How Can I Stop Working on Weekends?
Advice from The Sherwins for December 2020
Hi Sherwins,
For the past few months, my company has been working every single day of the week. No joke. I’m a project lead that’s getting pulled into meetings on Sundays. I could give you all of the horrible details, but I just need a plan. Everything has gone sideways with the pandemic. My New Year’s resolution is going to be fixing this situation. What should I do?
E in New York
Hi E,
Thanks for writing, and we’re sorry that you’re in this position. This year has been difficult on so many levels, and being reminded that work can still suck in the same old ways is probably not helping. We say this because, as historic as this pandemic may be, what you’re facing isn’t new. Nor is it unique. More on this in a minute.
Because time is of the essence…
Here’s the practical part of our answer…
Though it’s tempting, the situation you’re in cannot be solved either by lighting everything on fire or with a quick fix. Here’s how you can take things one step at a time.
1. Do a one-week audit of your work calendar. Do a skinny calendar audit. That’s one where you only audit one week of your time use, rather than a month or a quarter. Where are you spending your time, and what’s the relationship between your effort and its effect during these times?
2. Pick a few things to remove from your calendar. Isolate one or two activities from your schedule to work with (psst, probably meetings). Look at these particular activities (you know they’re meetings, admit it), and determine how you can accomplish the same goals without conducting them. If five decisions are being made during these activities, can three be made through email, and two others be folded into other meetings?
Remember that your role in the success of a meeting is often self-fulfilling. Watch out for this confirmation bias. If you’re in a meeting and things go well, then you’ll find yourself always showing up, and then you’ll have no data to show that the meeting might be just fine without your head in a Zoom box.
3. Experiment with making those changes. Come up with a plan for a few things you’d like to test, enlist a few colleagues to assist you, and start making changes. See what happens!
And now for the ‘tough love’ part of our answer.
What are your working assumptions? What have you tried doing? Why didn’t it work? What did you do instead? How did you test its effectiveness? How did you solicit feedback from your fellow users/team members? What behaviors are you trying to change, and what's your plan for adjusting things as your team's behavior shifts? Have you considered stakeholder buy-in? What are your indicators for success?
If you’re thinking that these sound like designer-type questions, that’s because they are. And we put them up at the beginning of the section about tough love because we have a feeling that you haven’t answered them.
We here at Ask The Sherwins aren’t an angry bunch, but we do get frustrated from time to time. And right now, E, the situation your letter describes frustrates us.
The pandemic is fast becoming an excuse for bad behavior, rather than a reason for designers to hold fast to what’s important. We’ve all had a few terrifying periods of pivots and reprioritization in the industry, followed by breathless missives from thought leaders about how this could really be an opportunity for all of us… and here we are again with another letter about setting boundaries and team norms.
This is frustrating to us because your letter is about yet another one of our colleagues moving through a company where their design toolbox is gathering dust in the corner.
Pandemic or not, you need to decide if you really want this to change.
Each time you accepted a meeting request, that was a choice. Separate it for a moment from consequences. You clicked the button. You showed up. You helped schedule the next meeting and the next, all the while knowing that it wasn’t what you wanted. And that it wasn’t what others wanted.
We say that everyone has a choice, and we also know that the cost of that choice is different for everyone. No one wanted to rock the boat in 2000 because the economy was collapsing. Same in 2001, 2002, and 2008. As a designer, you’re supposed to be sensitive to the cost of choice, to the risks of change, and… well… you’re still having meetings on Sundays.
And before you think we’re just picking on you, we’re not. Because everyone who showed up at that meeting did the exact same thing that you did. They chose. And it’s not like you did this before, so no one has the excuse of it being how you’ve always done it. This isn’t blame we’re casting, it’s responsibility. Part of this change will involve you taking responsibility for your choices.
Designers love to champion the individual, standing up and saying no to the villain. It’s so appealing, the narrative of a lone designer, lighting the fire, and doing the Right Thing. (There’s even some famous commercials about it—one with a sledgehammer immediately springs to mind.) But the reality is that everyone on your team continues to show up on weekends. If you want to change this behavior, it will require all of you to choose to change it. You’ll all have to be equally responsible for its success or failure.
The plan won’t make the change for you.
You seem to be raring to make this New Year great. It looks like you want a plan. Because plans are what we do. We’ve done our best to give you a plan that we’ve seen lead to success. But you should know that plans don’t actually make change.
This is important because this is part of what design is. The toolkits and process diagrams don’t make decisions for us. We do. We make the choices. Our users make the choices. Our customers make the choices. When people ask us how we convince someone to do X or how to get someone not to do Y, we usually say something like, “You don’t. They must choose. The tools clear the path, but they have to walk it.”
Now, we’re not being edgy about this, nor are we being naïve. A lot of design is removing or “clarifying” choices, highlighting needs that perhaps did not exist before, or leading people to believe that certain options are unpalatable or unthinkable. If this were not true—if we weren’t actively engaged in manipulating people’s impressions of choice—much of design would evaporate. So would most of capitalism. And a lot of parenting.
Design is supposed to recenter human choice in the face of external forces. It can change the world. For a time, there were warnings about over-promising, about painting the world as being just a few design sprints away from heaven. And then, we became so dedicated to not buying our own hype, to demystifying the magic of design, that all we managed to do was convince ourselves that its principles didn’t apply to us.
And here we are. And there’s that team behind the curtain, still meeting on Sunday.
You’ve got the tools. Now’s the time to use them.
To be frank, E, what exactly is standing in the way? Your letter expresses no fear of getting fired, nothing about risks to your reputation, no nightmare product manager, and no ask for advice on whether you should quit your job. If everyone were living in fear of getting shown the virtual door simply for refusing to work on Sunday, well… that would be exploitation. (If this were any other industry, and if you weren’t working as a designer, this would be a very different column.)
But you’re a designer. And at the end of the day, we as design professionals continue to champion our processes and frameworks as paths to equity, empathy, and empowerment. We make a living off of these tools, they’ve made us who we are on the job, and they’re central to our identity as designers. Do you not think yourself worthy of their power? Does your team not see themselves as agents of change? Do you think all of this working on weekends stuff is just “part of being a designer”? Or do you know how effective your tools are and how clear the choices will be once you use them—while also knowing that you aren’t actually prepared for the consequences of change? Because if it’s that last one, you know design has tools for that, too.
The pandemic has now led us to the very last days of the calendar, and soon, we’ll turn the page and be greeted with another January. Yes, things are upside-down right now, and many of us have had dark nights with painful memories. It’s going to take us some time to work through this.
But things must change. And change is hard. It is exhausting and tedious and time-consuming, and as designers, we have to stop looking around for someone else to motivate us to do it. We can’t stand with our arms crossed asking “Why should I?” or “Why won’t somebody do something?” We can’t push others out in front, alone to fight the good fight while we wait to see how things shake out. We also can’t allow ourselves to be pushed this way, to be cast as saviors, because change doesn’t actually happen like that. We’ve got to use the tools.
It’s a balance. It’s a contradiction. It’s the path. And we’re asking you to find this path with your team. To make a choice and also allow others to choose. To move forward without following or being followed, without the pressure of going it alone or the paralysis of waiting for others.
We have to get to another place, somewhere new, deciding together to move forward as one. We can’t point to any path that we aren’t willing to walk, and that path has to have room for everyone to walk with us. We’re all responsible. We all must choose.
Happy holidays. Be well and stay safe. We’ll see each and every one of you next year.
All best,
The Sherwins
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Send your questions to questions (at) askthesherwins (daht) com. All questions become the property of Ask The Sherwins, LLC and may be edited. Our advice shouldn't be construed as a replacement for the appropriate legal or professional counsel. This advice will be around until January 1, 2021. Fare thee well, 2020.