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Handed off a crisis on the beach
Chelsea Ryckis had taken a couple of days off while visiting a global benefits client in Italy, which is rare for her. The email was about a new incoming client and a problem that came from the previous representative, something her team could not have controlled. She told herself not to read it, then read it. Handling hard conversations with finesse is one of her strengths, and she knew she could convince everyone involved that it was manageable and that they would get through it together.
She was ready to get up, go back to the room, and handle it. Her husband told her not to do it and to give it to someone on the team, so she did. That person took it about 90 percent of the way, better than she had expected. The last 10 percent came back the next day as an urgent call, and she jumped on an hour-long call that settled it.
Because of the handoff, she kept the whole afternoon on the beach with her husband. She would make the same choice again, even though the handoff did not resolve the problem on its own.
Why does the last 10 percent take longest?
Engineers call this the ninety-ninety rule. It is credited to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs, who joked that the first 90 percent of the code takes the first 90 percent of the time and the remaining 10 percent takes the other 90 percent. The joke adds up to 180 percent of the planned schedule. Jon Bentley popularized the line in his 1985 Programming Pearls column in Communications of the ACM.
Why does checking work email affect time off?
Psychologist Sabine Sonnentag has studied psychological detachment, the sense of being mentally away from work during time off. In her research, employees who reported more detachment in the evenings and on weekends reported better recovery and less exhaustion afterward. Detachment depends on mental distance, so being physically away from the office does not guarantee it. In the framework she developed with Charlotte Fritz, detachment is one of four recovery experiences, alongside relaxation, mastery, and control.
Why does a small problem feel so urgent?
Researchers Meng Zhu, Yang Yang, and Christopher Hsee named the mere urgency effect in a 2018 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research. Participants often chose tasks with short deadlines and small payoffs over tasks with longer deadlines and larger payoffs. This happened even when the urgent option was objectively the worse choice.
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