Anne Helen Petersen

Not really about working from home; more about "wfh as a lens for examining issues with the way we conceptualise / structure work in society".

Pretty good tho. Really light on prescribing techniques; really heavy on prescribing focus points.

Main things I took away:
- Flexibility for employees needs guardrails instead of boundaries -- organisationally enforced / designed limits rather than pushing the work to employees
- Remote work, but also management in general needs a huge amount of attention and investment; it's typically been a bolt-on/afterthought in a lot of companies
- Tech / new ways of working are often adopted too quickly / cargo-culted without holistic consideration of the sideeffects (open offices, email, Slack etc etc), iteration is probably really important. Surveillance tech is fucked
- Best thing about remote work is it theoretically gives you space to engage with community, but there's a lot of work / investment required here from individuals. Childcare, Unions, mutual dependence.

All in all, felt like it was saying "here's what we have, here's this weird thing that happened because of the pandemic, how can we imagine something new that grows out of this?". In that sense, sorta utopian/idealistic, but cautiously so.

Didn't feel super... direction-ful? And/or like it was written quickly? But some good ideas to mull over.… (meer)

I've long been a fan of Anne Helen Peterson's work since her piece on Burnout in Buzzfeed News, and have followed her to the Culture Study substack.

Out of Office is partly about working from home, but more broadly is an examination on how we work, specifically in the United States and trends over the years, like how technology such as email or chat/messenger (Slack, Teams, etc.) are ostensibly supposed to ease communication but in reality let work follow us home, blurring the boundaries between work and personal time. A lot of these have been festering problems that were really thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, most typically for information workers. It's difficult for the individual to tackle such broad issues (that frankly need to be addressed at an institutional level), but there are suggestions to consider such as defining your boundaries and finding community OUTSIDE of work.

I'm biased because I like AHP's work, but also because I have one of those bullshit office jobs (and having transitioned to the desk from the lab bench, previously interacting more often with production workers on the floor... yeah, I feel like there's more physical effort going on there than what I do, and having to take inventory of my actions before an extended leave only highlights this for me). Still, even if the issues aren't a matter of life and death our employers should still consider how best to treat and accommodate their workers, especially as younger employees will seek out better settings if an employer oversteps.

It's a little bit funny to read this in 2023 when they interview the head of Twitter's HR in 2021 about hybrid changes to disincentivize coming to the office in order to allow for hybrid remote/in person work collaborations, when in late 2022 Twitter's workforce was thrown into chaos in a number of ways including mass layoffs and a forced return to the office.… (meer)

Ironically, regularly posting updates to goodreads was a self-demonstrating example of turning hobbies into work so here I am, writing an update as I finished the book early this morning. (and trying not to feel guilty taking 20 days to read a relatively short book...!)

Can't Even expands on Anne Helen Peterson's viral longform essay for Buzzfeed, "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation", dividing into chapters by theme (education, the various ways work has become shitty/the 'love what you do' myth/parenting/etc.) with plenty of anecdote from Millennials across geographic and class spectrum. As a reminder, we're the age cohort between 1981 and 1996, so while we've been painted as "lazy and entitled young people" for the last twenty years, we're grown adults trying to keep our heads above water after weathering multiple economic downturns in our adult lives.

In general, Can't Even is a good primer on the ways in which capitalism has fucked over society and how we've turned everything from our hobbies to our child-rearing into work, which compounds into exhaustion. She's cautious to not provide flimsy suggested solutions at the end, as these are things that we can't necessarily fix on the individual level and require structural changes.

I'd strongly recommend reading cited sources for further information on labor (I read [b:Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary|37003174|Temp How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary|Louis Hyman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1513007876l/37003174._SY75_.jpg|58855306] two years ago and recognized the arguments in the chapter on the gig economy). Also, AHP has a newsletter named "Culture Study" which also looks at this among other topics like celebrity culture and what it indicates.
… (meer)