How to Hack it as a Working Parent: or, should your face be bathed in the blue glow of a phone at 2AM?
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Modern technology has made it easier than ever for parents employed in technical environments to keep up with work at all hours and in all locations. This makes it possible to work a flexible schedule, but also may lead to problems with work/life balance and furthering unreasonable expectations about working hours. Add to that shifting gender roles and limited paid parental leave in the United States and you have potential for burnout and a certainty for anxiety. It raises the additional question of whether the “always connected” mindset puts up a barrier to some populations who otherwise might be better represented in open source and library technology communities. This presentation will address tools that are useful for working parents in technical library positions, and share some lessons learned about using these tools while maintaining a reasonable work/life balance. We will consider a question that Karen Coyle raised back in 1996: “What if the thousands of hours of graveyard shift amateur hacking wasn't really the best way to get the job done? That would be unthinkable.” For those who are able to take an extended parental leave, we will present strategies for minimizing the impact to your career and your employer. For those (particularly in the United States) who are only able to take a short leave will require different strategies. Despite different levels of preparation, all are useful exercises in succession planning and making a stronger workplace and future ability to work a flexible schedule through reviewing workloads, cross-training personnel, hiring contract replacements, and creative divisions of labor. Such preparation makes work better for everyone, kids or no kids or caretakers of any kind.
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How to Hack it as a Working Parent: or, should your face be bathed in the blue glow of a phone at 2AM?
- 1. How to Hack it As a Working Parent or, should your face be bathed in the blue glow of a phone at 2 AM? Margaret Heller, Christina Salazar, May Yan // 2.11.2015
- 2. Image credit: John Flinchbaugh (CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- 3. Traister, Rebecca. “When Will We Stop Punishing Working Women for Having Babies?” Text. The New Republic, February 2, 2015. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120939/maternity-leave-policies-america-hurt-working-moms. “...an American woman’s earnings decrease by 4 percent for every child that she bears….[A]fter men have kids, their earnings increase, on average, by 6 percent… [F]athers are more likely to be hired and to be regarded as more competent employees than mothers.”
- 6. (Extended) Parental Leave How long of an extended leave are you talking about? Canada Mandated Leave with Benefits (varies by province) 17 weeks (maternity leave) + 35 weeks (parental leave) = 52 weeks
- 7. Why think about leave planning? ❏ You are a parent-to-be ❏ You are in management or administration ❏ You are thinking of starting a family one day ❏ You are human and might one day get sick
- 8. “DOCUMENT ALL THE THINGS! You won’t regret it.” @cattsmall
- 9. Create a manual of your job functions Get important documents out of your own computer ● Keep the systems simple ● Findable and Usable is important ● Commit to maintaining it
- 10. “Stop Emailing Me” <a href= ”mailto:group.email@mpow?Subject=Not asking an individual”>I need help!</a>
- 11. Hiring Replacement & Cross Train Creative Division of responsibilities prior to hiring ● Look internally first - Cross Train ● Overlap as long as possible to train prior to leave, and to debrief at the end of leave. ● Try to keep your external hires
- 12. After you come back from leave
- 13. Getting to Leave by 5:30 ● Getting Things Done (David Allen, 2001) o Projects => Actions ● Fixed Schedule Productivity (Cal Newport) o Focusing effort => Deep Work
- 18. Norton, Quinn. “Against Productivity: This Essay Took Four Years to Write.” Medium, November 7, 2014. https://medium.com/message/against-productivity-b19f56b67da6. “This moment’s goal of productivity, with its all-consuming practice and unattainable horizon, is perfect for our current corporate world. Productivity never asks what it builds, just how much of it can be piled up before we leave or die.”
- 19. This slide left intentionally blank.
- 20. Thanks! Let’s discuss this more! Margaret Heller @margaret_heller mheller1@luc.edu Christina Salazar @InphoManiac christina.salazar@csuci.edu May Yan @mayyan may.yan@ryerson.ca Special thanks to Jaclyn Bedoya. Look for our forthcoming article about this topic in Code4Lib Issue 28.
Notes de l'éditeur
- At my place of work, we recently had the opportunity to hire for a programmer/analyst position. The lead candidate was an internal candidate who the hiring committee (of which I was a member) knew well. As we discussed this candidate, one of the committee members commented that “Yeah… in some ways this person has allowed his family commitments to hold him back professionally.” As a working mother who’s repeatedly had to turn down professional opportunities of all kinds so that I could take care of my child or my (now aging) parents, those words were a wake up call to the professional price that I was paying for simply having family commitments. However, my male colleague would be awarded good worker points for his time spent with his family while I would just be expected to do it because that’s just what women do. How many times have I heard "I learned this programming language" or "I installed that operating system in the wee hours of the night when we're officially off the clock and hopefully in bed. Even as this team prepped this presentation, we wrote emails to each other with one hand in the middle of the night while nursing babies, while staying up all night with naughty toddlers then dragging ourselves to work despite exhaustion, illness and stress. We pushed ourselves hard, because that seems to be the only way, even when we know we can’t work the same pace and the same hours that others can. We want you to know why that is, and why we think everyone, kids or no kids, needs to think about how you balance work with care for your children, your elders, your pets, and yourself. And because of the disproportionate impact on women and people of color, this issue has a direct impact on the diversity of this community and in fact, any workplace. We want to shed some light on the inequities that parents and especially moms face as well as showing you a way to get through the current situation.
- What we are saying goes for any type of caregiver – whether it’s a mother or father caring for his or her children or an adult child caring for his or her elderly mom or dad or someone taking care of a sick spouse or partner… or sibling. We're sharing our experiences as mothers of infants and young children and some of those experiences are unique to that group and reflect that we're grappling with the newness of how to be working professionals and caregivers. But please remember that this situation is particularly dire for all women. A 2014 report by Michelle Budig, quoted here by Rebecca Traister in The New Republic, points out that there is a very real gap and penalty for women vs. men. In short, men who take time away from their jobs are more likely to be viewed positively than women who take time to care for their children. Further a 2013 Pew study found that in the “Sandwich Generation” of people raising children while also caring for an aging parent women--particularly middle aged and Hispanic women-- are more likely to have cared for an aging parent.
- Beyond that though, the culture of “Always On” can be damaging in ways that aren’t always obvious. Our world--particularly our technical world--relies on treating human labor as interoperable machine parts that can be “always on”. We librarians have it easy compared to the service sector - or even tenure track faculty, who have classroom obligations to meet. The open source technology world expects all types of work at odd hours. But whom does these expectations exclude?
- Then there's the special issue of maternity/paternity leave. Take a look at the comparison by country of mandated paid maternity/paternity leave - that’s right, the US is at zero. If you are an academic librarian in the United States here are some other things you will want to think about: Whether or not you’re on the tenure track? Can you pause your tenure clock? By the time your baby is born will you have worked at your job for at least one year so that you are eligible for FMLA which protects your job for 12 weeks unpaid leave. Many academic institutions give 6 weeks of pay on short term disability, but if you want any more than that (up to 12 weeks allowed by FMLA) you will have to make up the difference in vacation time or unpaid leave. Note too that you are usually required to use up all banked sick time before your short term disability kicks in. So if you have two weeks of banked sick time, you use that and then get four weeks disability pay. You now have no sick time when you are back at work after six weeks. So don't get sick... or let your kiddos get sick. Let's turn now to some practical advice, since we're talking about leave. As a parent to be you'll have a lot of work related questions, like “Wait, how do I get this baby out of me and somehow still work?” If you don’t yet have children, here’s your chance to plan (or rethink your life choices). And if you don't ever intend to have children take this as hitting the highlights for how to prepare for an extended leave of any type. “But there is a better place. It’s called Canada.”
- In Canada women are entitled to an full year of leave if they are giving birth to a baby. either parents can take a parental leave. With such a long period of leave, it becomes important to have to look at seriously preparing for leaves and hiring replacements.However, it’s also easier for organizations to hire a replacement for a 1 year contract so that is an advantage for both the new parent and the employer.
- When I talk about preparing for a leave, I mean for you to do it well before you need to take one, and that it should be part of the culture of your work to always prepare for times when someone (anyone) might have to be away for an extended period of time for any reason. But for most of us this starts when we know we’re going to take maternity leave, this typically means you have 8-9 months of preparation time.
- First we start with creating documentation. It’s more than just documentation for projects and documenting your code. You are creating a manual for all your job functions so someone else can do your job.
- This maybe a challenging idea for many people: even the most mundane everyday tasks you do might actually need to be documented in case you are unable to do those things, for a short or a longer period of time. A good way to start on this type of documentation is to reflect on a periodic basis what tasks needs to be tackled, weekly? Monthly? Yearly? Identify those deadlines, record needed procedures and gather working documentation to ensure that those tasks can be accomplished. If you have a specific leave planned, start by looking at what’s to happen during that period of time. This includes things you do infrequently or ad-hoc basis outside of a regular routine. The upside creating all this documentation is that you’ll ask others to maintain it while you’re away and it’ll be useful for you to reacquaint yourself with any changes when you come back from a long leave. As technologist, you can be creative in maximizing the technologies you have to keep these documents searchable and usable but you are looking for long term sustainable solutions.
- Use generic emails for all the contact points when someone would be asking for help or working with library personnel both internally and externally. Reference, Systems, Electronic resource renewals, er troubleshooting etc. This way, procedures didn’t need to change, and contacts didn’t need to be updated when the person behind the generic email goes on a leave. This also means, that key communications over time, can be saved in a location that can be accessed by your replacement or other people that share the same responsibility.
- Depending on how high the learning curve for a position, it makes sense to consider looking at a creative division of responsibilities within the organization first before looking outside the library for a replacement. For example having many people to take over various components of your work instead of just one person. If you identify internal candidates for planned leave the training and hand off of work can be a lot smoother for everyone because it It gives you a much longer period of time to train. This might be the first time you cross train within the library, but it is something you should consider doing even when there are no leaves planned. Cross training protects the library by having multiple people well versed in important work and allows the library to be be flexible. cross training should take place both within a department and outside of it. When you train in new skills or work with a new department, you create opportunities to seed new ideas and may lead to better collaborations in the library. On day to day, this means that employees are able to take sick days, go to appointments, and take a vacation and always have a backup. When someone takes a planned or unplanned extended leave of a few weeks or a few months, you can shift around responsibilities in order to make sure everything is still running smoothly. In the case of an extended leave, you can use an internal candidate as replacement before looking to hire externally. Management should always be looking creatively at where is there growth in the library and look for ways to take advantage of a planned leave and replacement hiring. In my place of work, we’ve done it a few times where contract workers hired for replace leaves did not take on the work of the person who went on leave. Instead internal Librarian’s portfolios were shifted and crossed trained to take new responsibilities. Contract replacements are brought in to work in other (growing) areas of the library. When the person who went on leave returns, we look to keep the temporary hires by extending their contracts, or working to create new positions. This way, we are looking at growing and keeping skills in the library, but also maximizing our investment in new temporary hire.
- All you’ve done to prepare for your leave makes the library ready to be more flexible in your day to day work once you return. But it’s still overwhelming to return to work as new parents and have to learn to work with new time constraints.
- Sheryl Sandberg once admitted (somewhat defensively) that she leaves the office by 5:30 every day so she can eat dinner with her kids. This doesn’t seem that revolutionary. I have to leave by 4:30 myself. This is totally doable, even if you think it isn’t. Let’s look at two different approaches. First, Getting Things Done is a favorite of many people in technology, and mostly the way I personally work. This methodology was described by David Allen in his 2001 book. In this, you figure out all your projects--work, home, personal, whatever, and divide them up into a series of discrete actions. Ask yourself “What is the next physical action I have to take to make this happen?” You categorize your tasks by contexts, time to complete, and other factors, and then when you are in that context you choose the actions to accomplish. The potential problem with this method is that we end up with everything being in same context--computer or phone, and mixing up work and personal projects makes you feel unable to escape from either world. Another technique, about which Cal Newport of the Study Hacks blog writes convincingly, is the idea of Fixed Schedule Productivity. This is, in a way, more traditional, since this is basically planning your week out in advance, and only planning to get done what can be done within reasonable weekday hours, with a bit of time on the weekend if possible. He has published multiple books, finished a PhD, and started a family on this regimen. He argues that the problem with Getting Things Done is that it requires your work to be divisible into discrete actions, which is just not possible when you’re trying to do some types of work such as solving complicated mathematical, technical, or artistic problems. To make this work, you have to figure out what the most crucial things are for your life, and do everything you can to be able to put the time to those. Batch your time-suck work, avoid procrastination, be absolutely clear about when you will deliver (even if it’s far away) and ruthlessly cull commitments. This clears out space for Deep Work, where you can solve important problems--but at 10 AM when you have childcare, not at 10 PM when you are exhausted from a day’s work.
- Be ruthless with yourself. A tool like RescueTime can help you with shaping days that look more like you want them to. Seen here is the screen that I get when I try to check Twitter in the afternoons if I’ve not been all that productive in the morning. I can also set a Focus Time session, which blocks all my timesink sites for half an hour, which is enough to get me back on the right track. It’s aimed at developers, and things like development environments and text editors automatically get tagged as extremely productive. But I use it for my other work as well. The free tier is a good way to get started. I subscribed to the premium version eventually, and really love it for being able to categorize my days.
- Optimizing your communication with your colleagues is also critical. Lightweight project management tools are all over now, and when used thoughtfully have the potential to improve team communication. Don’t work out of your inbox. I know everyone does, but when the whole world wants something from you, give them a place to do it that isn’t on your person at all times. Use a separate task and project manager that helps you turn emails into actions, as well as see how much you have going on. This makes it easier to say “NO” to new projects that come in if you are overburdened already. Using tools like this keeps things out of email, and reviewable by everyone, so even if you were out of the office on leave for a few months you can still monitor what’s going on. This also helps you review the workload and see that things are getting done even if “face time” isn’t happening. As lightweight as you can go is best. Don’t make it a high barrier to following along. Something with a mobile app is even better, since that allows you to get work done on your phone.
- About those phones: The Twitter exchange above pretty much summarizes my experience. “If it can’t be done on my phone, it’s going to take me a lot longer to get to it.” And for that reason, just finishing things is often the most important thing. For me, the iPhone 5 was a lifeline during maternity leave. I could easily hold it and reach the entire screen one handed. That allowed me to write emails, do my banking, check into my project management apps, and schedule meetings all while holding my baby. My sister, who has no children but who uses a wheelchair to get around and has limited arm strength, relies on her iPhone for similar reasons.
- But not all phones are not engineered with the working mom in mind. Just recently I spoke with a whole table of accomplished women in library technology about the problems they have with phones that are getting too large to hold, and certainly too large to put in pockets of women’s clothing. Our iPhone 5s fit so perfectly in our hands that we are loathe to ever give them up for the “better” iPhone 6. It can get worse than that. Zeynep Tufecki, who chose not to use an iOS device for very legitimate reasons, writes here about her frustration of not being able to use her phone one handed while documenting tear gas being used on peaceful protesters in Gezi Park in Istanbul. “...on the latest versions of the kinds of phones I want to use, I cannot type one-handed....” This is a larger symptom of technological solutions and habits that do not adapt to someone outside of the average. We may laugh at Jitterbug phones, but they very appropriately meet the needs of people whose needs are not always considered by the rest of the tech world. We would do well to pay attention to this message. Who is being excluded by unattainable expectations for participation?
- The expectation to work at all hours and in all modes assumes that this is the ideal way to accomplish great technical feats. Karen Coyle wrote in 1996 of reasons women weren’t represented in hacker culture at MIT in the 1960s. She suggested that women, while technically equal to men, may just not have been interested in hacking. To quote Karen: “What if the thousands of hours of graveyard shift amateur hacking wasn't really the best way to get the job done? That would be unthinkable.” People who love technology, and love learning and building new systems, may love other things--like their kids--even more. They may not care to spend more hours than necessary attached to a computer for the sake of being so. The focus on hours spent, amount accomplished, and other things we measure when we quantify our projects and ourselves don’t really get at the whole picture of human experience, as this quote by Quinn Norton describes beautifully. The time we spend in solving complicated problems can’t be measured just by hours spent typing. The wisdom to do so takes time, and space. We must give ourselves--and our community--time to think, reflect, and be.
- Let’s take even one more step back. Chris Bourg, in her 2015 talk at the Ontario Library Association Superconference, suggests changing the image of technologists. “We should drop the term “tech guy” from our vocabulary and we should ditch the Star Trek posters” - because harmful stereotypes are self-reinforcing. Instead of “always-connected” and “all night coding sprints” and “brogrammers” can we instead become the haven of family-friendly, flexible, and well-rounded but still smart and committed professionals? Library technologists - who have both borrowed and hidden from the separate cultures of libraries and Silicon Valley - have a chance to forge a new culture. The Code4Lib community, through actions like providing childcare at conferences, adopting a Code of Conduct, and having talks like this has made a great start.