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My husband and I have very different working styles. He tends to work intensely during business hours to the allocated finishing time, and then happily switches his computer off, trying very hard to not open it until the next working day begins.
I, however, am the complete opposite. I take my time to chew over work tasks, and my computer usually never stays closed for more than a few hours before I crack it open to tinker away on a different project.
The rise in working from home has benefited some types of workers more than others.Credit: iStock
During the ‘in-between’ moments of life, I check emails, reply as needed, and then log back on to chip away slowly at whatever I’m working on. In short, we both approach how we work from opposite angles.
Researchers who study these common behaviours have identified there are broadly two types of people when it comes to managing work and non-work activities. Knowing which type you are (as well as those close to you) can have a profound effect on how you think about your job and your life.
Christena Nippert-Eng is a sociologist and professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington in the US, and has studied how people create rigid boundaries, or not, between their work and personal lives. She classifies almost all of us into two types of workers: segmenters and integrators.
My husband is a segmenter. They are employees who can draw clear, distinct lines between their work and everything else outside it. Segmenters can shut off the work part of their brain the moment they finish for the day, and then concentrate almost fully on the rest of their life outside their job.
The jury is still out on whether being a segmenter or integrator is better for your long-term wellbeing.
I am more of an integrator. We have more fluid lines between work and life, where unfinished jobs tend to loom constantly in the background as we go about other things. One sure sign of an integrator is that we find ourselves checking work emails at all hours of the night and weekends. And yes, even on holidays. This doesn’t mean that our job takes over our lives all the time, just that it’s integrated into many aspects of it.
Which type of worker are you? Well, first up, it’s more likely that you’re an integrator. When Google wanted to find out how these findings applied to a sample of 4000 of their workforce, they discovered that about two-thirds of people identified as integrators, with just 31 per cent considered themselves as segmenters.