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Never-Ending Workday
It's 7:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and Claire O'Connor is helping her seven-year-old daughter, Blaise, get ready for school -- with one eye on her BlackBerry. While the self-employed New York public relations consultant was asleep last night, she received more than 25 e-mails, and she's anxious to check them."My business depends on clients being able to reach me when they need to," she says. These days, "when they need to" is anytime at all.
Before her head hits the pillow tonight, O'Connor will field some 400 e-mails, 100 phone calls and 20 text messages. She takes little comfort in knowing that few of the messages demand urgent attention. That's because she'll have to sift through them all before determining which are important. Somehow she'll try to find chunks of time to get some actual work done.
"I never really feel like I'm finished for the day," O'Connor says. There's always one more task, one more call, one more e-mail. And no matter where she goes, her BlackBerry and cell phone are close by.
Always on like most responsible people, O'Connor grew up believing she had to finish her homework before she could go out to play. Now, for her and many of the rest of us, the homework never seems to end. Surveys show that the average office worker sends and receives 108 e-mails a day -- an onslaught of electronic clutter that can take hours to slog through. Even when we manage to clear out the in-box and escape our desks, most of us are still reachable by cell phone or some other handheld device. Sure, these gadgets add convenience and fun to our lives, but there's a price to be paid.
"Technology is allowing us to do things we've never been able to do, and it's positively incredible," says Edward M. Hallowell, MD, author of CrazyBusy. "The downsides are that it's addictive and you can become tied to it in ways that are exhausting."
There's little evidence that the rapid pace of technological innovation has made life markedly more enjoyable. In fact, it may be doing the opposite. Consider a 2007 survey by the American Psychological Association (APA), which found that 48 percent of Americans feel their lives have become more stressful in the past five years. Then consider that all our electronic communication hasn't slowed the raging flood of snail mail, memos, books, magazines and other print matter that most people read to keep up on the job. No wonder that more than a third of those surveyed by the APA said a major factor feeding their stress was work encroaching on personal time.
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