Which Type Of Worker Are You?

There are two ways of thinking about work and life, and knowing which one you are can be incredible freeing.

Every week I write a column on work for Australia’s largest media company, and I have developed a system to do it that works for me.

I let several ideas percolate in my head for a few days before assembling them into a rough collection of thoughts every Monday. I consider this my very loose first draft, and it’s a pretty rough word salad of what I’m trying to say.

The next day I re-open that draft with fresh(ish) eyes and rewrite, tighten and massage it over several hours into 700 brisk words that gets published every Friday and Saturday in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times and WA Today.

However I do have one final tradition before I send it off to my editor. I read the entire thing, out loud, to my husband. It allows me to iron out any remaining clunks in the copy, as well as ensuring the message is clear and punchy to someone hearing it for the first time. The weeks that we are apart I often WhatsApp him and read it down the phone line. It really helps to hear the words out loud.

I love a deadline, and the process of refining a jumbled mess of thoughts into a coherent argument every week is a very satisfying intellectual challenge.

I think of each column like a mini experiment, sharing it on my Instagram and LinkedIn profiles to see which topics connect with people, and which don’t. I also love reading the hundreds of commenters on the SMH and Age website who often give me new insights and angles into the topics that I hadn’t considered before.

So this week I’m going to build on a recent column I wrote a few months ago that really seemed to connect with readers and commenters, giving you some more info on the topic, and making it super actionable given the more space I have here in OUTLET

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One Useful Thing for September 2024: Segmenters vs Integrators

This is one of the most enlightening ways of thinking about how you work, and it can genuinely help you approach it in a different way.

Researchers like Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist and professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington in the US, have studied how people create rigid boundaries, or not, between their work and personal lives. She classifies us into two types of workers: segmenters and integrators.

Segmenters are those who can draw clear, distinct lines between their work and everything else outside it. They 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. A study from Google looking at 4000 of their employees found around one-third of people considered themselves segmenters.

The other types of workers are integrators. They have more fluid lines between work and life, where unfinished jobs tend to loom constantly in the background as they go about other things. One sign of an integrator is that they find ourselves checking work emails at all hours of the night and weekends. And yes, even on holidays. This doesn’t mean that your job takes over your lives all the time, just that it’s integrated into many aspects of it. Around two-thirds of people are integrators.

Which type of worker are you?

Take this little quiz to determine which of the camps you most identify with:

1. What calendars do you use to keep yourself organised?

   a) A work calendar and a separate home calendar

   b) One calendar that combines them both

2. Do you find it difficult to tell where your work life ends and your non-work life begins?

   a) No

   b) Yes

3. Do you look at your work email on weekends?

   a) No

   b) Yes

4. When you’re holidays, do you find it easy to switch off from thinking about work?

   a) Yes

   b) No

5. Do you usually leave your work laptop at the office over a weekend?

   a) Yes

   b) No

Now, add up how many times you answered a) and b) - yes, this is bascially a Cosmo quiz! If you answered a) more times, then it’s likely you are a segmenter. If you answer with b), then you’re likely an integrator.

Which type of worker is better?

Both have their own positives and negatives.

Many us want to figure out how to work less and live more, something that people who can easily segment work from life have trained themselves to be better at. Conversely, integrators can generally more flexibly fit work tasks around parts of their lives that aren’t always as malleable, like childcare or other responsibilities.

It’s hard to change fully from one to each other, but you can try to learn from the other about how to take some qualities and adapt them to your working style.

Why is it important to know which type of worker you are?

Knowledge is power, and having awareness can help you to stop beating yourself up. If you’re an integrator, you should know the good parts (flexibility) and the bad parts (overwork). If you’re a segmenter, you can better recognise the good parts (boundaries) and the bad parts (inflexibility). That way you can recognise the signs and lean in, and out, when they appear that best suits what type of worker you are.

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I’m writing this on a plane back to Spain from Australia. I spent a few weeks in the country in the lead up to Independents Day, the big annual event for the Digital Publishers Alliance that I proudly Chair. It reminded me of the power of community, and how much energy we can get when people come together for a greater good. It’s genuinely filled up my cup.

The next focus for me is launching my book, Work Backwards, into the UK and US in a few months time. It will be published on November 7, and I would love you to please forward this onto your friends, colleagues and relatives to pre-order it worldwide. You can pre-order it in the UK and Europe here, and pre-order it in the US here. And a reminder that it’s available to buy, read and listen to right now in Australia and New Zealand here.

Until next month,

Tim