I like getting down to the empirics :) Some thoughts/âempirical data on some of the suggestions. Specific to me as itâs hard for me to speak for Holden, but I would be somewhat surprised if my situation/âwork loads were way different than other folks working in EA orgs.
i) Indeed at CSH our Canada office is small enough to fit in a single home which we do to save money and travel time. Our India location does have an office, but I have found its location to have near 0 effect on staff work hours (this is tracked so we have decent data on it). This might be due to the fact that most staff seem to work a pretty set 35-40 hours in all cases.
ii) We have in fact hired a PA to manage our life operations, but I found the benefits to be pretty minimal (also via hour tracking). Sadly the between the coordination time between us managing the PA and the work they were able to accomplish without our physical presence, our total time saved was pretty limited. This was in large part due to bureaucracy type issues like banks needing to talk to the account holder that I would expect to be true for most PAâs. We do use a bunch of technological systems which mimic a lot of their work (calendly, online groceries, etc)
iii) My job (even though we are based out of India) is pretty minimal in terms of flights, so maybe I am just lucky that I always have enough work-reading to cover the time in them. Maybe this is an issue for folks that fly a lot more or have less reading intensive work tasks? I also am lucky small enough (6 feet) to work on a laptop in even an economy class seat.
iiii) I do spend a decent amount on business class laptops that are updated before they break, but not sure that technological progress is fast enough to see huge differences in this in a single year unless someone is doing pretty computer intensive tasks like video editing.
Regarding any of these or other ideas I would be really interested in seeing any empirical data on them improving work hours as I have found this historically pretty hard to find and hard to create in my personal data. Even data on overall time trades off 1:1 vs 1:3 etc or data on really huge amounts of well time tracked hours worked by people using systems like these would be super handy.
Joey, am I right in thinking your donât count work expenses in your estimate?
Your circumstances seem quite unusual for a couple of reason.
It seems you work in your home, and so donât commute to work. Most people donât get to move their office to suit their preferences. In general, if your office is in a city, you either pay to commute to it, or youâd pay more rent if you move closer, both of which are more expensive than your set up. (You could cycle, but youâd expect to you pay more to live within cycling distance).
Iâd also be curious to know how you spend as part of your work and whether you count those trips in your budget or class them as business expenses. Just to push the point, if I spent 52 weeks of the year on business travel I claimed from my organisation, my personal expenditure would be tiny. I think thereâs also something in that travelling abroad for work will be a partial replacement for holidays (at the least, itâs a change of scenery), which I donât see in your budget either.
Maybe the other thing is youâre living with a partner. This isnât something one can guarantee, and if you doubled your rent, utilities and internet numbers (leaving aside, for the moment, the normal costs of dating!), because Iâm assuming you split those, that adds $3300 dollars-ish, around an extra third, to your total.
I think what youâre doing is admirable, but my concern is that because you run your own organisation and live with a partner, which not all EAs can or will do, youâre able to reduce your own expenditure in ways that are hard to recreate. Hence Iâm not sure how practical a standard this is, even leaving aside all the concerns you might be able to spend more to save time.
It depends on the work expense. I would guess I generally err on the side of covering it under personal expense (e.g. using our home as an office space we do not get compensation for, or the free food we provide in Van comes out of our personal budget.). But we do put some things under it (e.g. my next flight to India will indeed be under work costs). I think in general our work expenses budget wise follow a similar pattern of lower cost than comparable organizations, so I do not feel my personal budget is offset by it any more so than the average EA org/âearning to give job, probably a little less.
Itâs true I have no specific budget for travel (although this would go under âother spendingâ). I generally find there are less money and time consuming ways to maximize novelty and life satisfaction. I wish I could count my trips to India as holiday travel and I guess they are novel. Overall though the locations we are going to (low income cities in north India) would not count as a vacation for most people. Certainly that is the way I feel, although I can imagine other people enjoying travel as a whole more than I do.
I definitely think youâre right itâs hard to cross-apply any specific rule, and there are things that could pull in both directions (I do think living with a partner makes this possible where it would otherwise not be). Of course there are other things that would pull in the opposite direction (there are cities cheaper than Vancouver for example). As mentioned in first comment, this was the number we felt we could both be comfortable and optimally effective at. If it was different circumstances we would have picked a different number.
We do not think we are so atypical in terms of skills and life circumstances in the EA movement that some EAs wouldnât benefit from this post. Of course we believe that many people will have different life circumstances that prevent it, but there are also many who could do something more like this. Many people cannot donate 10%, but I still think itâs very worthwhile to talk about and I expect many people that hear about folks donating 10% increase their net donations. I think the same applies to stronger commitments (e.g. 50% or more).
I like getting down to the empirics :) Some thoughts/âempirical data on some of the suggestions. Specific to me as itâs hard for me to speak for Holden, but I would be somewhat surprised if my situation/âwork loads were way different than other folks working in EA orgs.
i) Indeed at CSH our Canada office is small enough to fit in a single home which we do to save money and travel time. Our India location does have an office, but I have found its location to have near 0 effect on staff work hours (this is tracked so we have decent data on it). This might be due to the fact that most staff seem to work a pretty set 35-40 hours in all cases.
ii) We have in fact hired a PA to manage our life operations, but I found the benefits to be pretty minimal (also via hour tracking). Sadly the between the coordination time between us managing the PA and the work they were able to accomplish without our physical presence, our total time saved was pretty limited. This was in large part due to bureaucracy type issues like banks needing to talk to the account holder that I would expect to be true for most PAâs. We do use a bunch of technological systems which mimic a lot of their work (calendly, online groceries, etc)
iii) My job (even though we are based out of India) is pretty minimal in terms of flights, so maybe I am just lucky that I always have enough work-reading to cover the time in them. Maybe this is an issue for folks that fly a lot more or have less reading intensive work tasks? I also am lucky small enough (6 feet) to work on a laptop in even an economy class seat.
iiii) I do spend a decent amount on business class laptops that are updated before they break, but not sure that technological progress is fast enough to see huge differences in this in a single year unless someone is doing pretty computer intensive tasks like video editing.
Regarding any of these or other ideas I would be really interested in seeing any empirical data on them improving work hours as I have found this historically pretty hard to find and hard to create in my personal data. Even data on overall time trades off 1:1 vs 1:3 etc or data on really huge amounts of well time tracked hours worked by people using systems like these would be super handy.
Joey, am I right in thinking your donât count work expenses in your estimate?
Your circumstances seem quite unusual for a couple of reason.
It seems you work in your home, and so donât commute to work. Most people donât get to move their office to suit their preferences. In general, if your office is in a city, you either pay to commute to it, or youâd pay more rent if you move closer, both of which are more expensive than your set up. (You could cycle, but youâd expect to you pay more to live within cycling distance).
Iâd also be curious to know how you spend as part of your work and whether you count those trips in your budget or class them as business expenses. Just to push the point, if I spent 52 weeks of the year on business travel I claimed from my organisation, my personal expenditure would be tiny. I think thereâs also something in that travelling abroad for work will be a partial replacement for holidays (at the least, itâs a change of scenery), which I donât see in your budget either.
Maybe the other thing is youâre living with a partner. This isnât something one can guarantee, and if you doubled your rent, utilities and internet numbers (leaving aside, for the moment, the normal costs of dating!), because Iâm assuming you split those, that adds $3300 dollars-ish, around an extra third, to your total.
I think what youâre doing is admirable, but my concern is that because you run your own organisation and live with a partner, which not all EAs can or will do, youâre able to reduce your own expenditure in ways that are hard to recreate. Hence Iâm not sure how practical a standard this is, even leaving aside all the concerns you might be able to spend more to save time.
It depends on the work expense. I would guess I generally err on the side of covering it under personal expense (e.g. using our home as an office space we do not get compensation for, or the free food we provide in Van comes out of our personal budget.). But we do put some things under it (e.g. my next flight to India will indeed be under work costs). I think in general our work expenses budget wise follow a similar pattern of lower cost than comparable organizations, so I do not feel my personal budget is offset by it any more so than the average EA org/âearning to give job, probably a little less.
Itâs true I have no specific budget for travel (although this would go under âother spendingâ). I generally find there are less money and time consuming ways to maximize novelty and life satisfaction. I wish I could count my trips to India as holiday travel and I guess they are novel. Overall though the locations we are going to (low income cities in north India) would not count as a vacation for most people. Certainly that is the way I feel, although I can imagine other people enjoying travel as a whole more than I do.
I definitely think youâre right itâs hard to cross-apply any specific rule, and there are things that could pull in both directions (I do think living with a partner makes this possible where it would otherwise not be). Of course there are other things that would pull in the opposite direction (there are cities cheaper than Vancouver for example). As mentioned in first comment, this was the number we felt we could both be comfortable and optimally effective at. If it was different circumstances we would have picked a different number.
We do not think we are so atypical in terms of skills and life circumstances in the EA movement that some EAs wouldnât benefit from this post. Of course we believe that many people will have different life circumstances that prevent it, but there are also many who could do something more like this. Many people cannot donate 10%, but I still think itâs very worthwhile to talk about and I expect many people that hear about folks donating 10% increase their net donations. I think the same applies to stronger commitments (e.g. 50% or more).