of people, perpetually sending each other off-hours emails if for no other reason than to prove their commitment to the job. If the currency of the office is continuous engagement with work, you can't both disconnect and get ahead.

Prior to the Blackberry arriving, about twenty-five years ago, in order to connect with work you had either be there or be on the phone with the people who were there. Inter-office communication was phone calls, written memos or emails read on desktops, conference calls, or meetings. In the '90s and before, people who were tethered to their jobs were either physically tethered or giving the work their whole attention. When more communication went asynchronous (could've been an email!) and devices let you consume emails anywhere, knowledge workers could give their jobs continual partial attention. And we do: your phone, even if it's paid for by you, lets you tap onto work in tiny bytes, anytime and anywhere. Aided by devices and abetted by shallow lifestyles, we pretend that we can serve both of those inner voices: be at home and get ahead at work.

If you've been reading my Friday emails for long enough, then you know that this lie is the one I most like to rail against. My device use generally takes me away from where I am, disconnects me from what I should be doing, and leaves me worse off when I actually need to do something electronic. Sunday night work email or Slack from the couch makes us worse at doing good work at our desks on Monday. Chris Moody's piece in The Atlantic, linked below, tells us to set our clocks back and work like it's the 1990s. In the piece is a deeper sort of choice, one that even my "disconnect" inner voice can't quite make happen. Moody doesn't brag about it, but his essay hints that his home lacks high-speed wifi and smart devices. Wow. That sure makes it harder to do work Slack 24/7, but wouldn't that also make it impossible to learn how to DIY new electrical outlets or start willow trees from cuttings? Wouldn't that mean I couldn't write and send this email from my couch?

On any number of dimensions our devices have made life better. Start the list with me not electrocuting myself or ruining a wall on the aforementioned electrical outlet project. Clearly, replacing the coffee-stained, phonebook-sized Gazetteer on the floor of the car with a GPS that knows where you are is an upgrade. On the other hand, when the NYT tech reviewer spent a week with the Light Phone, he found himself calmer and less distracted while waiting for the train or the bank teller. It's almost vapid to tell everyone that skipping your phone for a day is a pleasant encounter with all the world you missed while paying it partial attention. But there is something deeper going on. The device and its always-on connection to a virtual reality give us a poor substitute for reality, Soylent for steak. It's not only that we miss the leaves in the trees or the sunset out the train window, it's that we become the sort of people who ignore each other by default. Almost every time I read an essay like my friend's on giving up his smartphone for the forty days of Lent, I wonder, doesn't that begin to unlock the deeper aspects of the life we are missing?