I recently read a fantastic piece by Dr. Jim Harter at Harvard Business Review. Its title asks a simple question: “Should Employers Ban Email After Work Hours?” The whole article is a great read, one of the best I’ve seen on email and work productivity, but one thing in particular caught my interest: the author’s discussion of what he calls the “evaluating self” vs. the “experiencing self”. I think this is a great way to look at how we feel not only about email, but about work/life balance in general.
Basically, when researchers at Gallup (where Harter is a Chief Scientist) asked people about the ability to use new technology in order to work remotely, “more than three-quarters of full-time workers [told] Gallup that the ability to use mobile technology outside normal working hours [was] a somewhat to very positive development.”
There you have it: increased ability to work remotely=good. Right? Well, not necessarily. Because Gallup also found that checking email frequently outside of work hours correlated positively with reports of increased stress levels. In other words, working remotely=more stress=bad.
So, which is it? Does working remotely give you a sense of freedom and make you happier, or increase your anxiety and make you feel stressed?
You vs. You
It depends on which “you” you ask. The idea of the “experiencing self” vs. the “evaluating self” (also commonly called “the remembering self”) is that we have two basic modes for understanding the world around us and our place in it: how we feel when we look back on a certain period of our life—a month, a year, or a decade—and as we project or plan into the future (the evaluating self), and how we are feeling at any given moment as we move through the day (the experiencing self).
One example: if you’ve recently been promoted at work to a position with greater responsibilities and a higher salary, your evaluating self will report feeling positive about this, because it is looking at the story of your life on a path where moving upward in your career is definitely a good thing.
However, if you are asked to report on your actual perceived happiness on a day-to-day basis, it is your experiencing self that will do the answering, and you may well find that the stress you feel is much greater than what you felt before the promotion, while the increased salary has not led to a commensurate addition to happiness or peace of mind. So your evaluating self will see the promotion as a good thing, while your experiencing self will not.
When it comes to out-of-work emails, here’s Harter on the evaluating self vs. the experiencing self:
The “evaluating self” probably says life is better because we have the flexibility to check email when we want, while the “experiencing self” feels the stress associated with the extra work, pressure, or guilt during our after-hours working time.”
A Balancing Act
The key then, isn’t to decide which of these selves is “right”, but instead to acknowledge that even within ourselves, we have competing wants and perspectives. Any course you choose should seek to find a balance between these competing “yous”—after all, they share the same brain and the same body.
If we listen only to the evaluating self and ignore the experiencing self, we run the risk of working like maniacs and eventually burning ourselves out. If we instead favor the experiencing self over the evaluating self, we may time and time again decide that eating Cheetos and watching Netflix sounds a lot better than getting to the gym or finishing that work email.
Timyo’s aim is to be one tool that aids in this balance. By making sending and receiving emails a less stressful experience, Timyo reduces the burden on the experiencing self, which in turn enhances the long-term well-being reflected upon by the evaluating self.
Ultimately, it is by paying attention to both the short-term happiness of the experiencing self and the long-term satisfaction of the evaluating self that we find ourselves being truly happy. If you use both of these perspectives to look at and fine-tune your work habits and the way you use email, you’ll be a lot happier for it.
Both of you.
