Submitted by: Submitted by slhu
Views: 12
Words: 350
Pages: 2
Category: English Composition
Date Submitted: 03/16/2015 05:14 AM
How Technology Can Help Work/Life Balance
Smartphones have made it more difficult than ever for people to separate their jobs from the rest of their lives. It doesn’t have to be that way.
They’re convenient. They let us work anywhere and anytime. But they also play on our anxieties and insecurities and leave us much more bound to work than we used to be.
My research shows that people use their smartphones so much outside of business hours—reading and responding to streams of messages from the office—that many end up putting in 13 hours or more a day. But they’re not doing that extra work because they want to. They’re doing it because they feel compelled to, and because the smartphone makes it so easy.
Want to show you’re responsive and dedicated? The smartphone makes it seductively simple to answer emails immediately, at all hours. And because it’s so easy, people start to worry if they don’trespond to notes quickly all the time. Especially if their colleagues seem to be writing and replying more than they do.
Meanwhile, companies see this process at work and push it even further. They not only expect people to be available at all hours, they make it necessary by wasting people’s time from 9 to 5—filling their days with endless meetings, for instance, or overflowing their inboxes with notes that take forever to sort through. Bosses figure: Why not? There’s no limit to the amount of time people can continue working.
In short, smartphones have gone a long way toward making work a race to the bottom. People’s lives are more tied to work than ever, employee time has been devalued because it’s no longer finite, and inefficiencies have spread uncontrollably throughout organizations.
Some businesses try to address these issues by exhorting employees to do things like triage their inbox more effectively, or turn off email after hours or when on vacation. But those fixes ignore the human factor—the anxiety that makes people feel they must keep in touch to protect...