Would you work on a weekend?

Image Credit: https://cutetropolis.com/2020/05/23/cat-sits-on-laptop-computer/

In my work experience so far, in the IT/Software industry, the demands, urges, requests, rare necessities, instructions to work on a weekend are not new.

In fact, as an individual contributor, team lead and team manager, I have deliberately chosen, a couple of times, to work on weekends. I also planned a few working weekends for my teams as well. Sometimes it went well and sometimes it didn’t at all as far as the goal is concerned. Sometimes I regretted my poor planning decision that I made and sometimes everyone appreciated me and my team’s proactiveness.

I know that it is a delicate, debatable and controversial topic and I don’t want to write (as of now) a white paper on this subjective topic. So why this post? Let me tell you why.

Recently one of my friends threw the following question to the people on Twitter. 

How will you react when your manager asked you to #work on #weekends?

I usually don’t respond to questions / comments  / statements / polls on twitter where I do not have something reasonable to say. Above question, somehow, triggered an urge in me to respond to this question in a manner that I think that a handful of professionals may want to answer.

I first explicitly stated my interpretation, received an affirmation from her

One of my interpretations of this question is this…

‘How will I react if my manager asks (in the near future, in some situation, to achieve something) me to work on a / some weekend(s)?’. 

Then I went ahead and picked the words ‘React’ and ‘Ask’ (in the given order).

I stated my assumption that I was in a healthy mental, physical and emotional condition at that very moment when I first heard the ‘Ask’.

Here my final answer was…

My reaction to my manager’s action would be a state change, in my head, turning into the following questions to myself based on my relationship with my manager and how have we worked together so far.

1. At this moment, what does this ‘Ask’ look like? A request, demand, instruction or mere a question seeking a binary answer?
2. What is the context?
3. What situations might have caused this ask from my manager? Was I somehow unaware or ignorant of those situations?
4. Why didn’t I think of such a question popping up in my head before even the manager sees a need to ask?
5. Did I miss something while planning such that my manager is trying to point my attention towards by asking? 
6. What is special with the weekend? Is it contingency planning? Is it firefighting? Is it a proactive measurement? 
7. Is it necessary based on my experience and expert judgement?
8. Is it only me to whom the manager asked and if so why could it be?
9. Is this becoming a pattern and I am not happy with this at all?
10. Is this a pattern and I am happy to do this because of the monetary compensation, learning, opportunities, exposure?

Of-course, there were other factors and assumptions as well behind answering the question. All of those are not explicitly mentioned here. For example – assumptions around my already planned personal commitments on the weekend, assumptions around organizational culture and so on. But keeping in mind twitter’s space limits and my focus towards responding in a quicker and healthier way, I responded with above 10 points.

Finally, I wrote that I was thinking of law of conservation of energy to construct my response (or reaction).

 I also mentioned to her that I was thinking of ‘Law of conservation of energy’ while I was drafting the answer.

My friend got other answers as well and I don’t see a reason to comment on those. Everyone has an opinion and point of view, like I had and I responded the way I thought I should.

Did someone ask you a similar / same question ever before? How did / would you react?