On Call
Is attention all you need?
With a newborn baby, you spend a lot of time on call. Which is to say, no matter what you’re doing, you’re ready to be doing something else soon. You might be reading a book with baby snoozing on your lap, but at any moment she could wake up and start fussing, or need her diaper changed, or whatever. Further, your success at the activity of “look after baby” is directly proportional to how ready you are to switch gears. If you catch the first tiny signs of discomfort, you can figure out what’s wrong before she’s actively upset. But if you get in the zone doing anything else, and take the baby’s peace for granted, you’ll both end up confused and upset.
Many years ago, I was a test prep tutor. A lot of test prep tutoring was active work; I sat with a student and explained stuff to them. But even more of it was waiting patiently while the student tried to figure something out.1 Here, too, there was downtime. With my fresh, 22-year-old brain I played number and word games in my head, while students read SAT passages. Again, though, it was good to pay attention. If the student’s mind was obviously wandering, or if I saw them make a mistake early in a math problem, I had to decide whether to intervene.
Maybe the purest expression of being on call was AIM in middle school. I’d just be sitting there, sometimes for several minutes, with no messages coming in. But the second a message came in, I wanted to respond.2
What does it mean to be on call? Basically, that your attention is loaned to you, but may come due at any moment. This is a strange state for a human brain to be in. And now, with grandma holding the baby in another room and my attention fully my own, I’m pondering that state.
The Good
The nice thing about being on call is flexibility. You often can’t do literally whatever you want - an after-hours dentist on call has to notice their phone ringing, someone watching a sleeping baby can’t be noisy, and a test prep tutor can’t mutter various numbers under their breath when their student is practicing the SAT reading section. But you can do plenty. Most notably, you can relax.
Indeed, the benefits of being on call have a lot to do with where. Being on call with a work from home job means you can do whatever you’d normally do at home. Being on call at a hospital is a lot less pleasant, but you can hang out in the break room or pace the halls.
There are entire genres of activity that are practically built for being on call. I almost never do Wordle, for example, but with a baby on me, sure, sounds fun.
The Bad
A weird fact about being on call: it’s exhausting. It doesn’t seem like it should be; you’re literally just chilling and doing whatever you want. But it is. I think it’s exhausting for the same reason a free-weights bench press is a lot harder than moving the same weight on a Smith machine: you have to stabilize.
If you’re working on a task, there’s inherent momentum. Changing a diaper, going over a math problem with a high schooler, whatever. The fact that you’re doing it keeps you doing it. But when you’re on call, you have to balance your attention between whatever you’re doing to kill time, and whatever you’re on call for. Too much attention on what you’re doing, and you might miss the actual important thing you’re waiting on. But too much attention on the act of waiting, and it’s impossible to enjoy yourself. So the mind is forced to wander and return in quick intervals.
I think this is a lot of the challenge of cushy-seeming office jobs. It’s great to have the freedom and trust to manage your own time. But once you do, you’re always on the hook for both your actual work and making sure you do it. I’m more exhausted after a day of self-directed programming than I ever was after teaching a 3-hour GRE class. The former I have to keep myself on task. The latter I just had to show up.
The Ugly
I’m okay with the bargain of being on call a lot. It’d be awful to be on call all the time; the value of unplugging is very high. But I enjoy going about my business with a sleeping baby on my lap, or having various jobs where I’ve tried to respond to Slack messages within a few minutes of getting them. There is one aspect of being on call, though, that I really hate: the guilt.
In the abstract, I understand that being on call is in some ways difficult. Indeed, I think a lot of people really struggle with open-ended work and being ready for action at a moment’s notice. It really is a challenge. And yet, it’s almost impossible for me to believe that viscerally. When I spend a day mostly just being on call and relaxing, I feel lazy. And worse, if I do actually try to “do things” in an on call period, and neglect the thing I was on call for, I feel negligent. The freedom of being on call creates a constant specter of opportunity cost, which is demoralizing and exhausting.
The good news is, I think this feeling is optional. In fact, the arguments in this post are me trying to get out of it. To tell myself that sure, I’m tired after a day of playing video games with a baby on my lap,3 with only occasional breaks to change her diapers, but that that’s okay. I do think it’s wise to beware of excessive affirmations about laziness; sometimes the feeling of “gosh, I’m not achieving enough” is galvanizing and useful. But being on call is a real thing, so I think it’s okay to lower your productivity standards when you’re often in that state.
Sure, you could advise that they do some practice tests at home, such that you could go over them together. With very few exceptions, they didn’t.
I count this impulse among my greatest professional skills; 13-year-old me would be tickled.
Not just my lap! My wife’s just as often and indeed actually more, since only she can feed her. Also helpful visiting relatives.