Glenn Fleishman has written a sad and wonderful piece about the subversive flipside of ubiquitous connectivity: ubiquitous work. He wrote it in response to this very good Infoworld column, but his piece is better.
I’m on the road all week, in one of my favorite cities on earth, one of the last great urban walking environments, a vibrant, beautiful city where the people talk fast, dress well, and are better entertainment than any performer you could pay to see. I have dozens of friends in this city. And I have a laptop with WiFi and a Sidekick email pager. My days here, my walks here, my peoplewatching and shopping here is sliced up into tiny chunklets, interrupted by the need to check in on my mail and cope with it before it gets too backlogged.
I’m not just talking about work-related stuff — hell, that stuff needs my attention and I’m glad to give it. I’m talking about the dross and the casual personal notes and the idle questions and the spam, of course, the 600+ daily bits of ping-and-pong, SYN-and-ACK that I exchange, just to keep all my plates a-spinning in my life. As Glenn says, “I believe that eternal work is as close to damnation as we’re allowed to see on this material plane.”
It’s one of my pet peeves that productivity is required to increase every month to indicate a healthy economy. In fact, increased productivity often comes at the expense of the family life so beloved by pro-business politicians. In the blue-collar world, increased productivity means a faster pace (and thus more accidents or decreased quality) or illegal off-the-clock hours. It rarely means more money.White-color workers of all stripes are expected to spend ever-more downtime hours working so their days start when they wake and check email, extend through the commute into the office, and follow them home and over weekends.
When my uncle worked at HP in the 80s and 90s as a manager, they tried to get him to take a very early personal computer home, and he refused. He knew they would demand that much more work from him on top of his long hours. (Ah, the days, when you could turn down a computer.)
To quote a popular phrase at Amazon.com after my time there: you can work long, hard, or smart; pick any three.