# Work culture creep

*epistemic status: This is not my field of study. I am working through some ideas here that I think might resonate with the community.*

I am a fun, happy, goofy dad. I can play music and perform magic tricks. I sing silly songs and make stupid jokes.

However, for 8 out of the 16 hours that I am awake, I sit at a desk, type, occasionally take phone calls, and talk about workflow. That's what I do 50% of my weekdays.

I am on a journey, trying to figure out what can be done to prevent these work habits from leaking into my personal life.

this post will be three major sections:

*   First, I'll argue that work habits are bad for personal life. 
*   After that, I'll contend that they are impossible to completely isolate from home life. 
*   Finally, I'll get into my thoughts on mitigating them.

This post is me working through some ideas. I'll do a separate post later on the efficacy of these.

 work behaviors don't generally port into personal life
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Why are work-life and home life-different?
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I try to optimize my decisions and behavior so that me and my family are happy and healthy. But when I work, I am a piece of a company that has different priorities.

Some companies optimize on profits, some non-profits optimize on effect of some type, but no company optimizes on the happiness and well-being of their employees. Some companies care, but it's never the overarching goal. This isn't an anti-work post, companies have to do this or they wouldn't be a company. That's okay by me.

My goal at home is to keep my family happy and healthy, my goal at work is to accomplish tasks for the company. Because part of my job is to help my company accomplish their goal, some of my behavior at work is completely unaligned with behavior outside work. I am not saying this behavior is bad at work, I'm just saying it would not usually be behavioral choices I would make outside work.

Work-behaviors have to be different from home-behaviors because all the incentives are different. Birds are different from fish because they both adapted in different environments, just as work behavior and home behavior are different because they both have different incentive structures.

How are work-life and home-life different?
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Just about every work behavior is an example of bad home behavior but I will go through a lot of examples because I feel like this takes a big shift in perspective.

Closed door meetings are normal while working. Closing the door while working from home is an example of the same thing. This behavior is normal, good, and accepted at the workplace but in a family or friend setting probably shouldn't be normal. If I am with a group of friends or family, closed door meetings would be pretty bizarre. While there are examples of this being useful, it definitely isn't normative.

Professionalism is normative at the workplace. With friends and family there is no need to be professional. By professional I mean formal, and trying to display an air of competency. In personal life, I don't need to signal to people that in good at my job. Out of work it should be normative to tell jokes, embarrass myself a little, and feel okay silly or weird if I want. If there are cases I need to walk on eggshells, they would be far from ordinary.

Work is big on focusing for objectives. At home it's okay to not have objectives. It's okay just follow my toddler around for a bit with no plan. It's okay to go into something without a measurable objective.

At work people are paid to talk to me. If they like me or not, they kind of need to with with me. In real life, relationships don't work that way. No one it's getting paid to help me and every interaction with me is a choice.

Work has strange power dynamics that shouldn't exist in real life. In my home life I have no supervisor and I also have any "new employees" to train. Yeah I have kids but the supervisor/employee model is not my ideal model to raise kids.

Hopefully at this point you see what I am trying to get at. What is normative at work should not be normative at home.

It's impossible to not be molded by work
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We have all heard the phrase, "don't take your work home." As if work contaminating home life is something that can be easily shut off with willpower. I hear a lot more about setting boundaries with work which is a great thing too. I think it's important to try to not let work effect home life, but will power isn't going to do it.

This might be my most important point in this post. Not thinking about work after work hours is just the first step towards preventing work from changing us. So much more needs to be done.

All the behaviors in the above section, closed doors, professionalism, objectives, etc. They are how we act for 8-ish hours a day. That has side effects regardless of whether we are cognitively thinking about work.

I am going to list a few strong reasons I believe work effects us even if we aren't cognitively thinking about it. You don't have to agree with all of these to understand my point.

Just because we aren't cognitively thinking about something doesn't mean it doesn't effect us. Whether you want to call it subconscious thought, the elephant (vs rider), or system 1( vs system 2) you probably believe that just because you cognitively aren't thinking about work doesn't mean work related thoughts don't effect your behavior. As a small example, you know the "ping" sound from getting a new email? Even if you aren't cognitively thinking about work, you hear that "ping" and it immediately makes you think about work. Maybe you want to check your email now, maybe you just get momentarily distracted. My point isn't that the"ping" is day ruining or even bad, just that there may be hundreds of things like the "ping" that effect your thought regardless of whether you are thinking about work.

I don't want to sound too behaviorist here, but for 8 hours a day your workplace behavior is being rewarded. Like Pavlov's dog to a bell, your "professional attitude and timely responses" is getting fed to you at performance reviews. The fact that "professionalism" is a semi-concrete term isn't because companies define professionalism and require it of you. It's because good work place behavior is rewarded and bad workplace behavior is discouraged. Saying you can "turn off" work place behavior after 5pm is like Pavlov's dog saying they won't salivate this time for the bell.

I am not sure what branch of psychology this falls under (IFS?), but maybe it resonates with you. Certainly you have made mistakes at work that scared you. Depending on how traumatic those were you may have built systems in place that make sure you don't repeat that trauma. I remember 18yo me being a waiter, spilling a drink on someone, having then angrily ask for the check to leave and on the bill I accidentally didn't remove the drink I just spilled on them. It was a series of honest mistakes for me but the anger I received and all the talking to the manager and all that made it something I still have nightmares about. You may believe that in the same way I built up barriers to ensure I don't make the same mistake twice, we all have workplace barriers built up in our heads. Now if you believe that we sometimes aren't cognizant of those barriers immediately, or maybe not even realizing those barriers are effecting us; it's easy to see how those barriers can't be turned off in our home life.

And the least rigorous intuition for why we can't "turn off" work life. Who do you think is more cautious in a dark alley: an off duty police officer or an off duty waiter. Who is more detail oriented while off the clock: an accountant or a golf caddie. Who is more personable off the clock: a car salesman or a programmer. This is flawed in many ways, but it describes my intuition that jobs require attention to certain traits and years of doing a job reinforces that trait.

What can I do to prevent this
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Okay I have some ideas I might try.

If I were Pavlov's dog, how would I avoid being trained to expect doggy treats at a bell. I might reinforce the exact opposite behavior once Pavlov leaves the room. Alternatively, before Pavlov comes in, I might eat so many dog treats that the idea of another disgusts me. I might try to develop an allergy to the dog treats.

I think the idea to " eat so many dog treats that the idea of another disgusts me" is a good starting point. Having everything I need outside of work is important. Having strong relationships, validation, and importance outside of work will prevent me from seeking it within work. I am thinking of this as a good foundation, making sure I don't need work for anything and it isn't filling in any gap in my home life.

"Building an allergy to dog treats" is an interesting idea. I think this would look like making sure I hate my job and despise being better at it. I could put in some interventions for that but it doesn't seem like a healthy choice so I'm going to table that idea.

"reinforce the exact opposite behavior once Pavlov leaves the room" is an interesting idea too. At first I imagined biking for x/5 amount of minutes, with x being minutes I am in meetings. I hate biking right now but I do it as exercise. If I am sitting through a meeting thinking about how much I am going to have to sweat for this, I might be minimizing the effects of reinforcement behavior.

Okay I've got some ideas, but what if I'm coming from this the wrong way. I do kind of want to get better at work. All these interventions would probably make me worse at work. Can I keep work reward structures wife somehow disassociating them with my home life.  Can I have my cake and eat it too?

Maybe. I have played an embarrassing amount of time in video games but I don't feel more likely to punch trees (Minecraft) or storm Hyrule castle (Zelda) or hit people with my car keys (kingdom hearts). Also, actors play all sorts of characters and don't turn out like them. Although famously method actors do have a hard time getting out of character sometimes. Gaming, acting, taking on another character seems to help at preventing reinforcement learning. Can I gamify my job?!

I think this method would take on two parts: 1 playing a character other than myself. 2 some sort of point and reward system. 3 reminding myself I'm in a game.

Initial thoughts are that 1 (playing a character) might entail: switching outfits immediately before and after work. When I work from home maybe wearing work glasses that I can take off easily on breaks. Turning on a bright "stage light" in front of my camera for meetings. Picking attributes of my personality that I would like to elevate or change when I'm in my "work mode". Finally actors film a scene and then take a break, I think timed pomodoro style breaks where I get out of character are important.

Okay so for 2 (reward structure). I thought long and hard and wrote a lot to arrive at the conclusion that work already has a reward structure. Better at work is more pay, more job opportunities, more project choice. I could think of gamey incentives like fighting a dragon but honestly that would pale in comparison to a pay increase or more job mobility.

Part 3 is important, reminding myself I'm playing a game. Acting works because actors know when the cameras record. Games work because we don't need to worry about orcs showing up in our real-life living room. Work is difficult because the way we treat it, like it's a part of our personality, it can be quite convincing that it is real life. Work is not real life!!! Running an efficient meeting won't make me a better dad. I am going to try so hard to treat my work like a video game.

Currently, I occasionally feel the need to tell my friends about a big work accomplishment, or maybe I'll find someone with a similar job and I'll want to geek out about their technology stack. I need to fight the urge. I am going to make more of an effort to not feel pride about my work outside my work. Also, I'm putting pictures of my family everywhere. Might even change my mouse cursor to my son's face, remember when everyone changed your cursor on their myspace page?

I feel like I need to defend the last one. It's a good thing to be proud of the work one does, I'm not saying it's bad. Right now I think the benefits from disassociating from work-proudness outweighs the goodness from having work I am proud of.

conclusion 
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My plan is to do these concrete things:

*    I will build a work character, someone I can act as
*    I will try not to talk to anyone about my job unless they are in a position very similar to mine (for networking purposes)
*    I will take frequent breaks, when I can, to get out of character
*   I will continue to build a good foundation of friends and family outside work
*    I'm going to decorate my home office with more pics of the kiddos

I will measure success with the following metrics.

*   am I able to move from work to non work tasks easily
*   do I feel a need to talk about work
*   hopefully I should feel some sense of being more myself although this is vague

And I will report back!