Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a tech worker in the Bay Area? I’ve been a professional organizer in San Francisco for over a decade, and a lot of my clients work in tech. That means that I’ve been inside the homes of more tech workers than most people, and I’ve gotten more familiar with their daily lives, routines, and stressors than probably anyone else!
As a result of all that experience, I’ve noticed some through lines among households where the adults are working in tech. It’s called a bubble in the press and it absolutely is - reality is distorted in some very interesting ways both helpful and hurtful. But I hope that by letting you inside this bubble for a quick peek, you’ll realize that Bay Area tech workers are humans just like you: people trying to do their best and create loving homes.
If you’re a tech worker, you may not even have realized that any of these through lines apply to you, but I encourage you to read on and let me know if I’m getting it right!
Here we go: the top three things I’ve noticed about organizing for tech workers in the Bay Area.
1) The swag they get is out of control.
Tech workers get company swag in enormous quantity. Patagonia may have halted the logo quilted vest train, but people are still getting free t-shirts, hoodies, backpacks, messenger bags, water bottles, coffee mugs, to-go cups, cocktail glasses, trophies… the list goes on and on. Don’t forget, many people who work in tech switch companies every couple of years, so they have multiple rounds of this kind of stuff that they’ve acquired. And of course, they also go to conferences where the swag is plentiful, so add that in as well. It’s a truly impressive amount of stuff, more than any human or family could ever use, and it’s a real contributor to clutter!
(Side note: if any tech leaders are reading this, I think you can pull back on the swag. It’s literally going to waste. I can’t tell you how many of your logo items my team is taking to the Goodwill! Maybe you could pitch it as an environmentally friendly initiative? And it also saves you money? Just saying…)
2) They are used to everything around them happening efficiently at a very high level.
Tech workers use the newest, best, most automated software at work. Even if they’re not engineers, they are used to clearly defined systems and well documented processes that get things done quickly and easily to a very high standard. They automate and use AI for anything they can at work, and they bring this mentality home to deal with their email, to-do lists, and calendars.
It’s truly amazing how productive tech workers can be. But all of that is in the digital world, while their home is very much a physical world. The efficient, automatic mentality breaks down when we have to use human hands to physically move things around. I always have to ask one specific question of tech workers when I set up an organizing system: who is the human being who is going to execute this system?
When it comes to objects and organizing them, a human being has to be the one to do the steps in the organizing system. It doesn’t have to be the client I’m talking to, but they do need to identify which human or humans it’s going to be. Is it you? Is it your spouse? Is it your child? Is it your housekeeper? Is it some other human you can hire? if you don’t know who is responsible for maintaining an organizing system, that system is going to fall apart really fast and the clutter will take over.
(Side note: this is how women end up doing most homekeeping tasks even when they work the same number of hours as their male partners. In a vacuum of responsibility at home, we default to women. I don’t like that our world works this way, and I wish it were different, but it’s the truth and I’ve seen it play out time and time again in clients’ homes.)
3) They have so little free time.
It’s well known that people in tech are making an incredible amount of money, especially in AI. I have plenty of clients who grew up as immigrants or working or middle class, went to college on scholarship, and now find themselves able to buy a multimillion dollar house. From the outside, it can look like they won the lottery!
However, there’s a dark side. That money comes at a cost, and that cost is that the companies own these peoples’ time and that’s considered normal. You might imagine that they put in a long work day just like you do, and that’s true, but that’s not the full extent of it. Even after they get home, they’re expected to be available to answer calls and emails into the night. If a project gets assigned at 4pm and is due the next day they have to figure out a way to get it done. When their boss’ boss feels like calling a meeting for a Sunday morning at 8am (true story) they can’t say no. Psychologically as well as temporally, most tech workers above the entry level are never off.
When your work owns you like this, it’s really hard to keep a home organized. You’re constantly in survival mode. Every second that you’re not working is spent feeding yourself and your kids, making sure bills get paid and homework gets done, and maybe you can fit in some actual quality time with your kids and oh, I don’t know, maybe you can grab 20 minutes to exercise? This is not a lifestyle that lends itself to the regular tidying routines and periodic decluttering sessions that keep a home looking good and working smoothly.
And in order to just keep up, tech workers order as much as they can for delivery because they literally don’t have time to run errands. This means a constant influx of Amazon, Instacart, and Doordash orders, which means lots of boxes, which means more clutter.
I hope these three points about the lifestyle of working in tech have shown you that everyone has their own challenges with getting organized, even when it looks from the outside like they have it made! And I hope that those of you who are in tech can give yourselves some grace and understand that the challenges you’re facing are real.
Did any of these points surprise you? Do they track with what you’ve experienced while working in tech? I’d love to know what you think and if you have anything to add!
LMW
