This Indian Startup Has ‘Killed All Work-Related Chats Post 6pm and Holidays’

Zerodha, a Bengaluru-based financial services company, has officially put a stop to all work-related charts after 6pm everyday and throughout entire day on holidays. Several companies and employers have over the past years acknowledged that working for long hours may take a huge toll on their employees’ mental health and productivity. And, therefore, they have also taken steps to address the matter in their own ways. While some have prioritised the mental health of their employees, others have taken measures to ensure nobody has to work for more than their duty hours. Zerodha founder and CEO Nithin Kamath, too, has taken note of the issue and decided to put an end to work-related conversations after office hours.

Tweeting about the same on May 6, Kamath wrote, “At Zerodha, we have just killed all work-related chats post 6pm and holidays. Also, trying to get as many conversations to be asynchronous, moving them from chat to our internal instance of @discourse.” He ended the tweet stating that he was curious if this would help reduce the feeling of burnout.

In another tweet, referring to a discussion on startup accelerator platform Y Combinator, Kamath said, “Apparently, multitasking hurts performance and may even damage the brain. Being part of multiple discussions on different topics in different chat groups simultaneously has gone up exponentially post WFH.”

User Shakaijin wrote on Y Combinator that he had noticed the impact of multitasking on himself and now he was actively taking steps to avoid it. The user initially thought multitasking would increase his efficiency by filling the gaps of downtime in certain tasks, “but it soon turned me into a person incapable of focusing on anything deeply,” Shakaijin said.

The user added, “One day, I noticed that I was unable to read a book the same way I did as a child (cover to cover in one sitting for example), and it shocked me. I now have a rule that I do one thing only, and start other tasks only when the previous task has been finished. This applies to both productive work (learning, programming etc.) and entertainment (YouTube, books etc.).”

Another user, Hobberscotch, an engineer by profession, talked about facing a similar issue at work. “I am a data engineer and while writing new scripts to pull data, the testing process sometimes involves waiting 15 mins to an hour (or more) for all the data to pull. Sometimes I’ll start a new task in the middle of the pull or, if I expect it’ll only be a few minutes, I’ll flip out my phone. But once the data is finished pulling, I’ll then need to jump back and validate it one last time,” the user wrote.

Sarath (@sarat), a Twitter user who is an engineer by profession, said they had been following similar protocols since 2019. “Less slack, less meetings, long form of commutation (basecamp). Uses zoom/calls as appropriate — faster than chatting. Choose core hours, and ensure overlaps,” the user wrote.

“It’s a fantastic move. It’s this thinking that makes you a unicorn. Everyone’s too fixated with long hours and constantly being engaged in work forgetting the long-term toll it takes for the short-term results. Just like investment, this will help in the long term,” wrote another user, Kushal (@Kushal_sh).

Here are some more reactions to Kamath’s decision:

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