Always On or Never Off; Three Thoughts on a More Balanced Mindset
A slightly different take on work-life balance, whatever that is…
Boundaries
Recently my wife and I were talking about healthy boundaries for work, especially in the context of working at home.
Whilst we were talking, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague and friend about 15 years ago. Over a sandwich, we got to talking about the subtle and yet real distinction between ‘Always-on’ and ‘Never-off’ mentalities.
This was 2010. Work-Life balance had become a real thing. We were wedded to our BlackBerrys — we called them CrackBerries, because of the addictive reaction once that little red notification light started flashing. The iPhone was becoming a main stream business tool, and the potential of having all of that knowledge and processing power in our palms was very apparent.
We were both old enough to remember professional life pre-laptops, pre-cell phones. When we logged-out of Lotus 123 and powered off our desktop computers at the end of the day, headed for the door, and left work at work.
We talked about how it was relatively easier, in those far off days, to maintain and differentiate the work and home personas. At work, we were the work versions of ourselves. At home, we only needed to be the home versions of ourselves, or at the very least, the non-work versions of ourselves.
It was a simpler time.
We talked about how the ‘new’ technology was creating a world where the distinctions between the personas was blurring. How we had the growing expectation to be always-on, and how we always had carried a part of ourselves that was never-off.
We talked about how maybe adopting a never-off mentality to this work intrusion was maybe the better way to manage the shifting balance.
Always-On, or Never-Off
The distinction between the active state of being always-on and a more passive state of being never-off lies in the nature and implications of how work and personal life intersect. While both involve a degree of continuous connection to responsibilities, the quality and impact of this connection differ significantly.
The always-on state is marked by an active, often stressful engagement with our responsibilities, and usually skews to work topics. In this state, we make ourselves continuously available and responsive, never far from emails, Teams chats, phone calls, and maintain a posture that is primed to address work-related issues regardless of the time or place.
This constant readiness can be stressful, as the brain never fully disconnects from work. The relentless demand for attention and immediate response creates an environment where we find it hard to achieve genuine relaxation and mental recuperation. That said, maintaining an always-on approach may also help with stress; for some personality styles, the stress is created by have to quickly ramp up attention in an area of life.
In contrast, never-off refers to a more passive state of latent attention. Any parent will be able to identify with this state — there is always a part of our background processing that is always given over to our kids. And when kids need us, we find it relatively easy to ramp that background processing to a full and immediate state of attention.
A never-off way of being is an awareness of our responsibilities without the immediate pressure to act. It allows us to stay attuned to our responsibilities and concerns in a way that doesn’t dominate the here-and-now.
The more inert state of being never-off brings about a stronger sense of continuity and integration between work and home personas. It allows for a more holistic approach to both, enabling us to stay connected to our professional identities and responsibilities while still keeping the things that are important to us in our personal realm in close consciousness.
Unlike the always-on state, which disrupts personal time with urgent demands, the never-off state keeps a background awareness that develops readiness and responsiveness without unduly sacrificing personal well-being.
Work-life Balance, Context Shifting and Trying to Do it All
The always-on / never-off conversation was about work-life balance, of course. What I’ve recently realised is that the conversation was also about context shifting.
The term “work-life balance” originated in the 1970’s and 1980’s, as a response to the increasing demands of the workplace and the evolving dynamics of family and personal life.
The concept initially grew out of the women’s liberation movement, as more women entered the workforce and sought to balance their professional roles with their responsibilities at home.
By the 1990’s, the term began to be used more broadly to encompass the general experience of the encroachment of work into traditional non-work time, fueled by the rise and rise of knowledge workers and the Knowledge Economy.
Technological advances spurred the encroachment even further. The freedom of not needing to work in the office to be productive came with the cost of being always on, and a growing expectation of immediacy.
The multi-tasking hustle was with us. We began to believe that we good be productive workers, attentive parents, loving partners, exciting friends and contributing citizens all at once, all the time.
“Context shifting” has emerged as way of better defining the work-life balance conundrum. The concept is rooted in cognitive psychology and the study of multitasking, where it refers to the mental process of switching between different tasks or areas of focus.
Early research on multitasking and cognitive load in the mid-20th century laid the groundwork for understanding how humans handle multiple tasks and how shifting between them affects performance and efficiency. Researchers have found that frequent shifts can lead to decreased productivity and increased errors due to the time and mental effort required to reorient oneself to a new context.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the concept of context shifting gained prominence with the advent of digital technologies and the proliferation of information channels. As personal computers, the internet, and mobile devices became integral to work and daily life, the frequency and necessity of context shifts increased dramatically.
The impact of digital multitasking, the constant context switching that our devices ask of us, impairs cognitive function, reduces attention span, and elevates stress levels.
This research has underscored the significant mental costs of the always-on culture, where we are asked to pay attention to and try to juggle multiple streams of information and tasks simultaneously.
Adjusting
Over that sandwich, my colleague and I likened the always-on / never-off distinction to a stock-standard modern TV. Technically, the TV, once plugged into the mains supply, is never ‘off’. It’s just awaiting the instruction from the remote control to become what we would call ‘on’.
I think if we were having the same conversation today, we’d probably build the analogy around the smart phone, and the applications that it runs.
Our phone are always on, but to what degree are they never off? That distinction depends on the applications that are installed on the phone, how we’ve provisioned those applications with their respective permissions, and how we mange those applications once we use them.
Curate the applications. Like many things in life, the applications on our phones have a way of accumulating, somewhat insidiously. We install them for a specific task or event, and forget that they’re there.
They hover in the latent space of our phone’s capacity, taking up memory draining the battery, diminishing processing power, and unwittingly, they limit the space available for something New and Useful. Often times it’s only when we actually need that New and Useful thing do we realise that there’s not enough space for, and that we have to go through a rushed and hurried exercise of shedding that which is not useful.
Another way of going about this is to frequently survey and curate the applications installed. What are they, and why are they there? Are they just-in-case applications? Are they applications that were once useful, or were timebound in their lifespan, and hence no longer relevant? Do they need to be deleted, or at the very least archived away?
I hope, dear reader, you’re getting the metaphor here.
Set-up the apps with care and intention. Once we’ve figured out what apps are needed, we need to figure out how they best behave for us to get the most out of them.
Do we need notifications from those apps? Does the app need to chew up background data to ensure it’s always up to date, or is it okay for the app to update only when it’s in actual use? Where does the app need to ‘live’ in our home screen set-up? Is there any kind of logic to our home screen set-up?
All of this needs to be a function of intention, and ideally the processing of these intentions that occurs when we’re deciding to install the app from the app-store.
Again, I hope the metaphor tracks, dear reader.
Close the apps that aren’t needed, when they’re not needed. This is where the always-on/never-off metaphor really hits.
If you’re like me, you’re not very disciplined about closing apps once you’ve used them.
I’ll check something random that catches my attention, like who-was-that-actor-and-what-else-were-they-in. I’ll open the IMDB app, get my answer (it was Mads Mikkelsen, and the movie I was thinking of was Casino Royale)and then move on with my life. The app is still open on my phone.
I have no idea if I set it to not run background data, so I don’t know if any of my phone’s background processing is being hampered, or what impact that’s having on my data plan or my battery life.
In this case, after checking, it turns out I had set the app up not to run background data. That was more serendipitous than intentional.
The point is that I didn’t go that extra step and close the app once I’d finished with it. I just left it hanging in a sort of no-man’s land. On, but not useful. The right thing to do was to close the app as soon as I had finished using it.
There are, however, some apps that are constantly and consistently useful, and it would be prudent to ensure that these are running in the background, never fully off, but not always on.
Breaking-down the metaphor, dear reader, the apps are code for our roles and interests in life.
There are some roles that it is appropriate, good and right to be never-off. The roles of life-partner, parent, child. There are some interests that are life-giving and good for the soul.
Regardless of what’s happening in the foreground of our lives, we’re never-off in these roles. We’re also not always-on in these roles, but because we hold them in a never off state, we should, by design, be able to click into these roles quickly and efficiently when required.
We choose the roles and interests that are truly important to us, and intentionally manage those roles so that we can context-shift effectively between those roles.
Then there are those roles and ‘interests’ that drain our energy and chew up our bandwidth. Work. Social media. News. Mind-numbing games. In isolation, and in the moment, none of these are bad, per say.
Where they begin to denigrate our lives is in the accumulation, and even worse when they subtly creep into an always-on state.
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This take on work-life balance is, admittedly, a bit abstract, and the metaphor is possible a stretch, but it’s beginning to make sense to me.
There’s an irony that I’ve faced in writing this article.
It has taken weeks to write. I’ve found that very frustrating, as I’ve had it lingering in the background, whirring away in the back of my mind.
It’s been a real example of an ‘app’ that I’ve had running in the background.
It’s been almost impossible to close the app, and keep it closed until I’ve been ready to open it again.
Now that it’s done, I’ll be able to close this particular app, for good, and turn my attention to another, new app.
