When Time Off Becomes the Subject of Workplace Surveillance
Think your boss only cares about results? Think again. Just as overwork must be invisible, time off must be justified—a phenomenon I call managed absence.
The “lifestyle chart” showed up one morning, scrawled across a five-foot whiteboard looming over the first-year analysts’ desks. A mid-level staffer had taken it upon himself to rank the so-called “lifestyles” of men and women in the investment banking firm. The message was clear: women had it easy, while men were grinding away under the weight of their workload. Samantha, who’d recently worked seventy-one straight days (often leaving the office no earlier than 3 a.m.) could only laugh at the absurdity of it. Despite the obvious disconnect from reality, the chart stayed up for weeks, a quiet assertion of who was perceived as hardworking and who wasn’t.
Workplace surveillance isn’t always about security cameras and keystroke trackers. Sometimes, it’s as simple as a whiteboard scribble reinforcing who is perceived as committed and who must continually try to prove they are. This kind of “teasing” isn’t just workplace banter – it’s a tool of social control. And as a mechanism of control, the chart reveals a deeper truth: workplaces don’t just monitor productivity; they monitor absence, tracking who steps away, when, and why – turning non-work hours into something workers must justify and manage just as carefully as their work performance.
In my last newsletter, I wrote about the hidden nature of overwork in “work smarter” cultures, revealing how professionals must manage impossible workloads while maintaining an air of effortlessness. But there’s another side to this dynamic. While presence at work demands performative ease, absence requires elaborate justification. This is what I call “managed absence”: the idea that stepping away from work now requires explicit signaling, justification, and careful preparation to ensure it is perceived as legitimate.
The Autonomy Paradox
Professional workers are often described as having greater autonomy than hourly employees, and in theory, this should grant them schedule flexibility. But in reality, their autonomy is undercut by endless deadlines, dispersed teams, and global clients, which create an expectation of constant availability. The content and quantity of work itself undermines the very autonomy it promises.
Downtime, in this context, is therefore the exception rather than the rule. Professionals I spoke with described how personal interests and hobbies weren’t necessarily discouraged but met with indifference. As Samantha put it, “No one minds if you have a hobby. It just can’t interfere with work.” But because work flows continuously from multiple directions, professionals must actively announce and defend their personal time to temporarily pause the constant barrage of deliverables.
Take Amy, a client services consultant who transitioned to a four-day workweek (and took a cut in salary to do so). “I set the expectation with my clients that I’m unavailable on Fridays. I think that’s really important,” she told me. “I don’t hide the fact that I work part-time. That sets you up for a losing situation. So, I’m just very upfront [about my schedule].”
This need to publicize absences brings personal time under the purview of collective awareness and informal accountability, making it both less of an entitlement and easier to surveil. Historically, time away from work was managed through formal categories – sick days, vacation days, and other leave policies – overseen primarily by direct supervisors. But as workplace cultures and contexts shift, time off has become subject to broader evaluation.
Companies now frame personal leave as a perk, introducing policies like “unlimited” vacation that often mask a broader erosion of labor protections in the US. As formal structures weaken and individual discretion takes on greater importance, work becomes less institutionalized and more entangled in personal relationships—a shift I detail in my forthcoming book, Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us. Consequently, time management is no longer just an operational concern; it becomes a marker of personal value. Today’s professionals must actively manage the optics of their absences not only with their bosses but also with clients and peers, preemptively signaling, justifying, and preparing for time away to ensure that it’s seen as legitimate.
Just as the lifestyle whiteboard chart quietly ranked who was grinding and who wasn’t, today’s professionals navigate a workplace where leave is not just granted but policed through performance reviews, Slack and Teams statuses, email response times, and even the subtle judgments of coworkers. What was once a back-office calculation has become a public display, where workers must actively demonstrate that their time away is warranted, appropriate, and does not indicate a lack of commitment.
Inequities in Managed Absence
This negotiation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Women, racial minorities, and workers from lower-income backgrounds are underrepresented in elite professions, and they often face greater scrutiny regarding their work ethic and dedication. At the same time, research shows that, amid inadequate support from institutions and lopsided gender arrangements in the home, these groups also disproportionately bear the burden of caregiving responsibilities.
The visibility required by managed absence brings these inequities to the forefront of workplace experience. In my research, for example, women were more likely than men to spend their time off performing care work — an activity that has long been stigmatized in elite professions, especially for women. Aware of this stigma, many professional women sought to counter negative workplace perceptions by framing caregiving as essential labor, emphasizing how it fulfills a moral obligation to others.
About her need to leave by 5 p.m. every day to relieve her childcare support, consultant Sophie told me, “I’m responsible for another human being.” Joanie, an investment banker, similarly described how she made changes to her work schedule after her working-class family impressed upon her the importance of being present for other family members. “My mom said, ‘I’m not proud of you. This isn’t the daughter I raised. These aren’t the values I instilled in you,’” she told me, explaining how she used that conversation as her rationale for taking time off.
These of service accounts invoked morality to achieve legitimacy. By framing care work as an obligation to others as opposed to a personal choice, these women signaled that their time away was not a willful rejection of work but a moral imperative that overrode personal preference. Yet this framing comes at a cost. In making personal obligations legible within professional spaces, of service accounts reinforce the idea that personal time is fundamentally distinct from—and often incompatible with—professional work. In some cases, this framing places personal and professional time on equal footing, but more often, personal responsibilities take precedence. And rather than challenging the structures that create this incompatibility, it forces those with external commitments to navigate a system that remains indifferent to their obligations.
In service accounts, by contrast, framed time away not as competing with work but as sustaining it. These explanations tended to position personal time as a functional extension of professional life, reinforcing the idea that stepping away was not an indulgence but a strategic necessity. In response to my question about what he did when he was not working, Billie, a white finance professional whose father also worked in the industry, said, “You do little things to maintain your sanity when you’re that busy.” For Billie, that meant going out for a drink with friends, no matter what time he left the office on a Friday or Saturday night. Many of his colleagues, he told me, were at the gym when they weren’t working. “It becomes kind of like a saving grace,” he explained of these activities; without some outlet, people burned out.
For those with longstanding ties and unchallenged status in elite professional culture, integrating work and personal life often came naturally. Accustomed to environments built around their perspectives and preferences, they could more easily align their time away with professional values and expectations. Whether going out for drinks, training for a marathon, or cultivating new habits and skills, their personal pursuits were readily cast as professional investments—reinforcing relationships, building perseverance, or demonstrating a commitment to continuous growth. This framing fits seamlessly into dominant workplace cultures that embrace relational and community values, so long as they ultimately serve professional performance.
Because in service accounts framed non-work activities as instrumental, they were more culturally acceptable in workplaces that prize efficiency, self-optimization, and productivity. Unlike of service accounts, which positioned personal obligations as external to work, in service accounts reinforced the idea that even time away was productive. Absence wasn’t a detour but a tool—a means of working better, longer, and with greater focus.
The need to justify time away is not just symbolic—it shapes real workplace outcomes. When women, racial minorities, and workers from lower-income backgrounds rely on explanations that are less culturally validated in their workplaces, their absences are more likely to be scrutinized, leading to greater pressure to demonstrate their commitment. To counter this scrutiny, they often intensify their hours while on the clock, working harder to preempt any doubt about their dedication.
Take Sophie: “Yesterday, I knew I needed to leave at five, and I had things to get done. People were coming over and chatting, trying to be social, and I was like, ‘No. I cannot talk to you right now. I need to do this.’ I’m on a tight schedule. When I’m here, I’m focused on work. Getting things done, planning ahead.” Because her time away was framed it ways that made it a liability, Sophie felt pressure to compensate by intensifying her hours on the clock. The result wasn’t just exhaustion—it was professional isolation. The very social ties that fuel career advancement were the first casualty of her failed struggle to justify her absence.
From Justification to a New Default
Existing research has long tied caregiver biases to workplace inequalities. My findings are valuable in pinpointing the issue: the problem isn’t necessarily the time spent not working but how that absence is accounted for. This distinction will likely become even more salient with the expansion of remote and hybrid work in professional fields. Without the natural boundary of a physical office, “absence” must be actively declared among remote workers – otherwise, they remain accountable to ongoing deadlines and expectations. But in doing so, workers must carefully shape their accounting of that time to avoid stigma.
Many professionals already frame leisure, self-care, and even rest as essential to their performance – whether it’s the executive who touts morning runs as a productivity hack, the consultant who describes vacation as a way to “recharge” for clients, or the manager who emphasizes how hobbies make them a better leader. If personal downtime can be positioned as an asset to productivity, then activities like caregiving can be framed that way, too. Parents, for instance, might present their caregiving responsibilities as a way to sharpen their leadership skills or reinforce their professional motivations—whether that means providing for a family or maintaining mental stimulation.
But while strategic framing offers an individual workaround, the structural issue remains: why must time off be justified in the first place? Instead of assuming that constant work is the default – and requiring workers to earn, explain, or negotiate their absence – let’s flip the script.
A true shift would mean treating non-working time as the baseline, not the exception. Personal time would be assumed, protected, and untethered from productivity metrics. This could include:
A right to fully disconnected time off, where workers are neither expected to be available outside working hours nor pressured to compensate for this ‘perk’ with heightened focus and motivation on the clock.
Stronger protections for all forms of leave, including personal and family-related absences, without workers needing to position them as a sacrifice or a strategic career move.
A four-day workweek as the standard, creating a more balanced split between professional and personal time.
In other words, we need a workplace culture where absence isn’t policed but protected. Because when workers are forced to justify their time off, what’s really being evaluated isn’t just their availability. It’s their worth.
*Are you interested in having me speak to your organization about this research, contact me at smosseri@gmail.com.