My Three Actions Friday at 5 p.m. for a Great Recharge Weekend

You cannot open a news feed these days without reading about Zoom fatigue, work-from-home isolation or Covid burnout. Speaking with colleagues and other executives, everyone is feeling it. We are all tired ... but also cautious with admitting it as we know that we are fortunate to be working during the pandemic.

At Calix we have talked about how work-from-anywhere has fueled our growth, and helped our award-winning culture improve. (WE ARE HIRING Cloud dev, sales, customer success and a myriad of other roles! Check us out here)

At the same time we are being very transparent about the stress our teams are under as we grow. We are constantly reinforcing that our team members need to take control of their calendars, take breaks and take vacations. It is also important to break from the workweek and recharge on the weekend. While it is impossible for all to "100% unplug on the weekend" (We all need to go above and beyond to support the business - success is not 9 to 5), it is possible to take steps to make it a good weekend.

Here are the top three items that I do at the end of the day on Friday, to help me recharge:

1. Power down my Mac (PC). Not hibernate or sleep. Full power down. That forces me to close windows, applications, and most important - take the "draft emails" I was working on and either send them or close them. There is a sense of finality to closing it down for the weekend and usually takes 15-30 minutes as I "clean up" and complete open items.
2. Have two phones and plug the work phone into the charger. Having a personal phone is HUGE. I went to a work and separate personal phone last summer during Covid and it was the BEST thing I could have ever done. My personal communications are now fully private, and on the weekends I only carry that phone. The impact is profound as I don't see random work alerts, and have ZERO ability to look in my work Outlook if I am sitting somewhere waiting. If a work issue or opportunity pops into my head, I email a reminder from my personal email account to my work email so that I can look at it first thing Monday. Don't get me wrong, I still look at my work phone on occasion, but it is when I decide to look at it, not when some random unimportant notification pops up to disturb my weekend recharge. I am fortunate that in my role, we have entire teams who work shifts through the weekend to ensure that customer emergencies are dealt with in a timely manner.
3. Do not send emails on the weekend. The higher up you are, the more important this is for two reasons:

• Weekend culture is toxic. Five years ago at Calix, that was the norm. I would get as much email on the weekend as the workday. Everyone did it - and it was toxic. If you send emails on the weekend, you are sending the message to those around you that they should be working on the weekend too. You are forcing everyone around you to "keep on their toes" just in case you send a note. While we have not 100% stopped weekend emails (impossible), it is way - way - way down and we try hard to stop it completely.
• Your permission to not respond does not work. I have used this rationalization before, excusing my weekend email with "I have told them they do not have to email me back - if they do it is their choice". If I sent notes on the weekend, others will. Now I mostly put weekend emails into drafts and send them Monday morning - but I will admit, that I am not perfect. I need to keep working on this and make it 100%.

The reality is that there are times where we work through the weekend - maybe even months of weekend (I certainly put in lots of weekend hours in 2020). There will also be emergencies at work. I am not talking about those situations - we all need to lean in at times.

I am talking about when we can take the weekend off - we should. Permanently working long hours is not good for culture or teams, in the same way that working on vacation is bad for team morale and employee productivity.

I cannot do it always, but I try as I know that it will make me a better teammate, a better leader, and make Calix an even BETTER place than it already is.... and according to Glassdoor, it is a pretty great team environment (We are hiring!)