Work/Life Balance and Quietly Quitting

[Ball Security]

34 minutes ago, China said:

CEO Celebrates Worker Who Sold Family Dog After He Demanded They Return to Office

 

In a virtual town hall last week, the CEO of a Utah-based digital marketing and technology company, who is forcing employees to return to the office, celebrated the sacrifice of a worker who had to sell the family dog as a result of his decisions. He also questioned the motives of those who disagreed, accusing some of quiet quitting, and waxed skeptical on the compatibility of working full time with serving as a primary caregiver to children.

The decision by Clearlink CEO James Clarke to mandate in-office work had come as a surprise to many workers, seeing as Clarke himself had said over email as recently as late October that he had “no plans” to mandate in-office work and some Clearlink employees had been hired with the understanding that the company was “remote-first.”

 

But “circumstances” had “changed,” the company told employees this month, as Clearlink, like many others, has struggled to adapt to a teetering economy and recently undergone a round of layoffs. To jumpstart the firm, Clarke sent a company-wide email on April 3 saying that people who live within 50 miles of the company’s new headquarters in Draper, Utah, would be required to come into the office four days a week, with limited exceptions, starting April 17. The decision, he wrote, was made to improve the company’s performance amid a “challenging” environment.

 

During a video meeting to explain the reasoning behind the changes, Clarke unleashed on his employees, saying he had deduced that some 30 employees had not opened their laptops for a month (the quiet quitters); wondering aloud if some remote employees were secretly working multiple jobs; and asking the company to increase productivity to “30 to 50 times our normal production” as a result of recent advances in artificial intelligence while also making reference to the “Judeo-Christian ethic” and noting, for unclear reasons, that he went to Oxford and Harvard.

All he was asking, he said, is that people come into the office and give their “blood, sweat, and tears” to the company. “I challenge any of you to outwork me, but you won’t,” he added. 

In hopes of rallying the troops, Clarke took the time to pay special attention to one employee who had sold the family dog as a result of his decision, describing it as an example of the “sacrifices that are being made” and saying it broke his heart as someone who, he claimed, has been at the “head of the humanization of pets movement.”

 

Clarke also focused on concerns that the shift would cause undue harm to people who serve as primary caregivers for their children, who would have to pay for additional childcare. The CEO expressed skepticism that single and working mothers could meet company expectations while continuing to take care of their children, saying that while “it can be done … it adds so much stress to a working mother’s life that I would never want to put on anyone.” 

 

Click on the link for the full article

I do wonder if some of these CEOs get kickbacks/favors/bribes from commercial real estate developers/investors to make these decisions.

 

If your employees are going three months without logging into their laptops, what are you paying management to do?
 

Also, if you want to do a mandated return to office, that’s one thing.  Implementing it in a week is just asinine.

[PleaseBlitz]

Did a deep dive into my hours today. I am annualizing at just over 2400 right now, which works out to 47 hours per week assuming one week of vacation. 

[Mr. Sinister]

I quit everything, and moved back here to the DMV, and now just do warehouse work. No idea what I want to do with my life now, but thankful that I'm single w no kids, which makes these decisions easier.

[China]

1 hour ago, PleaseBlitz said:

Did a deep dive into my hours today. I am annualizing at just over 2400 right now, which works out to 47 hours per week assuming one week of vacation. 

 

Are those billable hours, or total hours?

[PleaseBlitz]

7 hours ago, China said:

 

Are those billable hours, or total hours?

It’s sort of weird at my new firm. It’s billable hours, plus they ask us to keep track of certain nonbillable stuff like biz dev and training and “firm contribution,”. So it’s that. 

Edited August 3, 2023 by PleaseBlitz

[LadySkinsFan]

Sounds a lot like "other duties as assigned". I always hated that as part of a job description. That goes away with independent contractor jobs as the contract is succinctly spelled out. 

[Corcaigh]

I exited (buyout) from a company I had helped build just as COVID started. Worked from home for 18 months with a much smaller startup, and because it was smaller and WFH I was able to restart hobbies and start to coast. Built a home in the countryside while this was going on and stopped paid work when we moved in to the new place.

 

I thought I might find something else, doing some advisory work etc., and actually started a few small tech project ideas, but entirely happy volunteering and relaxing. Not interested in the hustle or grind of paid employment again.

[Mr. Sinister]

Grinding sucks. Worked security in Miami, and there were days where I may have only gotten an hr or two of sleep. Took years off ny life, I know. My hands shake now. Complete mess. Tired all the time.

[Corcaigh]

I hate the phrase ‘work/life balance’ now. It implies that there is an acceptable tradeoff where you sacrifice quality of life.
 

For several years toward the end of my paid employment when my company was a ‘rocket ship’ I had no balance - I was a zombie. If not working I was sleeping, often on the couch at weekends, ’cause quality sleep was so compromised. 
 

By accident/luck I came across a series of podcasts that educated me on sleep quality (Matthew Walker), mindfulness (Jack Kornfeld), philosophy (Stoicism) and other health disciplines (Peter Attia) that have greatly improved my quality of life.

 

Edited August 3, 2023 by Corcaigh

[Corcaigh]

3 hours ago, PleaseBlitz said:

It’s sort of weird at my new firm. It’s billable hours, plus they ask us to keep track of certain nonbillable stuff like biz dev and training and “firm contribution,”. So it’s that. 

Is this classified as ‘training’ or is some client getting billed for the research time?

[Mr. Sinister]

13 minutes ago, Corcaigh said:

I hate the phrase ‘work/life balance’ now. It implies that there is an acceptable tradeoff where you sacrifice quality of life.
 

For several years toward the end of my paid employment when my company was a ‘rocket ship’ I had no balance - I was a zombie. If not working I was sleeping, often on the couch at weekends, ’cause quality sleep was so compromised. 
 

By accident/luck I came across a series of podcasts that educated me on sleep quality (Matthew Walker), mindfulness (Jack Kornfeld), philosophy (Stoicism) and other health disciplines (Peter Attia) that have greatly improved my quality of life.

 

 

I've taken to abusing melatonin. Gonna try and look into this.

[Corcaigh]

1 minute ago, Mr. Sinister said:

 

I've taken to abusing melatonin. Gonna try and look into this.

For years I would have subscribed to the belief that ‘alcohol helps you sleep’.

 

Alcohol helps you be unconscious, it doesn't deliver the recuperative benefits of sleep. I think melatonin is much the same.

[PleaseBlitz]

Just now, Corcaigh said:

For years I would have subscribed to the belief that ‘alcohol helps you sleep’.

 

Alcohol helps you be unconscious, it doesn't deliver the recuperative benefits of sleep. I think melatonin is much the same.

 

This is correct (take it from me).

 

My sleep has always been terrible, until recently my doc prescribed me some sleeping drugs (Trazadone).  Never slept better in my life.  

 

[skinsmarydu]

Yeah, melatonin doesn't do squat for me.  I live in an area with lots of loud-ass cars all night long, so I need real sleeping pills to stay asleep.  Even they don't work sometimes. 

[Mr. Sinister]

Yeah. I'm embarrassed to say how much I take. But it absolutely doesn't help. Like I said, I just wake up, but I still feel like crap all day

[Corcaigh]

13 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

 

This is correct (take it from me).

 

My sleep has always been terrible, until recently my doc prescribed me some sleeping drugs (Trazadone).  Never slept better in my life.  

 

Matthew Walker (neuroscientist and sleep guru) is mostly against medication to help sleep but he’s OK with Trazodone. Here’s a lot of geeky detail From Walker from a recent Tim Ferris podcast:

 

Right now, trazodone is probably the most off label prescribed sleep medication. It’s doesn’t receive the current labeling for a sleep medication, but it is used by many doctors off label.

Trazodone, I find fascinating for a number of reasons. It’s originally designed as an anti-anxiety or antidepressant medication in higher doses. But what we’ve discovered is that in lower doses, and lower doses being anywhere between 25 milligrams all the way up to maybe 300 milligrams, it’s quite sleep inducing. And the reason I find it interesting is, firstly, it does not work like classic sleeping pills, which, as I said, just knock out the cortex, sedate the cortex by stimulating the inhibitory transmitter GABA. Instead, trazodone actually works on the three neurochemical systems that we’ve mentioned before, which are the wake-promoting systems within the brain.

Specifically, trazodone will target the noradrenaline system within the brain, and it’s what we call an alpha-1 adrenergic antagonist, which simply means that it dials down the volume on noradrenaline. It is a 5-HT2A antagonist, meaning it reduces serotonin activity. And finally, it reduces down histamine by targeting the H1 receptor, which, again, we spoke about histamine being wake-promoting. If you block it with anti-allergy medications, you get sleepy.

By the way, trazodone, I know sounds quite scary. It sounds like a tranquilizer. And it’s not like that at all. It’s actually very nuanced. And what I like about its profile perhaps is that, from a scientific perspective, is that it tries to do something more naturalistic. It tries to switch off the volume of the wake-promoting regions and therefore allows sleep, the passage of sleep to be produced and arrive with you in a more naturalistic way.

Also, one of the other interesting features is that not only does it — and by the way, it seems to be quite effective. There was a meta-analysis that was done recently on 11 different really well controlled, randomized placebo controlled trials, or RCTs, across probably almost around 500 different patients. And what they found probably was three things of interest. The first is dose, then age, and then duration of use or efficacy. They found that regardless of the dose, whether it be below 50 milligrams or above 50 milligrams, it provided benefits for reducing the time it takes to fall asleep, which is what you were describing with trazodone use. It reduces the amount of time you then are spending awake for the rest of the night. It increased deep non-REM sleep.

But here was the fascinating part for me, it didn’t come at the cost of REM sleep, which in some ways is a little bit surprising. They’re not utterly antagonistic in their role, REM and non-REM. But I mentioned earlier on in the conversation that you can increase deep non-REM sleep by way of exercise. But if you look at some of those sleeves, when you increase deep non-REM, you can have an exercise induced reduction in REM sleep.

But yet what’s interesting about trazodone is that it seems to increase the amount of deep non-REM sleep, but leaves REM sleep untouched. You don’t get a consequence to REM sleep. And we don’t quite understand why that is, but that’s one of the nice things is that whether it be below 50 milligrams or above 50 milligrams, you get these benefits.

The age dependency is quite nice, because if you look at people who are younger than 60 years old, you get these sleep benefits. But even you see many, not all of them, but many of the same sleep benefits for people who are 60 years or older. And we know that as we get older, as you and I discussed earlier, the harder that sleep becomes. And so that could arguably be a more challenging use case where that medication would fail, yet you seem to get quite a lot of the distance and the benefit even as you get older. So I think that’s a potential upside.

And then the other aspect of it was the duration of action. They did look at this, which comes onto aspects of tolerance and withdrawal. There didn’t necessarily seem to be a significant tolerance buildup, where if you look at acute dosing for one week, you get these nice benefits. But then if you keep assessing people week after week up to one month, at least in the meta-analysis, the benefits were still there for the most part, which suggests that there isn’t necessarily tolerance to the drug, that those benefits persist even when you continue to take the drug.

So right now, that’s why I think it’s an interesting drug in terms of its profile and how it works. So I’m not anti-medication. Please don’t think that. It’s just that if those medications aren’t producing naturalistic sleep, I prefer to say so. But here, it seems to be a very different mechanism.

[Mr. Sinister]

Thanks guys. Good stuff in here 🫡

[PleaseBlitz]

That makes me feel a lot better about taking it.  Thanks for posting!

[The Evil Genius]

Just wait til you hit your late 40s and have to pee every night at 2am. Or some other bull**** time. 

[Corcaigh]

2 minutes ago, The Evil Genius said:

Just wait til you hit your late 40s and have to pee every night at 2am. Or some other bull**** time. 

You should look into that unless you down a pint of water just before you get into bed.

[Spaceman Spiff]

58 minutes ago, Corcaigh said:

I hate the phrase ‘work/life balance’ now. It implies that there is an acceptable tradeoff where you sacrifice quality of life.
 

For several years toward the end of my paid employment when my company was a ‘rocket ship’ I had no balance - I was a zombie. If not working I was sleeping, often on the couch at weekends, ’cause quality sleep was so compromised. 
 

By accident/luck I came across a series of podcasts that educated me on sleep quality (Matthew Walker), mindfulness (Jack Kornfeld), philosophy (Stoicism) and other health disciplines (Peter Attia) that have greatly improved my quality of life.

 

 

I hate it, too. 

 

When I hear a candidate say it on the phone, I automatically thing "will **** and whine if they have to work a minute past 5pm". If I hear a company say "we provide a great work/life balance" I know they're full of ****.  

[LadySkinsFan]

I've had insomnia ever since I hit puberty. When I was working, I became a night owl and stayed up until 2-3 am. That changed for a year when I contracted at ATT downtown when I lived in Annapolis. One either got up way early to get downtown at 6:30 am to leave at 3:30 pm or 9:30 am to leave at 6:30pm. I went to bed at 8:30 pm because I didn't want to be downtown at dark. 

 

After that year, I went back to my night owl time. During menopause, the insomnia was worse for a few years too. 

 

Now retired, I still have insomnia almost every night. I take Formula 303 an herbal combination. It works great and I've taken it for several decades. It calms my mind and I fall asleep easily. The plus is that I wake up naturally, even during the night to pee and go back to sleep easily. I buy it through Amazon. 

 

About night peeing, caffeine is a big contributor to that. I switched to decafe tea and rarely drink coffee. Decafe also helps with diabetes.

Edited August 3, 2023 by LadySkinsFan

[Corcaigh]

Just now, Spaceman Spiff said:

 

I hate it, too. 

 

When I hear a candidate say it on the phone, I automatically thing "will **** and whine if they have to work a minute past 5pm". If I hear a company say "we provide a great work/life balance" I know they're full of ****.  

Your work will be your life so it is 100% in balance.

 

And “Work hard, play hard” translates to as “grind you up with long hours and then your loser boss will expect you to accompany him to nasty strip clubs, or otherwise hang out with obnoxious bro co-workers.”

[The Evil Genius]

3 minutes ago, Spaceman Spiff said:

 

I hate it, too. 

 

When I hear a candidate say it on the phone, I automatically thing "will **** and whine if they have to work a minute past 5pm". If I hear a company say "we provide a great work/life balance" I know they're full of ****.  

 

From my experience, there is nothing that gets done past 5 than can't get done before 3. I find poor planning by management always leads to this issue. It may not be the same in your industry, but tasks are generally known days ahead by management. It shouldn't be the employees fault if management doesn't relay it in a timely fashion. 

[skinsmarydu]

2 minutes ago, LadySkinsFan said:

I've had insomnia ever since I hit puberty. When I was working, I became a night owl and stayed up until 2-3 am. That changed for a year when I contracted at ATT downtown when I lived in Annapolis. One either got up way early to get downtown at 6:30 am to leave at 3:30 pm or 9:30 am to leave at 6:30pm. I went to bed at 8:30 pm because I didn't want to be downtown at dark. 

 

After that year, I went back to my night owl time. During menopause, the insomnia was worse for a few years too. 

 

Now retired, I still have insomnia almost every night. I take Formula 303 an herbal combination. It works great and I've taken it for several decades. It calms my mind and I fall asleep easily. The plus is that I wake up naturally, even during the night to pee and go back to sleep easily. I buy it through Amazon. 

I'm a fan of 303 too...I need to get back on that.