ABSTRACT
Ping! Bing! Chime! Sit in any office for more than a few minutes and you will hear a cacophony of notifications alerting people that they have new e-mails, chats, text messages, tweets and posts. You can see workers flinch at their desk as they are assaulted by the alarms. We are constantly connected, pecking out messages on our smart phones in
meetings, at the dinner table, even waiting in line for coffee. While the Internet and mobile devices have given us the freedom to not be chained to a desk, they have also resulted in us being perpetually tethered to the office. The average professional in the US works 46.5 hours per week, the most of any country in the world (Chui, Manyika, Bughin, Dobbs, Roxburgh, Sarrazin, Sands, & Westergren, 2012). And it’s making people miserable. In a 2009 survey by The Conference
Board (Franco, Gibbons, & Barrington, 2010), only 45 percent of respondents said they were happy with their job, the lowest satisfaction rate in twenty-two years. It’s also hurting performance with long hours, diminishing the ability to think. A study published by Virtanen, Heikkila, Jokela, Ferrie, Batty, Vahtera, & Kivimaki (2012) found that workers who put in fifty-five hours per week scored lower on vocabulary tests than those who worked a forty-hour week, and workers ran a greater risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression as well as developing dementia later in life. For some, staying connected borders on addiction. In a survey of eighteen-to
thirty-year-olds in Cisco Connected World Technology Report (2012), one in three people considered the Internet to be as important as air, water, food and shelter, and more than half claimed they could not live without the Internet, citing it as an integral part of their lives. Some respondents said it was even more essential than owning a car, dating and socializing with friends.
