Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career - Gil Gordon - Paperback - 1 ED

Chapter 1 How Did We Become So Attached to Our Offices? None of us wakes up one day and decides, "I think I'll give up my free time on weekends, answer my pages during dinner with my spouse, and carry my laptop on vacation." Those intrusions of work into our personal time result from a process of slow erosion, not sudden upheaval. As employees, we ourselves have unwittingly contributed to that process and ended up stretching our workdays and workweeks. One of the characteristics of office work up to the 1980s (and thus before the deluge of technology) was the containment of most office work within the office. Certainly, the briefcases came home, the traveling businessperson worked on a plane or in a hotel room, and the sales rep caught up on paperwork in the car. But when far less office work was as easily portable as it is today, the types of work that could be packed into that briefcase were much more limited. Employees who still had items on their to-do lists at 5 p.m. were more likely to stay late in the office than to simply pack up the briefcase and plan to finish everything after dinner. Briefcases weren't big enough to contain a file drawer's worth of information, and there was no easy way to look at a set of engineering drawings or a year's worth of monthly budget printouts on the kitchen table. At-home evening and weekend work was mostly limited to reading, drafting memos and reports on yellow pads, and grinding out budgets using a pocket calculator -- absolutely archaic activities by today's standards. If we fast-forward to the late 1990s, we can see that the limitations on the kinds of work that could be done from afar disappeared almost entirely. Looking for the sales reports from the last two quarters? Just log on to the corporate network and download the files. Need to get out a rush memo to the entire sales force? Draft it on your laptop and upload it to the mail server, and it's in the sales reps' mailboxes in seconds. While every aspect of every job was not portable, enough were to enable most office workers to leave at a more desirable hour, get home in time for dinner, and still be able to finish the day's work at home after having had at least a little time with the spouse or family over the dinner table. So far so good -- until the point when those of us taking work home slipped into some bad habits. The idea that came to us for the new marketing campaign could now be sketched out on the laptop at 10 p.m.; instead of being hastily scribbled down on a note to be taken into the office and worked on the next day. The budget planning that was going on with the overseas offices could now be compressed from weeks to days because global fax and e-mail meant that the morning message sent from Tokyo could be read in the evening -- at home -- by the financial analyst from the New York office, and so on. You might ask, "What's wrong with that? Isn't business life today all about doing things faster and faster? Isn't it good to be able to save time by taking advantage of these tools?" The answer is, of course, yes -- but I believe it's a qualified yes. No doubt there are times when a faster response is not only better but absolutely essential. The problem arises when the people involved don't differentiate between the value of and need for having it faster on one hand and the desire to have it faster just because someone can send that e-mail from home at 11 p.m. There are many benefits to being able to work extended hours at home instead of staying until all hours in the office and making do with a vending machine sandwich for dinner while your spouse or family stares at your empty chair at the table. It's great to be able to do increasingly sophisticated, complex office work at home; it's not so great when we aren't able to close the door (literally or figuratively) on the home office and wind up working well into time we'd rather resGordon, Gil is the author of 'Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career - Gil Gordon - Paperback - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780609806975 and ISBN 0609806971.