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Linked – Changing the eDiscovery Burnout Blueprint: Practical Solutions to Address Failing Mental Wellness in the eDiscovery Industry
ByMike McBride October 22, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

It’s great that someone is putting it all in writing with research. Still, until the collective response to our stories about dropping out of a wedding to pop open our laptop is “that’s not acceptable,” we will have this issue. We should reconsider the tales of all-nighters, working from vacations, and extraordinary efforts to get eDiscovery work done in time. Instead of wearing them like badges of honor, we should think of them as exploitation. What else would you call the expectation that you are available to respond 24/7, and when you sacrifice much of your personal and family life to meet that expectation, you are rewarded with a 2% raise at the end of the year?

Because as long as that is the job, mental health is going to be an issue.

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Career | Mental Health

Linked – Time to Talk About Emotional Labor
ByMike McBride October 17, 2024October 16, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Words about your workplace’s great culture ring hollow when team members regularly find themselves putting up with jerks. That’s not a great culture. That’s extra emotional labor—labor that likely doesn’t come close to matching what they are paid.

We don’t talk about this in terms of emotional labor. We talk about being resilient, staying composed, etc. We don’t talk about how exhausting it is to know that every day at work, someone is likely to yell at you, let alone know that when it happens, there will be no solution to prevent it from happening again. If they take the time to complain and ask for a solution, they’ll be told it’s “just part of the job.”

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Mental Health

Linked – Here’s how to celebrate World Mental Health Day 2024
ByMike McBride October 10, 2024October 10, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’m sure there are some CEOs out there who read that and think we’re supposed to be drained and used up. That just shows how dedicated we are to our work. That ignores the fact that work is only part of our lives. They ignore the damage that does to society when we have adults who are uninvolved with their kids’ lives, disconnected from their community, uninformed about what is happening in the world, and lacking many meaningful friendships because work requires them to have nothing left to give to those endeavors.

That’s why having a workplace that accounts for those impacts on employees’ lives is so important.

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Security

Linked – China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor
ByMike McBride October 9, 2024October 9, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

I don’t know how many times security experts told law enforcement that building a “backdoor” for them to access encrypted systems would end up with that same backdoor being used by bad actors.

They didn’t care.

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Career

Linked – Vast Majority of CEOs Ready to Make Remote Workers’ Lives As Miserable As Possible
ByMike McBride October 7, 2024October 7, 2024 Reading Time: 1 minute

Remote workforces require CEOs to develop measurements to tell who is getting work done and who isn’t. Apparently, for 89% of them, that’s too hard.

Reminder: They get paid, on average, 344 times the average worker but can’t be bothered to measure productivity meaningfully.

So, to the 11% who are not planning on this behavior, I hope you find the best talent on the market because you are not limited by who can be in the office and run circles around these dinosaurs.

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Tech

My new browser of choice – ARC
ByMike McBride October 4, 2024October 10, 2024 Reading Time: 2 minutes

Simply put, I can’t log in and out of accounts all day, and I also don’t want to deal with my computer running out of memory. I spent many years walking that thin line. So, I was intrigued when I saw someone talking about a new browser they were using that was easy to use with multiple profiles and optimized for memory usage. I was skeptical but intrigued enough to give it a try.

That browser was Arc for Mac.

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