"I'll do my real work later this evening" isn't a sign of dedication. It's a sign that your team is busy, but with the wrong things.
When priorities are unclear, your team can get overwhelmed by context switching and feel the need to "catch up" later.
Last week, I had the pleasure of joining a panel on Context Switching hosted by
@TheLeadDev and
@incident_io
These were some of the key takeaways:
1) As a senior IC or manager, lead by example to demonstrate how to set boundaries at work with things like response time in slack and when you take meetings.
2) Prioritize knowledge sharing on your team, especially when it comes to topics that are likely to come up in on-call. Reward collaboration over independent projects in promotions. Run chaos days and have devs less familiar with the infra code make changes there.
3) Set expectations around on-call so that the team knows that when they're on-call, there aren't expectations of doing a whole lot else. Being on-call lets the rest of the team focus and enables you to offer the best customer experience.