Buffer & Working Styles
I have never had a ‘proper job’ my entire life so far and it doesn’t look like things are changing anytime soon so speaking with the Buffer Community on different working style was an experiment I couldn’t refuse.
So that’s me summed up in a tweet. I must admit the bombardment of tweets from the community did overwhelm me a bit but that’s one of the reasons why I decided to write this post because communicating with a few hundred people in under an hour is almost impossible, at least to do it well so I’d like to take this time to elaborate on some of the unanswered questions and explore the themes a little further.
This feels like a simple enough question to answer at first but not if you’re someone who creates your schedule everyday. I try to design my days so that there’s an equal amount of unexpectedness coupled with routines.
Why?
Because having a schedule is a good thing as I have come to learn after several years of moping about clueless but at the same time there’s a sense of excitement and urge to explore the unexpected when you let yourself just be.
There were tons of different answers but what struck out was the irrelevance of differentiating between ‘work’ and ‘life’, I am always amused when someone tells me they’re trying to master work-life balance. Not the usual if you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life bollocks but because this illusion of your work being separate to who you are & vice versa is just too funny to not laugh on the inside while you meekly smile on the outside.
When am I most productive?
That’s a hard one, productivity is defined by being effective at what’s important. Mornings are usually good for creative work for me whereas afternoons are best for admin so what kind of productivity you’re looking for is probably the question you need to ask yourself everyday.
It was interesting for me to read the responses, most conversations around productivity are about how much you get done rather than the ability to recognise what needs to get done at the right time.
Half the battle is in training one’s mind to know when what needs to be done to clear the path for creativity to flourish.
Certainly that needs to be reflected in the ways we manage our own time as well? Great to see so many responses on how intuitively people know their productive zones!
I half expected to hear specific responses, even got myself ready for the ‘living on the beach’ response that has completely lost it’s charm or uniqueness now. But the Buffer Community was refreshing, the running theme among most answers was one of regular breaks.
It has been statistically proven that moving gets the creative juices flowing, even if you’re an accountant and think creativity isn’t necessary for work it essentially helps in getting you into a state of flow.
I know we have the lunch breaks but that’s not much of a break as it is sustenance. The one time I worked for 3 weeks (yes, in an actual office!) I ended up having nothing to do by 12noon, not because there wasn’t much to do but because there I wasn’t used to spreading the workload till 6pm as I was advised most people do. So not everyone has a job where you get to ‘spread your workload’ nonetheless, my days almost end by 3pm at the most. I only answer random emails after that if I am feeling particularly in a hustle mode but after that my time is dedicated towards reading (seldom writing), watching documentaries suchlike because that’s the external stimulus necessary for my brain to get back into ‘work-mode’ the next day.
*Flashing my meek smile once again*
I really don’t balance my work and personal time, just because I refuse to fall into this illusion that your work is different to who you are and that your family/personal life needs to be different and separate to who you are.
That’s a huge stressor for me to constantly try to maintain this arbitrary separation between the two and it’s not the same argument as “if you love your job…” but a request to examine why is there such a huge desire/need to separate the two? You don’t need to be working all the time, just like you’re not going to spend every waking moment with your loved ones but striving for something that literally does not exist makes us all unnecessarily sad.
The next time someone tries to make you feel bad about not having a “good” work-life balance I urge you to ask them if they have achieved this in the first place; the very nature of striking a balance requires to compromise on either sides in order to bring them together. So striving for work-life balance especially forcing yourself to get one essentially means asking you to strip away certain aspects in both the areas. Why go out of your way to do that?
I live happily in the chaos that is my life dominated by work, friends, family and a whole of other things because it’s collectively that they give meaning to my life, not by separating them.
This is a big one for me, mostly because as someone who has a chronic illness and works by herself stress feels inevitable. Most people take it for granted that stress is in fact an integral part of living our lives today but that doesn’t mean everybody else’s reality needs to be your reality.
Sure stress is insane especially if you’re doing admin or creative work (go figure!) stress finds it’s way somewhat like an uninvited habit that you don’t know what to do without.
That’s exactly it, most people see stress as something that is inevitable and something that you just build up a resilience to after years of being it’s slave. While most of it might be true, it’s also true that you don’t need to go through years’ of walking on icicles trying to cope or avoid it — two common strategies employed against stress.
To me, every time I get stressed or sense it coming on I physically move away from the space if the stress is somehow tied into a specific place (ie; related to a person or colleague) or I sit down and write out all the possible ways this situation could spiral into. Some might be pleasant and others not-so-much but the act of critically evaluating your situation makes the unknown more familiar thereby reducing the level of stress it could inflict on you.
Wow — an ideal environment? Now, that’s a lot of stress!
The very idea of ideal environments can sometimes cause obstacles in helping you get there, like a web 2.0 version of self fulfilling prophecies that just don’t work too well. I think one of the biggest challenges in answering such a question let alone taking the steps to creating this dream into reality is the emphasis on ‘one ideal environment’ — much like my ways that are effectively unstructured, the optimum environment for me to thrive is one that is constantly changing.
Doesn’t every high school kid want to be popular and famous and when you grow older you want different things, just imagine how your life would be if everything you wished for in your six birthday came true? And that doesn’t stop even if we are 25, 30, 45, 60 or any age you get to so why strive for one ideal environment which is an oxymoron in it’s evolution?
My ideal environment is in fact not an environment at all but a state of mind because being in the right mindset could make you do extraordinary things.
My environment is designed to support maintaining a specific type of mindset; a growth mindset.
In the work that I do I constantly have to defend and justify my work, most of my projects are the kind of things people aren’t used to hearing about so if I took their comments to heart I would never get out of bed in the mornings!
This is probably the one question I was most excited for and specially requested Buffer to add it in as part of the chat.
What excites me about it?
Well, I think some of the best ideas in the world are the ones which are powered through collective motivations and this question very directly points towards the hidden aspirations of our workforce.
My dream scenario is at the heart of Buffer; remote working. I think all of us perform better when we’re allowed to find our own ways of working rather than asked to succumb to an arbitrary schedule that was once designed by the Industrial Revolution.
Despite Buffer as a standing example it saddens me to see how many organisations let go of perfectly great employees because they can’t conceive of remote working as a viable option.
I don’t know why that is — do you know why?
I understand there are far greater problems that needs addressing than remote working but if there’s one thing that the future of work needs to reconsider is the notion of inclusivity. All of us strive to uphold the equality laws in our local geographies as well as like to think are pretty liberal minded as institutions go but unless your company has done everything in it’s power (and yes, this means leading systemic change) to make space for a suitable employee I don’t think we have the right to call ourselves an open minded society.
I can go on at length about how we need to revisit many of the concepts that we take for granted and for those interested can take a look at this post I wrote about health & equality calling to Redefine Health but for now, it feels pretty good to have been given the opportunity to share my perhaps not-so-popular yet intriguing thoughts with the Buffer Community.
Thanks to everyone at Buffer and am so thrilled to be part of this amazing growing Community.
Bhavani Esapathi is a writer & public speaker on digital technology and social innovation. She is currently the Director of Managing the Arts course at The Goethe-Institut as well as the Founding Director of The Invisible Labs; a social tech initiative to make invisible diseases more visible in our world. If you liked this you might want to subscriber to her weekly email letters on creative technology and collaboration in the cultural sector. Say hi on Twitter @bhaesa.
