Work? It’s never ending

One of those little things I really appreciate of Ling is that she tries to make sure we go to and come back home from work together every day. Throughout the day too we keep in touch with MSN messages and SMSes. Yep, all those cute ‘kissie’, ‘pokie’ messages that you normally akin to courtship LOL.

It’s one of those little ‘couple-time’ things. In the morning trips to work, we’ll brief each other on what will be happening on our respective days at work, and on our return trips home, we’ll debrief, and she’ll also get my capsule versions of news from The Straits Times.

One thing I ask her often on our return home journeys though is whether she’s got work to do tonight, and she’ll usually reply with a heavy sigh “Ya… work is like never ending.”

This is one of those things which I’m adamant about though: work should not be brought home. For me, answering urgent work emails from home is ok, but not things like marking or lesson preparation materials outside exceptional circumstances. There’s a reason why the Ministry of Manpower has a statutory maximum of 44 working hours per week (breaks roughly down to 9 hours a day): it’s work-life harmony, a.k.a. maintaining your sanity, physical and mental well-being, and not getting exploited by your work place.

OK, so the economy isn’t doing so great now and we all have to work harder to keep our jobs. But if you’re going to work yourself to death, burn-out, go postal because you’ve not had any time to yourself, it’s not worth it then.

The earlier years of marriage were tough in this respect. I was upset to see Ling bring home tons of scripts, lesson preparation, and text-books every night. After dinner and her quick shower, she’ll be at it from 7:30 pm to 11 pm, often later, and every night.

Then there was that chain of letters and articles to the forum and mainstream media last year about how difficult being a teacher in Singapore these days, and especially in terms of workload and student discipline and administration.

What was even funnier was that those letters were invariably written not by the teachers themselves, but by their husbands and if I remember rightly, in one instance by the teacher’s parents even. Were the teachers themselves all suffering in silence, or were they under embargo not to comment? Either way, I couldn’t agree more with those letters, especially looking at what Ling has to go through.

What I remark to Ling is that if equilibrium can’t be reached between her mountain of work and a 44 hour / week cycle, then something’s deficient. Period. Either the rate of processing work is too slow or inefficient (e.g. spending too much time agonizing over an answer), or the work is excessive vis-à-vis the 44 hour cycle. If it’s the latter and it’s persistently happening, then it’s a systemic problem that the work place must address.

Still, there’s been small improvements. About a year ago Ling was at a low point trying to finish her work, and turning in at 1 am just trying to finish marking; that was the juncture when I finally got her to making resolutions to at least put aside some time on evenings for us to do things together, and leave whatever she can’t finish in school aside and save it for the next day.

So, about half the evenings in a week these days, I’ll make her put aside her work and we’ll watch TV (Star Trek Voyager which she’s addicted now to), or play a PS3 game to unwind. Not perfect yet, but it’s a step in the right direction.