Give us all a break!

Michael Darragh
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

The first thing most of us reach for when we wake up is our phone. We check personal email or instant messages, look at social media updates and perhaps, check in on the news.

If we are one of the 44% of workers who use our phones for work email, this is also when our work day begins. From that moment, everything we do — get the kids ready for school, breakfast with our significant other, walk the dog — is done with a backdrop of task lists, planning and work stress. By the time we are physically at our office, we have spent much of our precious personal time thinking about work.

Then comes the work. Technology has blown open the doors of possibility and human potential. We are able to collaborate and move at an exponential pace, transforming entire systems of production, government and management. We have at our fingertips unprecedented processing power, storage and access to knowledge. It’s breathtaking, exciting, inspiring and exhausting.

We spend our work days striving and pushing ourselves to keep up with the breakneck pace of our brave new world, which emphasises ‘the now’ with an accelerated sense of time and timing. By the time we leave our offices for the day, we are intellectually spent, but we know our work is never done.

The statistics are startling. Fifty percent of workers check email while in bed. Thirty-eight percent routinely check email at the dinner table. Sixty percent of professionals keep in touch with the office for a full 13.5 hours per day and five more hours on the weekend for a grand total of 72 hours per week. Forty-four percent of professionals check work email daily while on vacation, and one in 10 of these unlucky individuals check it hourly. The constant emotional chatter and stress from work is unrelenting.

We are all headed straight for a brick wall of burnout, and senior leaders are in the front of the pack.

We are in desperate need of a collective intervention. We all need to admit that we need a break.

What happens when an athlete trains too hard for too long? Overtraining — a physical condition that results in poor performance, co-ordination and weaker muscles accompanied by exhaustion and apathy. It can take weeks or months to recover. Elite athletes and coaches know that in training there is a point of diminishing returns, and they emphasize the importance of rest.

The same is true for professionals. Professionals need recovery periods, where they are able to fully disconnect from work. During this time, they are out of bounds and can let go of that feeling of needing to check-in to make sure no one needs anything and everything is running smoothly.

Some companies have begun to take this issue seriously by implementing policies prohibiting employees from checking email during vacation and strongly encouraging them to unplug during other leisure time. Bandwidth CEO David Morken is one of the leaders taking this issue head saying “Make no mistake about it, I want overachievers on my team. But who can overachieve for the long term when they’re working 80 hours a week, never seeing their families and ignoring their physical health?”

Technology has created some unimaginable opportunities for business, but senior leaders need to start acknowledging that they and their employees are human and need to tame the technological beast in favour of work/life balance.


Originally published at elephant.md

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Michael Darragh

Written by

CEO of Elephant.md - Creative Technology Services with agility and economy for Global Brands.

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