Bodywork at Work: Attending to Bodily Needs in Gig, Shift, and Knowledge Work

The concept of ‘bodywork´ refers to the work individuals undertake on their own bodies and the bodies of others. One aspect is attending to bodily needs, which is often overlooked in the workplace and HCI/CSCW research on work practices. Yet, this labour can be a significant barrier to work, consequential to work, and prone to spill over into other aspects of life. We present three empirical cases of bodywork: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and office-based knowledge work. We describe what attending to bodily needs at work entails and illustrate tactics employed so that work can be carried on, even when the body (or technology optimising it) breaks down. Arguing that all systems are bodily systems, we conclude with a call to acknowledge the centrality of bodies in all work and the roles technologies can play in supporting or constraining bodywork differently for different workers.


INTRODUCTION
Contemporary Human-Computer Interaction research is increasingly attentive to the body [2,25,51].As bodies are more commonly assisted, augmented, and tracked with technologies, the research focus on bodily experience has expanded.It now encompasses, among others, felt and sensory dimensions of interaction [26], novel bodybased interaction [30,45], considerations of the representation of the body in design [18,51], supporting bodily transitions [11,59], and afective and relational factors arising in the long-term use of self-tracking technologies [24,43].While work remains a core context for research on the complex underpinnings of computersupported cooperative activity, research on work practice has not adopted this focus on the body to the same extent.Yet, as the interaction of technology and the body becomes more intimate [3], and the boundaries of personal and professional spheres are often fuid [65], we see a need to consider how bodies, technology, and work come together, and how that should inform the technologies we design so that they attend to bodily needs and bodily care also in work contexts.
We use the concept of bodywork (or "body work") [19] to structure our examination of how bodily needs are attended to with technology at work.Within the Sociology of the Body, this concept has been developed in an efort to 'bring the body in' to the work environment and highlight the gap in investigations of the body/work nexus as a response to how bodies had long been overlooked in the literature [19,49,57,63].Here, we use 'bodywork' as a way of thinking about how bodily needs impact work, and how managing the body with the help of a variety of technologies is key to work.We identify bodywork as an integral part of work practice -a type of labour that often goes overlooked both in the workplace and in HCI research on work.To address this, we connect with prior research on self-care, self-tracking, and personal informatics that has covered a wide range of perspectives on self-management of care.Much of the focus here has been on understanding how individuals integrate self-care technologies into their everyday lives, for instance, to experience control in managing symptoms [4,24], to navigate unpredictability [44,56], and to manage diferent social situations [22,37,42].
Self-care practices at work have been studied in breaks during the workday [14,48], ftting personal tasks in the workday schedule [39], and the use of personal care devices in the workplace [42,65].These studies have uncovered a rich complexity in how personal tasks are done while adhering to the norms of who fts into these professional spaces.Studies from a feminist and disability focus have similarly contributed to critiquing and deconstructing the normative view of the body in technology and its implications for design [18].We contribute to these lines of research with an in-depth inquiry that is geared to address two research questions: (1) What does attending to bodily needs entail in diferent work settings?and (2) How does technology shape, support, or constrain workers' eforts to attend to bodily needs?
To ground our analysis of bodywork empirically, we draw upon three illustrative cases of diferent kinds of contemporary work: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and ofcebased knowledge work.As work is scattered in terms of work times and locations [60], our cases are selected to illustrate large parts of what work today encompasses and how bodywork manifests in that.By analysing three diferent settings side by side, we highlight bodywork as a phenomenon that cuts across the world of work.We outline how people balance bodywork, optimise the body for work, and coordinate bodywork with others, as well as what happens when breakdowns mean that bodily needs get in the way of work or workers need to tolerate unmet and delayed bodily needs.
Understanding bodywork lets us foreground issues around the quantifcation of the body at work, worker surveillance, and technology infused fexible work settings.While there has been research into the bodily experiences of working with and through technology, the intersection of bodily needs and work practice has often gone overlooked.Our work highlights that the need for bodywork cuts across diferent types of work.In discussing the implications of our research for HCI and CSCW, we argue that all systems -to some extent -are bodily systems.

RELATED WORK
This section starts with a defnition of bodywork along with relevant HCI and CSCW literature connecting with it.It continues with a brief review of studies that consider work-life boundaries, helping to trace the role of technologies and practices in shaping work, life, and the boundaries of personal and professional roles.It concludes with a discussion of research on technologies for self-care and self-tracking.

Bodywork
In HCI and CSCW, the body at work is largely overlooked yet marginally present through the sociological concept of bodywork.Gimlin presents four forms of bodywork to describe the sociology of the body: appearance work, body labour, emotion management, and body-making through work [19].Body or appearance work refers to managing a person's physical looks and wellness, such as grooming or clothing selection.Body labour refers to labour performed on behalf of or directly to other people's bodies, such as in health care or service industries.Emotion management refers to the control and display of emotions that are deemed socially appropriate, such as smiling to be perceived as a friendly employee.Body-making through work refers to the production of physical bodies through a person's work, such as the implications of standing for long hours.
These four aspects of bodywork are manifested across various research interests that are directly and indirectly connected to work practices.Appearance work is present in the intimate labour of breast pumping in professional settings [65] and highlights the social construction of gendered bodies.Research on pregnancy situates embodied experiences as socially and culturally constructed [5].This positions how appearance work is negotiated in relation to formal and informal care infrastructures, and, for example, how this impacts personal pain management, family relations, and complying with ideals of motherhood.Strohmayer et al. [53] investigate the body labour of sex workers in the UK to advocate for social justice.Emotion management is seen, for example, in the management of empathetic relationships in research by Balaam et al. [6] and concerns for bringing personal perspectives into academic work [12,23].This line of research also includes taxi drivers' emotional labour in platform-mediated work [46].As an example of bodymaking, in research on pop-up ofces in private homes, Rossitto and Lampinen [47] discuss the practice of collaboratively supporting bodily movement during knowledge work as an act of care for oneself and a community.
In this paper, we position bodywork as taking care of bodily needs and situate this defnition in workplaces, work practices, and practices related to work.In particular, this includes the presence of the body at work and how its needs are suppressed or deemed invisible relative to employment priorities.

Boundaries of work and life
The increasing pervasiveness of technology and the growing permeation of work into personal life as its outcome has been an important topic in CSCW and HCI research [39].In particular, knowledge work is known to be troubled with inaccurate planning [1], often leading to overtime and the rescheduling of work tasks.Studies have reported that people use mobile tools, such as tablets, beyond ofce hours to extend work tasks [52].A downside of constant connectivity is unwanted spillovers in switching between diferent roles, which can ultimately lead to increased levels of stress [16].In this regard, boundary theory has been central in understanding how people manage boundaries and what tactics they develop in technology use [41].Personal attitudes and the nature of work impact how boundaries are created, maintained, or changed to classify work and non-work on a spectrum from integration to segmentation [41].Fleck et al. [16] found that people use multiple devices and tools to create boundaries between home and work, and the extent to which they do so relates to their boundary behaviour style.Grimes and Brush's [20] examination of the calendar use of working parents found parents frequently recording personal information in the professional calendar to manage the dual roles of a parent and an employee.Boundary sculpting is a useful term proposed by Ciolf and Lockley [10] to describe the blurring of work-life boundaries in both directions between professional and personal spheres.
Work and life permeation has also been explored by examining breaks during the workday.Berman et al.'s [7] study of the break-taking behaviour of managers reported on short breaks having a positive impact on productivity and wellbeing.Yet taking such breaks is far from simple.Work breaks in digital form, such as internet content surfng, are prone to prolonged "cyberloafng" and require an extent of self-regulation in managing break-taking [55].Further, the work-from-home setting creates difculty in perceiving the value of breaks and motivation to incorporate active break-taking in the workday [9,48].As Skatova et al. [50] discuss through their study of users' perception of micro-breaks and "proper" breaks (long breaks), there is a need for further research to redefne breaks and look beyond personal tools to the personal ecosystem.Recent studies on the COVID-19 pandemic have raised important questions on the overall work required to adapt to hybrid or fully remote settings which includes reconfguring work-life boundaries and reconstructing the home's sense of place to serve multiple, sometimes conficting roles [9,61].Further, new work arrangements, such as crowd and gig work, have prompted discussion regarding what invisible labour counts as a break [54] and how breaks integrate within microtasks [33].
Across the literature on interruptions and boundary management in work and personal life, there is much emphasis on physical health concerns [48], the psycho-social impact of digital interruptions [31], and work-life arrangements [47].Yet, discussion focusing on the body -the core medium to execute work -remains scarce.There are some exceptions, of course: For example, Janböcke et al. [27] explored incorporating a user's chronobiology in the calendar design to support personal planning activities that explicitly acknowledge the body's biological rhythm in meeting workplace demands.Bowler et al. [8] explored uncertainty as a starting feature in digital calendars and other scheduling technologies to support temporal empathy for people with health conditions or care responsibilities, and Yadav et al. [65] studied the intimate care practice of breast pumping at the workplace.However, surprisingly little seems to be known of how bodily needs in general shape boundary management, how they shape work practice, and, in turn, what impact work has on the body.

Technologies of self-care
In HCI literature on self-care technologies, we focus on studies examining technologies and informatics systems for self-care and self-tracking in everyday settings.These studies illuminate how the use of these systems intertwines with the social and cultural fabrics of daily life, and how socio-cultural complexities infuence perspectives and practices related to bodily care.Mamykina et al. [37] reported on users' adoption of a diabetes-monitoring application to perform identity construction work in daily self-management.O'Kane et al. [42] examined the infuence of social situations on the use of self-care technologies by observing how diabetic individuals concealed or revealed their insulin pumps/glucose meters in front of others.Park and Chen [44] observed how the unpredictability and intermittency of migraines afected people's eforts to identify individual triggers and stressed the importance of social recognition.
Another area of research on self-tracking has examined practices by analyzing various stages, with the aim of understanding why people adopt, discard, or persist in such practices.Li et al. [34] identifed fve iterative stages: preparation, collection, integration, refection, and action.Epstein et al. [15] further expanded this into seven stages by incorporating decision and selection, as well as lapsing and resuming.Freeman et al.'s [17] study of teenagers' use of self-tracking devices emphasizes thinking critically about the broader information ecosystems within which tracking tools reside, suggesting the use of fexible resources.Collectively, these studies address barriers users face in supporting their self-tracking journeys.
Along similar lines of exploring self-tracking journeys, an emerging direction is to investigate the afective, temporal, and relational dimensions of the user's relationship with self-tracking technology, which becomes particularly pronounced with the accumulation of large amounts of self-tracked data over long periods [4,35].Knittel et al. [32] found that while users feel supported in sharing experiences of self-tracking with others, they face unique challenges in seeking community input on highly personal and complex data.Homewood [24] and Park et al. [43] have drawn attention to the shifting relations people experience in living with intimate self-tracking technologies over extended periods, the dynamics of shared use, and the fuctuating nature of the user's body.We can draw upon the sensitivity developed in prior work when it comes to understanding how self-tracking technologies appear in the workplace, and how they may connect or confict with workplace technologies.

THREE ILLUSTRATIVE CASES
To cover a range of work settings and labour conditions, we draw on three illustrative cases, each representing a distinct work setting, along with technologies and bodily needs particular to it.Our cases include gig-based food delivery work, shift work in hospitals and bars, and ofce-based knowledge work.Table 1 provides a summary of the three cases, showing the work settings, participant demographics, and the collected data.Bringing together a diverse combination of worker experiences allows us to capture nuances of bodywork embedded across a variety of work settings, illustrating both commonalities and diferences in what bodywork entails and how it features diferent technologies.

Moving bodies in gig work
Food delivery platforms are part of the 'gig economy', a term used to refer to "labour markets that are characterized by independent contracting that happens through, via, and on digital platforms" [64].The work is contingent, casual, and non-permanent, with little job security, involving payment on a piece-work basis, and lacking any options for career development [64].Gig work, then, is part of alternative work arrangements that include but are not limited to temporary work, contingent work, part-time work, contract work, and freelance work.
To approach bodywork in gig work empirically, we draw upon diverse research materials that were collected through an ethnographic study of food delivery work, performed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pune, India.Following social distancing regulations, the data collection ranged from six early telephonic semi-structured interviews to feld visits and eleven video-recorded ride-along sessions where the researcher drove with the delivery workers who wore an action camera mounted on their helmets.Field notes were collected from four locations where riders commonly congregated while waiting for order allocation or for restaurants to be ready with order preparations.All participants identifed as men, despite eforts to locate participants of diferent genders.All interactions with participants took place in the local languages -Marathi and Hindi -and relevant portions of the materials were then translated into English.

Sleep in shift work
In our second case, we study shift work -a form of work that has been on the rise due to factors like globalisation and technological advancement [13].Shift work entails challenges, such as potential health impacts, disrupted sleep patterns, and strains on work-life balance [58].A recent HCI study on sleep and shift work [28] examined how workers follow multiple practices to structure their lives according to shifts.The authors note that not only are these practices diferent based on local legislation and across diferent lines of work, but that even within the same workplace, navigating work-life balance pans out very diferently for diferent people.
Our empirical analysis of bodywork in shift work focuses on sleep tracking, in particular on sleep hacking, the active actions people take on their sleep schedule in structuring their lives to their needs and wants.We draw upon a dataset comprising interviews (6), and focus group materials (4) that feature altogether 17 participants (13 male, 4 female, with an average age of 28) along with 700 minutes of recorded audio.These interviews and focus groups were informed by an analysis of Reddit posts related to sleep and shift work.This involved qualitative thematic analysis of a collection of 1002 posts and comments.Participants were recruited through four initial contacts with people in night work occupations and subsequent snowball sampling.Further, some participants were recruited by reaching out to online forums for sleep hacking.Ten participants had recently or were currently working during night time.Here, we focus primarily on these participants as they schedule their sleep around night shift work at hospitals (4), and around shift work at late closing bars (6).These participants were based in Sweden and the United States.All qualitative data were anonymised, transcribed, and, where needed, translated from Swedish into English.

Breast pumping in knowledge work
Knowledge work does not primarily involve physical labour, yet as we argue in this paper, workers' bodies and their bodily needs are relevant in all types of work.Knowledge work can entail complex and multifaceted problems in attending to the body.For example, scholars in disability studies have documented various conficts related to 'body norms' in the workplace [18], often rooted in the societal and cultural standards of what is 'normal' or 'ideal'.
We approach bodywork in knowledge work through the case of breast pumping at the workplace.Carrying out pumping work in the workplace is a type of bodywork that many experience as complex and anxiety-prone -it conficts with workplace norms about the body as well as the use of unfamiliar technologies [42,65].For our analysis of breast pumping in knowledge work, we draw on interviews conducted with 19 individuals working in diferent settings of knowledge work in 11 countries across Europe, Southeast Asia, South Africa, and North America.The participants were between 22 and 40 years old, and all identifed as women.The interviews were conducted online over Zoom in English which were later transcribed and anonymised to protect any identifable information.

ANALYSIS PROCEDURE AND POSITIONALITY
Each of the three cases was analysed for this paper through the lens of bodywork, informed by the coding and inductive analyses previously conducted and published on each case.The analysis we present below is the result of an iterative process whereby points of commonality and distinction between the cases were subject to multiple rounds of analysis as well as discussion among the authors in collaborative data sessions.These sessions focused on iterating a common understanding of the entire dataset, compiling common themes that resonated with each case, highlighting the distinct characteristics of each case, and developing fnal themes that explicitly focused on the relationship between bodywork and the labour the participants were being paid for.In presenting our fndings, we  This research is a collaborative efort of researchers working in diferent areas of HCI, Interaction Design, and CSCW.The research on gig-based food delivery and sleep/shift work has been led separately by two authors for more than four years.The breast pumping project has been led by one author for over two years with prior long-term experience working with mothers and breastfeeding in India.Three authors identify as cis-gender women and mothers, and four authors identify as cis-gender men.Two researchers are of Indian origin, four have origins in Europe, and one in the United States.Based upon a commitment to critically examining the role of technology in everyday life, our analysis was heavily grounded in iterative coding of the empirical data, along with self-refexive discussions.Our backgrounds as knowledge workers with what we consider fexible work settings shape our understanding of the social norms of work and the body.Thus, through our collective work, we exchanged and challenged our views to keep our focus on the participants' individual experiences, situated in their diferent cultural and work contexts.

FINDINGS
Responding to our two research questions, that is, what attending to bodily needs entails in diferent work settings and how technology shapes, supports, or constrains workers' eforts to attend to bodily needs, we now present our fndings that address gig, shift, and knowledge work side by side.Through our analysis, we identifed four dimensions of bodywork at work: (1) balancing bodily needs and work availability, (2) optimising bodywork, (3) coordinating work, life, and bodywork, and (4) breakdowns that called for tolerating unmet bodily needs.Table 2 encapsulates how these four dimensions manifest across the three cases.

Balancing body and work
Work is often arranged around common times for common actions.The traditional 9-to-5 of modern working environments, including breaks for refreshments every 2 or 3 hours, allows for there to be times when a normative employee is working, and times outside of that where they can eat, sleep, attend to other bodily needs, and socialise.When life fts into this rhythm, such bodywork is for all intents and purposes invisible, or at least insignifcant, to others in the work context.The efort required to ft work and other parts of life together, from time planning to the pragmatics of getting ready and showing up on time, is, of course, well familiar to most people with any kind of work experience.However, when either the work or the body is unable to conform, the visibility, timing, and amount of bodywork changes.In our three cases, we observed a signifcant amount of bodywork taking place outside of scheduled work hours.This was related to planning, disciplining, and managing the body in specifc ways to meet work goals.We showcase here how eforts to manage the body to make it ft with the requirements of work can range from the mundane to rather drastic.

Meal routines in gig work.
One often has to eat at times that are conducive to work.This can mean, for example, that breakfast has to be moved earlier to accommodate a commute.Working for a food delivery platform, however, means that in order to deliver customers' food at times conducive to their schedules, one cannot eat at the same time.We observed that drivers' meal routines were severely afected by their eforts to maximize their earnings: workers must remain available for order allocation, especially during the high order-fow hours when customers order lunch and dinner.In remaining available to work longer, they also held expectations that the order allocation algorithm -the details of which are not made available to the drivers -would be more likely to assign them 'better' orders.
Full-time delivery workers like G1, with no other source of income, felt that they had no option but to adjust their eating habits.G1 described the nature of this adjustment: "I start work after eating my breakfast. . .and try to eat something as and when I fnd time during the day... Else I eat some snacks at 4 p.m...No lunch, directly in the evening.If I won't, then I cannot help it.At times, I get an order as I am having the frst bite.So I just fnish that bite, have some water, and start (for the pickup location).No dinner on time as well.After delivering the last order at 11 p.m., I usually reach home by 12:30 -1:00 a.m.You don't feel like eating so late." Dinner time from 7 p.m. until midnight was a popular work slot for many part-time delivery workers.G2, a part-time food delivery worker, usually ate his dinner close to midnight so as to be available for work during the dinner slot: "If my brother has already cooked, then I work for some more time; else, I go back by 10 p.m. and cook my food." Delivery workers who lived in the same area where they served food managed, at times, to go home and eat.G1, who lived further away, explained the economics that made leaving the delivery area unviable for him: "I stay far away from the area.Going home to eat food will cost me petrol worth rupees 50 minimum and an hour both ways...I will miss the orders if I worry about my food...Customer's and my eating hours cannot be the same." The implications of when deliveries are desired by customers and how the platform allocates orders are clear: "The rider does not eat on time.The delivery boy is starving himself to deliver food on time for the customer." 5.1.2Sleep routines in shifwork.Shift work, by defnition, pushes the timing of some or all of the employees' work outside of a normative 9-to-5 schedule.This, in turn, shifts the time of non-work activities -many of which pertain to bodywork.While shift work has a much more predictable structure than gig work, schedules can still vary from week to week, often requiring the worker to maintain a routine that is at odds with cyclical bodily rhythms [29].
Finding a resilient sleep schedule that accommodates work and other life obligations is often an unattainable goal for shift workers.Choices primarily revolve around structuring sleep in the days surrounding work nights, while, during work nights, the choice is between aiming for a full 8 hours of sleep directly as soon as one gets home, sleeping less and compensating with naps, or in some cases, sleeping later during the day before the next shift.Some prioritise shared and normative activities, like having breakfast with family and dropping kids of at preschool, while others opt to sleep earlier to maximise non-work waking hours that align with the surrounding society's waking hours.
Carving out sufcient hours of sleep to prepare for the next shift requires meticulous planning to mitigate disruptions from typical daytime elements like sunlight, roommates, partners, and ambient noise.Research materials highlighted the efectiveness of employing measures such as blinds, sleep masks, and ambient or white noise.Additionally, managing the home's temperature emerged as a factor in enhancing sleep conditions: 'Like 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit is usually what my room is during winter'.
Transitioning from working to sleeping was often accompanied with the challenge of having a tired body while the mind remained alert.Participant S3, working as a bouncer at a bar, described tackling this challenge by allowing their sleep onset routine into working hours by avoiding 'social confrontations' during the last hour or using additives like 'glycine, melatonin, or CBD' for a more efective cooldown.Another participant, S2, who worked as a programmer at night, described practices that extend throughout the day: "So I defnitely control light, food, physical activity, even socialization.Kind of ramping those things down toward the end of my day, and when I start the day, I try to, you know, get to view light as soon as I can.Exercise... things like that, so I'm pretty big on those types of things and I'm really controlling those zeitgebers 1 and having them work for me in my favour." 1 time giver -environmental variables that infuence the circadian rhythm For shift workers, managing one's sleep rhythm is an active practice, involving diverse tactics and methods to overcome the challenges in attending to their bodily need for sleep outside of normative hours for sleep.
5.1.3Intimate care in knowledge work.Even when employment follows mainstream social norms, such as for most ofce-based knowledge workers, sometimes the body itself does not.Arriving later, leaving earlier, or taking more breaks than others, is often seen as the opposite of being a 'good worker.'When the body does not ft the norms of the workplace, the need arises to either change the work or change the body.Pressures to be seen as a 'good worker' encourage workers to change the body more than the work.We discuss the case of ftting breast pumping into the workday as one such example.Here, breastfeeding mothers are forced to either carve out time from the workday to pump their milk, attempt to train their bodies to be able to pump efectively when it is convenient for their working schedule, or attempt to work and pump milk at the same time.P6 explained how she trained her body to better ft with the expectations and norms of her working environment: "I knew that I would have to prepare myself.So when I frst started pumping, you know, is every 3 hours...But I realized maybe at like eight weeks ... that's just not going to be realistic for me.So I had to plan when to pump and I trained my body.I pump at 6 a.m. and then I don't pump again until noon.For most women, they would maybe lose supply because of that large gap.But I had to do it because there was no other way I would be able to take a break because I'm already reducing my productivity, I can't further reduce it." Infrequent pumping reduces milk supply and impacts how long one can feed breast milk to the child.Many participants shared that due to conficts in accommodating pumping at the workplace, they had stopped pumping sooner than they had originally planned.P12 had resorted to supplementing breast milk with formula milk: "My workplace is supportive of pumping.But I can't take 20 minutes in between seeing patients to pump...I could pump in the morning before I went, pump at lunch, right after work.I wish I could have maybe one or two more times during the day.I think I would have made more milk and had to use less formula.I was able to sustain it for the year, so that was my goal overall.... But yeah, so I'd say okay, maybe not ideal, but okay." Overall, we observed participants investing in signifcant planning to make their bodies available and resilient for work while attending to the bodywork that breast pumping entails.

Optimising bodywork
Using digital tools to optimise work efciency in an efort to maximise productivity is a common phenomenon [31,38].Here, we found a hidden but distinctive aspect of how bodywork connects with the goal of increasing efciency in the workplace.Participants described a range of tactics where they employed technology to plan and perform bodywork, as well as to minimise the time and amount of bodywork they required, in order to increase their work efciency.

Positioning to optimise earnings in gig work.
In gig work, with a lack of control over work allocation and how work is evaluated, participants developed diferent tactics to mobilise their bodywork to maximise their work output.Workers strategised their movement to increase the chances of getting an order and to maximise their earnings.This included leveraging their prior knowledge of the surroundings to take shortcuts and moving between diferent hotspots to attract orders.Here, the bodywork entailed riding extra miles to maximise earnings, despite the back pain long hours on the motorbike caused.Throughout the delivery workfow, we observed that workers aimed to complete the delivery as swiftly as possible so as to make themselves available for the next order.Riders made eforts to maximise their earnings at every stage of the delivery workfow, starting from striving to locate themselves near popular restaurants so that they could pick up the orders faster.When making deliveries, we found riders like G3 relying on their understanding of the area to reach the drop-of location faster than the route suggested by the platform.In brief, the workers tried to make sense of the platform's algorithmic decision-making and then used everything available to them, from their bodies to their knowledge of the surroundings, to optimise their performance.

Tracking sleep in shif work.
In shift work, optimising with the body meant working on improving the efciency and success of adapting sleep routines between changing work schedules.The users employed many diferent approaches (as per the section 5.1.2),many based on recommendations from colleagues or advice posted online.These practices required workers to quickly adapt to new schedules or maintain existing schedules with odd sleep routines.The practices of ftting sleep to one's work schedule can be argued to approach sleep-hacking [28].One of the main struggles here is to get any insight into how much sleep, and at what quality, one gets.
Yet still, using dedicated sleep-tracking devices was not a general practice among participants.One reason for this is that tracking sleep during work shifts risks reinforcing the felt tiredness from sleeping poorly -more awareness without the opportunity to make change can serve to make matters worse.Hence, we saw that measuring sleep hours using trackers was mostly reserved for those who were actively trying to optimise their sleep quality.One challenge highlighted by a participant was getting the output of one's tracker in the correct format.Within some sleep hacking forums, users share advice on which brands of trackers can be hacked to give access to the raw data, particularly hunting down trackers from the bankrupt company Zeo (as seen in Figure 1 Electric pumps vary, from bulky with wires that require a charging outlet to lightweight battery-operated ones, also known as portable pumps.Figure 2 shows sketches of three portable pumps with variations in their models, ranging from hands-free to semi-wearable to wearable.All participants preferred portable pumps at work, with three using the wearable form of the portable pump.For example, P2, a consultant with a feld-based job, comfortably pumped in the car using a hands-free pump, supported by accessories such as a special bra and lanyard for added convenience.Quick changes between pumping and driving were made easier by wearing loose-ftting shirts, a frequently adopted dressing approach among participants.
P3, a researcher in Switzerland, enhanced work efciency by using two types of breast pumps.She opted for an electric portable pump for her frst break, usually taken in a meeting room, and a wearable pump for her second break at her desk or during the tram ride home.Despite the electric pump being more efcient in milk extraction, P3 found it time-consuming to move to a separate location for pumping.Her preference to pump at her desk was infuenced by concerns about how her work was evaluated, shaping her experience of intimate bodywork and the adaptations she made.She described her dilemma of working and pumping as follows: "The pump is quiet and it's just discreet.So I felt fne doing that behind my desk.I mean, I would have to ideally just take time of to pump and not work something, right.I don't know if it afects how much milk you produce if you're cooperatively working on something else and ideally, that would be a moment that you really take to like relax and just focus, like do something else besides working and really focus on the pumping itself." Carrying out the bodywork of pumping in an efcient manner demands creating an arrangement that fts both one's body and one's work setting.This efort was frequently shaped by technologies, as refected in P5's description:  Increasing in the order of wearability, the left-most is convenient to wear as it can be made hands-free with extra accessories; the middle one is semi-wearable, slightly smaller and can ft under clothes but the pump machine has to be held outside one's clothes; and the one on the right is the smallest and can be worn with the entire unit inside one's clothes.
"So I've been using two diferent ones at the same time.So I have an electric pump that I'll put on one breast and then I have this silicone vacuum...where you just press it and then it creates a vacuum.So I've been putting that one on the other one so that I could express myself from both breasts simultaneously.At frst, I had just the silicone one, but I think the electric one is better at stimulating the milk fow.But if I have the breast pump stimulating the milk fow on one breast, then as long as I'm just using the vacuum on the other with the silicone pump, then I get the letdown from that breast as well." These varied experiences of optimising with the body in service of work priorities across the three cases highlight how bodywork comes up across diferent types of work and diferent bodily needs.Based on the availability of resources, support, and existing technologies in the work environment, participants developed tactics to attend to their bodily needs at work.What is more, they also incorporated extra bodywork to accommodate workplace constraints, for instance, by roaming around the city to optimise their work availability, hacking sleep and sacrifcing personal and social life to aford necessary transition periods to be able to sleep, and compromising the intimate experience of milk expression by combining it with work tasks.

Coordinating work, life, and bodywork
Work involves other people, so the demands of the body and the demands of other workers need to be balanced.We observed participants coordinating with colleagues to help ensure that personal bodily needs are addressed without causing disruptions to workfows, coordinating their life between work breaks to make the body ready for the next task, and coordinating with friends and family to make room for life outside of work despite the requirements work placed on workers' time and bodies.Considering the three work environments we analysed, the type of work plays an important role in afording or constraining the capacity to coordinate work and bodywork.An important commonality across the work settings, though, is that the work of coordinating bodywork as part of work and life was largely left for the workers to take care of, together with co-workers and family members.

Delivery drivers alone together.
In gig work, the worker is visible to the platform only in the form of a binary availability status -online or ofine -and the worker is only seen as a worker when logged on.Coordinating bodywork in food delivery is marked by the nature of the work environment the platform sets up.Gig platforms design and manage their workfow such that work can purportedly be performed individually, entirely relying on the information and instructions provided to the riders through a dedicated app.This pushes riders to complete the work on their own, giving little or no space for collaboration and support, be it about the work itself or attending to one's bodily needs while doing the work.While we observed riders fnding opportunities to build ad hoc collaborations with co-present others (like security guards and other riders) to solve mundane challenges faced in the completion of delivery, we did not witness such coordination in relation to bodywork.It seems riders have to endure their individual corporeal challenges on their own while aligning themselves with the platform's demands and instructions as well as they can.Figure 3 shows Gig workers waiting at a common spot, where they occasionally engage in conversation.  of its very nature, cannot be handled in a short amount of time.Compensating for accumulated sleep debt requires longer periods, cutting across personal and professional life.One impact of this is on the hours available for social life.Adjusting to the shifting nature of work leaves shift workers with limited scope to compensate for the lost sleep routine.As a result, participants had to compromise either their social obligations or their sleep: "Or at least I get disturbed and isolated when you work nights, because, like the three or four days, you have like four waking hours a day when you're not at work, sort of.And then it becomes like, say you work like during this coming week, then I work two nights now and then I work three nights this weekend and then another three nights in the middle of next week.There will be times that I can't...It is very difcult to get to meet people and if you do, you are usually very tired."-S5 In the days between shifts, the participants had diferent approaches to adjusting sleep routines which involved trying to "reset back, and try to have a normal circadian rhythm", that is, trying to sleep during more normative sleeping hours.But even then, the trouble here is not only about being awake and rested during the right hours: the act of planning for free days often falls on the working days, needing to be taken care of while sleep-deprived.
"You work at night, and then you work very intensively, i.e. you are awake for very short periods of time, so then perhaps your inclination to plan things is not as good.But like some schedule app like this that pings one and says like this: "Yes, but you and your friend have said you want to hang out and here I see that you are both free this day, and have nothing for you.Maybe suggest having a beer?" -S5 Another way is fnding social life during less normative hours.For some, this meant fnding social life during nighttime after one's shift, such as gaming online with others on similar schedules.For S2 in particular, the social coordination was in how to set up their own work schedule to have as much time as possible with their partner who worked a night shift as a nurse, regardless of whether this time was during night hours or in the early morning.

Calendars and coordination of breast pumping.
Pumping at work requires one to set aside break time that is noticeably longer than a bathroom break.Pumping breaks often collide with other workplace activities, so coordination is needed to resolve conficting requirements, such as needing to pump at the same time that one is needed at a meeting.Pumping also typically requires access to a dedicated space which, in turn, might need to be coordinated with others depending on what is available.A number of participants coordinated with their co-workers informally to use the shared ofce space for pumping.P16 recounted her experience as follows: "So in my building where my ofce is located, we have a women's locker room, and for the frst few days I would go there to pump, but it just was very inconvenient.I had to use an extension cord and sit in like a shower stall that had a bench.And so I talked to the woman that I share my ofce with and just said, do you care if I close the door and put like a cover on the little door window and pump in here?And she said, No, that's absolutely fne.I don't care." Using existing workplace technologies, in this case, calendar scheduling and instant messaging, participants coordinated with others by communicating their availability.Depending on the situation, they chose to either obscure or explicitly notify others of their status of pumping.P1, a UK-based academic, relied on her autonomy and access to a personal ofce space to discreetly manage her pumping: "At some point, I just really aggressively started like taking care of my schedule and just making sure I would lock those times.And if somebody wanted a two-hour meeting, I just pretend and say, oh, sorry, I can do an hour because I have another meeting afterwards, which was kind of true, but not quite what they were thinking." On the other hand, P13, a Thai school counsellor, utilised calendar planning to negotiate a new schedule with her supervisor.Seeking formal consultation, she collaborated with a breast pumping consultant to design a calendar aligning with her pumping needs and workplace obligations.She then discussed the calendar with her supervisor and scheduled pumping times for the entire year.For others, direct communication over messaging apps helped in quick coordination and reporting their status where relevant.While the extent to which work tasks require workers to coordinate with others varies across types of work, our fndings also highlight signifcant diferences in the extent to which work arrangements allow for coordinating bodywork.Through diferent examples of coordinating bodywork at work, we observe that coordination ranges from the workplace to personal life, and that it is largely left for the workers to tackle, with little or limited formal support.

Breakdowns
The extremes in bodywork surfaced when neither balancing, coordinating, nor optimising worked.In routine working conditions, tolerating the body is a natural consequence of being at work.However, when the body 'crashes' or stops working according to work norms, bodywork appears in the foreground, as bodily needs require explicit attention.By examining the strain participants experienced in their work, we observed what contributed to bodily strain and what participants could do to deal with it.

5.4.1
The broken bodies of delivery work.Having to tolerate strain and breakdowns was pronounced in gig work, especially in terms of having to bear the negative efects of long driving hours on a motorbike.A signifcant part of the physical labour in online food delivery demands riders to navigate through the city trafc, facing unexpected challenges like blocked roads and unmapped locations, working against the timer set by the delivery platform to complete the order on time.In India, food delivery is primarily performed on a motorbike and almost every participant in our feldwork mentioned how risky driving is, especially at night and during the rainy season.G2, who worked part-time, explained why he did not want to deliver food full-time: "...riding all the time is a serious problem.Sitting all the time on the bike is a problem...Driving the entire week is harassment." G4 described how completing back-to-back deliveries was common before the pandemic: "No one had time to sit and pause; everyone was always in running mode, with back-to-back orders, and we had orders waiting."Such a busy job resulted in back pain for many delivery workers.During the pandemic, when there were fewer orders to deliver, workers frequently got long-distance orders, making them spend longer driving hours on their bikes.G1, a skilled electrician who started working full-time with the delivery platform due to a lack of other jobs, explained how such long driving hours afected his body: "Being an electrician is a hard job; it is risky.So initially, it felt easy to roam around on a bike, but not anymore.My body hurts, my back hurts badly after driving the entire day.I can't sleep at night.Now I feel it is better to be an electrician." The platform remains largely unaware of the broader context in which delivery workers perform the work, including the bodily demands workers endure.Long-distance rides often resulted in exhaustion without recovery time, especially when combined with irregular meal times.Workers did not have the liberty to decide the ride route, distance, or delivery area and, as explained earlier, they did not control order allocation.These constraints became severe during the pandemic, as the order fow was reduced and workers made extra eforts to receive orders.

5.4.2
Leaning the body into shif work.Tolerating unmet bodily needs is a part of maintaining one's readiness for shift work.The physical toll observed in shift work is evident in the physiological challenges workers face due to disrupted sleep cycles.Working sleep deprived is a usual phenomenon.Whether one consciously chooses to de-prioritize sleep or encounters sleep disruptions, the imperative remains to fulfll work obligations by "leaning bodily into it" as expressed further by S7: "Well if it is a proper work weekend then one has to face it, ehm, very very bodily, like one has to do one's hours, then rest, then straight on to the next one.That it, like, has to keep rolling, and it has to work." As described by S6, who recently moved away from working nights, over time one becomes adept at working without sleep and, in turn, frequently chooses to prioritise wakefulness for other aspects of life: "...you could really accept the 'Well I'll still be able to do my job and be dead or super tired.I'll still be able to get through the shift and it'll still be worth it as opposed to where perhaps today instead a higher priority is placed on feeling well during the day as well." The experience of night shifts for nurses, due to the nature of their work, places a higher demand on being alert during one's work hours.Yet, similarly to bar work, working with sleep deprivation is largely unavoidable.Prioritizing the body to prevent sleep deprivation is challenging in practice -and, instead, one's reality is to be constantly tired, as described by S1 as the feeling of being constantly "covered by a wet towel".
While participants mentioned "in the moment" ways to combat tiredness at work, such as cofee and tobacco, one still has to learn to tolerate working with a lack of sleep.Paradoxically, having slept well is sometimes met with a bit of scepticism.While sleeping well is not explicitly frowned upon, the ideal shared by many in bar and hospital settings is that a good worker should function equally well no matter how many hours of sleep they have gotten before the shift.

Leaks and broken pumps.
Attending to bodily care through body breaks, such as lactation breaks, reveals tensions related to bodywork also in knowledge work settings.In line with previous studies, we observed participants grappling with a quantifed view of the body and the negative perception associated with breaks at work [7,40,62].P7, a pattern designer in Switzerland, described feeling constantly guilty for taking pumping breaks, despite having access to a dedicated pumping room and a supportive supervisor.Notions of a quantifed, always available body circulate in the work environment, and occasionally surface in unexpected ways, such as when P7 encountered a colleague while exiting the pumping room: "You know, when one colleague asked me like, how much milk do you get when you pump?You know?And then I'm like, whoa, it's very diferent and then I'm like, wow, they should like check, look, I actually did pump.I didn't go there and just had a break for myself."Anxiety resulting from not conforming to the ideals of a quantifed worker directly impacts the intimate bodily experience of pumping.Several participants shared feeling anxious after accidentally spilling expressed milk.P7's experience with a broken pump further exemplifes breakdowns in bodywork and technologies devised to support it: "And then actually yesterday my pump broke.So now I actually spent like an hour pumping with my hand pump, but I think because I'm stressed about my pump it didn't work, no milk came, like normally I would pump in one day, I pump maybe total like 30 minutes and then I have at least 200 milliliters.But now I pumped for like 20 minutes and I had like 20 milliliters." Further, beyond specifc breakdowns, situations of tolerating the body in pumping at work involved having to bear engorged breasts for extended periods, for instance during long meetings, and having to pump in unhygienic conditions, such as a restroom or rooms not adequately designed to meet pumping requirements.
Bodily breakdowns showed the accumulated tensions of performing bodywork in hidden or ignored ways at work.Participants' experiences illustrated the tolerating of strain on the body as an inherent part of bodywork at work, either as a result of the work itself or the conditions of the work.The limits of tolerating are determined by what one can allow or endure while attending to bodily needs amid workplace policy and norms.Breakdowns revealed asymmetry in the infrastructure produced by the workplace, technologies, and the ways they are used.Work, as can be expected, foregrounds the productive act for which the labourer is receiving remuneration.Where that work entails the explicit use of the body, such as in diferent forms of physical labour, the efects of the work on the body and its limits are at the fore.However, in our illustrative cases, we see that bodywork is present in all work, even if it, of course, plays out differently depending on the type of work in question and the labour conditions under which the work is performed.For instance, in gig work, bodywork was directed towards tolerating irregular meal times and back pain from long hours of driving in order to continue delivering orders.In shift work, bodywork involved continual mental and material planning for rest so that one could keep up with work, personal life, and the needs of the body.In breast pumping, bodywork manifested as the constant anxiety and organization of pumping logistics to fnd relief from engorged breasts, to avoid leaky breasts, and to ensure enough milk gets expressed for the next day.All these instances of bodywork were enmeshed in the quotidian work day routine and, as such, easily overshadowed by the norms and ideals of the workplace.In one dimension, as the goal of the work moves from physical labour to knowledge-based work, the imperative for an employer to take the body into account is lessened -to the point where acknowledging the bodily needs of their employees is often about regulatory compliance rather than improving work practices, the working lives, and presumably the productivity, of their workforce.Meanwhile, the rise in gig-based physical labour has resulted in a distortion of this rule of thumb.As each individual 'gig' is, supposedly, an isolated piece of contracted labour, the responsibility for taking care of bodywork is removed entirely from the work arrangement.A gig worker should 'log of', attend to their bodily needs, and then signal to the platform their readiness to work when they are available for another piece of work -a convenient fction that ignores both the economic constraints that drive people to engage in such labour as well as the algorithmic and monetary rewards for continued readiness within such platforms.
Crucially, our fndings highlight that all systems are bodily systems: whether or not technology is designed specifcally for work tasks or for taking care of bodily needs, in the workplace, all systems have implications for how both work practice and bodywork practices are carried out.While sleep trackers and breast pumps are obvious examples, food delivery apps have the knock-on efect of pushing workers to schedule meal times based on when there are orders, and shared calendars can be used strategically to set aside times for breast pumping.This perspective is not unique to the three cases presented here and, for example, extends to social media accounts such as @bathrooms4all ( https://twitter.com/bathrooms4all) that post toilet codes for the beneft of people who lack bathroom access in cities, including gig workers.In this case, social media and technology-based locks become part of the fabric of systems that allow and constrain bodywork.
Understanding all systems as bodily systems, and all work practices as shaped by ongoing bodywork, opens for creative ways to consider bodily needs in workplaces where they are not central.This approach presents an alternative pathway for the design that does not aim for a single and novel technological solution but rather taps into a relational perspective that acknowledges artifact ecologies [36], that is, the constellations of heterogeneous technologies that co-exist and are interlinked in contemporary work and workers' everyday life.We see such opportunities as more sustainable access points for addressing diverse bodily needs.This includes revisiting both technologies commonly used for coordinating work, such as calendars and workfow technologies, and technologies that traverse personal and professional practices, such as social media and smartphones.An ecological approach invites us to ask how existing technologies are already a part of a bodily, socio-technical arrangement: What bodywork do they enable or constrain, and how might they better support the interleaving of bodywork and work practice?
Echoing concerns about quantifcation of the body, such as how bodies are codifed in the design of tracking apps, we want to foreground two concerns for the body and work.The frst concern is related to how technologies embedded in workplaces shape workers' capacity to attend to bodywork.In gig work, the workplace constituted by the platform did not provide scope for workers to attend to their needs while working.Workers were presented with a binary choice, between earnings and bodily needs.In knowledge work, however, workers had some capacity to communicate their difering readiness to work and to draw on technologies to coordinate break times.In shift work, putting the body second was normal, and there were few ways to incorporate the bodywork needed within the working environment.
The second concern is related to privilege and the politics of bodywork [21].A signifcant part of coordinating bodywork at work has to do with others: colleagues and managers, as well as friends and family members outside of the work environment.It also includes people thought to be an example of an 'ideal' worker (real or imagined), and those who decide what that looks like.This unavoidably brings in the complexity of longstanding tensions of who has the privilege to prioritise their needs and schedules over others', and what counts as 'standard' behaviour of a body at work.The politics and privilege of bodywork were most salient upon breakdown.The experiences of pumping with a broken pump, pumping under surveillance, pushing through back pain to complete food deliveries so as to keep earning, and the valorisation of caring for patients while sleep-deprived, all surface deep-rooted assumptions of the body at work.

CONCLUSION
Employing the concept of bodywork as a framework within three distinct contemporary work environments, we conducted an indepth inquiry into the various practices individuals adopt to integrate their bodywork into their work lives and the impact that diverse technologies, weaved into socio-technical arrangements, had on their capacity to do so.This included balancing bodywork against the constraints and responsibilities of work, striving to optimise bodywork for productivity, coordinating with others where possible, and dealing with breakdowns in technology, bodies, and practices.While there has been research into the bodily experiences of working with and through technology, the intersection of bodily needs and work practice has often gone overlooked.Our work highlights that the need for bodywork cuts across diferent types of work and, crucially, that all systems are bodily systems.
We call for HCI research to take the fore in supporting workers in balancing their bodily needs and the needs of their employers, in collaboration with colleagues and family members, to develop ways in which careful surfacing and obfuscating of bodily needs can be managed.Not only do bodies leak, but bodywork also leaks across work-life boundaries.Embracing the collaborative aspects of managing work and the body, especially when there are breakdowns in either, and the extent to which this collaboration spreads within and outside of the working environment, presents opportunities for greater optimisation without sacrifcing wellbeing.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Tracking sleep using a ZEO headband, a product from a tracking company that went bankrupt in 2013 which is still recommended in online forums for tracking naps and segmented sleep.
.): "I think everyone is kind of disappointed with the way sleep trackers are out on the market now [...] people have tried to kind of make their own but it's a little hacky [...] it doesn't seem like modern-day sleep tracking has really paid attention to naps and tracking naps especially.A lot of the algorithms seem to be trained for 8-hour sleep sessions, so people who sleep segmented and things like that, the sleep trackers just don't know what to do with it." -S2 5.2.3 Breast pumping as a technology in knowledge work.Optimising pumping in knowledge work involves minimising logistics and time.Participants chose pumps based on their work situations.

Figure 2 :
Figure2: Three sketches showing portable breast pumps.Increasing in the order of wearability, the left-most is convenient to wear as it can be made hands-free with extra accessories; the middle one is semi-wearable, slightly smaller and can ft under clothes but the pump machine has to be held outside one's clothes; and the one on the right is the smallest and can be worn with the entire unit inside one's clothes.

5. 3 . 2
Shif work, sleep, and social obligations.Shift work inevitably leads to coordinating life outside of working hours.Sleep, because

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Gig workers at 'a waiting spot' where they have an occasion to interact with each other while waiting for order allocation.

Table 1 :
Summary of the cases, covering type of work, participant demographics, and the collected data

Table 2 :
Four dimensions of bodywork in gig, shift, and knowledge work.
Our results have covered four dimensions of bodywork in diferent work settings.First, we discussed the balance between caring for the body and meeting the requirements and needs of work.Second, we have considered attempts to optimise bodywork to ft with and maintain work commitments.Third, we discussed the needs of coordination at work -and in life outside of work -and how this also must be combined with the needs of the body.Lastly, we discussed breakdowns where things go wrong and either work or bodily needs, are sacrifced to deal with the failing of technology and/or practice.Throughout our fndings, we have seen how bodywork cuts across diferent work settings and how a range of technologies play varied roles in shaping how bodies are attended to and how that intersects with work practice.In what follows, we consider this in more depth, arguing that while some systems are explicitly designed with bodies in mind, ultimately all systems are bodily systems.