Workaholic for a boss

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work with a woman who’s up and working by 4AM. She’ll take 3 flights instead of 1 to save $100. Why have a single hotel room for one person when two or three people can share? Why send a simple email when you can Teams, text, call, slack, and text again in a 3 minute period? She’s an insane workaholic who’s pennywise and pound foolish. She’s a decent person with a family but never stops working.

Thankfully she is not my boss!

I don't want to sound sexist, but workaholic women are an extreme pain to deal with. I worked with 2 women who were workaholic and worse experience of my life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh. She sounds incredibly undisciplined. I work a lot in the evenings and on the weekends. I guess you might say I’m a workaholic. What I’ve learned to do, which your boss would be wise to do, is to use delay delivery with my emails. I do not want any employee thinking they are expected to work outside of the workday simply because they got an email from me at 8pm. They’re welcome to do that on their own.

As for an 11:30-3pm meeting, please speak up. Say, “I see this is during lunch time. Are you providing lunch for us, or are we taking a break during the meeting?”

I would be floored if someone said that to me. Can't grown adults figure out how to eat food around their daily itinerary?

agreed. this would be a sign of an incompetent.

No, the incompetent person is the one scheduling a meeting from 11-3 with no plan for lunch on the agenda.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At a new job and my boss is a workaholic. Shes in her 40s married with 2 kids. She sends emails at all hours even on the weekends. Today we are all in a meeting from 11:30 to 3! Guess we don’t need lunch

It's crazy that she does not use (or know how to use) email scheduling tools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work with a woman who’s up and working by 4AM. She’ll take 3 flights instead of 1 to save $100. Why have a single hotel room for one person when two or three people can share? Why send a simple email when you can Teams, text, call, slack, and text again in a 3 minute period? She’s an insane workaholic who’s pennywise and pound foolish. She’s a decent person with a family but never stops working.

Thankfully she is not my boss!

I would not count what she's doing as real work. She is merely keeping busy by adding additional tasks for herself. I worked with someone like that. She had little to do so would spend an extraordinary amount of time writing an email.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I had a boss like this. It was horrible. she sent emails at all hours of the night was incredibly inefficient and disorganized. She made her emergencies everybody's emergency.

She would sometimes call a meeting at 4 o'clock in the afternoon with the intent of meeting a deadline the next day, which meant all hands on deck, but we would be working till 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Unplanned on our side because we did not know that she had this deadline looming.
Anyway, I left the company and I heard through the grapevine that pretty much the entire team left and then she was demoted.

It's so annoying so many of you had to leave before the boss was demoted. Someone above her should have seen the whole picture sooner, but they rarely seem to do so. I had a disorganized boss like this. By coincidence--this is hard to believe, I know--three of us gave our two weeks notice on the same day. I was the last person that day to give my notice, and she was trying to persuade me to stay. Later, she told my friend and colleague that I wasn't working out. LOL. I disconnected from her on LinkedIn, but she keeps sending me connection requests. LOL

Later, the whole company went under, and my boss was let go. Go figure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have an unpaid lunch break in there or something?

I've been working for 18 years and have never had a lunch break so it's never been on my radar and I could accidentally be that boss I guess.

I also send emails at weird times. As a working single mom, if I can't sleep at 3am I might as well play catch up. However, I do literally have my email signature saying "Wellbeing Notice: Receiving this email outside of normal working hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you."

Good grief - it's almost 2026 -- haven't you figured out how to schedule delivery of an email for the following morning?

The con of delaying delivery is that if other people’s emails on the same topic come in in the interim, your email could look like a confusing non-sequitur or be OBE. People may wonder whether you or not you though the other info was relevant

Well yes, that's obvious - scheduling is not going to be a universal solution or applicable in every instance but in many(most?) cases it is - so use it when it is.

In the cases where many folks are on the to/cc offering input on a time sensitive matter, don't use scheduling and drop the wellbing verbiage since it would seem to be no longer relevant. Pretty simple.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At a new job and my boss is a workaholic. Shes in her 40s married with 2 kids. She sends emails at all hours even on the weekends. Today we are all in a meeting from 11:30 to 3! Guess we don’t need lunch

My boss lives an hour away from the office without traffic. We’ve been back in person five days a week since early 2021. I’m technically a 9-5 employee but I’m in the office by 7:45, and I leave around 5:30. He’s there when I arrive in the morning AND when I leave in the evening. Luckily he doesn’t expect people to stay that long.

[Anonymous]

My reports probably consider me a workaholic because I check and respond to emails after hours. Clients expect quick response times, and our admin staff can be slow so better to forward tasks asap, but I also send things to everyone related to the work when I see it. Meanwhile, the mid level staff probably gets annoyed when I can’t review the client work they send to me at 5 pm that’s due that day, so it’s then late and they look bad. So to summarize they don’t want me to send them emails after hours but they want me to spend hours reviewing things every few days at night (x multiple people). Got it!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with a woman who’s up and working by 4AM. She’ll take 3 flights instead of 1 to save $100. Why have a single hotel room for one person when two or three people can share? Why send a simple email when you can Teams, text, call, slack, and text again in a 3 minute period? She’s an insane workaholic who’s pennywise and pound foolish. She’s a decent person with a family but never stops working.

Thankfully she is not my boss!

I would not count what she's doing as real work. She is merely keeping busy by adding additional tasks for herself. I worked with someone like that. She had little to do so would spend an extraordinary amount of time writing an email.

Married with kids, she sounds depressing. Guarantee her husband is cheating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have an unpaid lunch break in there or something?

I've been working for 18 years and have never had a lunch break so it's never been on my radar and I could accidentally be that boss I guess.

I also send emails at weird times. As a working single mom, if I can't sleep at 3am I might as well play catch up. However, I do literally have my email signature saying "Wellbeing Notice: Receiving this email outside of normal working hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you."

OMG! I love your Wellbeing Notice! Well done!

I don't. It seems a bit over the top. I already know I'm not responding outside of business hours.

NP. This kind of notice is super common in my industry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have an unpaid lunch break in there or something?

I've been working for 18 years and have never had a lunch break so it's never been on my radar and I could accidentally be that boss I guess.

I also send emails at weird times. As a working single mom, if I can't sleep at 3am I might as well play catch up. However, I do literally have my email signature saying "Wellbeing Notice: Receiving this email outside of normal working hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you."

OMG! I love your Wellbeing Notice! Well done!

I don’t. Sending messages at 3am makes you look like you’re off your rocker and that you are NOT well. No “notice” is going to dispel that in my mind. I won’t be able to refrain from judging you.

Don’t you work with people around the globe?

[Anonymous]

I leave my laptop and work phone at my literal office. Your 11 pm email will wait until I show up at 9 am

[Anonymous]

I’ve worked inside companies where basically the Whole Company worked like this. Part of it was because we were multinational - so you were always waking up to a slew of emails from Europe and going to bed with a slew of emails coming in from Asia. All I can say it set your boundaries. Even inside that company men and women alike were like - as for me, I am not responding between 5:30 and 8:00 because that is family time. I will scab for an emergency before 9:00 and then everything waits until the next day. Just because your boss works like that doesn’t mean you have to. And even if pressed like ‘did you see my email last night?’ The answer is ‘no I did not but I’ll look at it first thing this morning.’ Like stop being an anxious fool about working, define your boundaries, reiterate them time and again, and you’ll be fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work with a woman who’s up and working by 4AM. She’ll take 3 flights instead of 1 to save $100. Why have a single hotel room for one person when two or three people can share? Why send a simple email when you can Teams, text, call, slack, and text again in a 3 minute period? She’s an insane workaholic who’s pennywise and pound foolish. She’s a decent person with a family but never stops working.

Thankfully she is not my boss!

I don't want to sound sexist, but workaholic women are an extreme pain to deal with. I worked with 2 women who were workaholic and worse experience of my life.

I have encountered this too and it’s awkward to talk about (and I’m an early career woman fwiw). I think some of these types have unresolved perfectionism / control issues compounded by (valid!) concerns about how women may be judged more harshly for subpar outputs.

It’s a problem. I think many of us could frankly benefit from trying to adopt a bit more of the I-Am-A-Man-Putting-in-the-Minimum-Necessary-Effort-For-A-Desired-Satisfactory-Outcome mindset. But it can be hard to figure out the floor/ceiling for this. Idk!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do you have an unpaid lunch break in there or something?

I've been working for 18 years and have never had a lunch break so it's never been on my radar and I could accidentally be that boss I guess.

I also send emails at weird times. As a working single mom, if I can't sleep at 3am I might as well play catch up. However, I do literally have my email signature saying "Wellbeing Notice: Receiving this email outside of normal working hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you."

I mean, isn’t that how email works?

I send it when I’m online, and you respond when you are online. It’s not like sending a Text or stupid Teams chat that pings/pops up instantly.