Back to the past: Work and mobile technology

I SAW a fascinating headline about modern working practices last week, but I must confess I was not surprised by it. A new study has shown that the arrival of mobile technology in our lives has extended working days by two hours on average. Before we all took ownership of bright and shiny new smartphones that we were so sure would improve our lives, we tended to work about nine hours a day. That nine-hour a day figure is a huge generalization of course, but let’s assume it’s broadly accurate for the sake of argument.
Now that many of us own iPhones and Galaxy S3’s or whatever, we work 11-hour days on average, including two hours work from home. Wasn’t technology supposed to make our lives easier?
I do not find the revelation that we are now working longer surprising because I have seen it coming for some years now. I vividly remember working at a large German investment bank when one day all the senior staff were given BlackBerry smartphones. Back then, all a BlackBerry did was let you read and reply to work e-mails, but the novelty of being able to sit at home and read a message from a client was totally captivating. People quickly became absorbed by their new toys. I remember going up in the lift a week later with a couple of senior directors who knew each other well. In years gone by, these old friends would have spent the thirty seconds chatting before getting off at their separate floors and starting their day. Not anymore. Both were immersed, heads bowed, fingers flying over a tiny keyboard, oblivious to the world around them. Both got out without having exchanged a word. Work had begun to penetrate every waking minute of our lives.
What the survey last week actually found was that the modern worker spent two hours a day either calling the office or checking work e-mails from home. For a significant minority of workers, that figure is even higher, at three hours a day. For many people, checking work e-mails is the first thing they do in the morning and the last thing they do at night. The truth is the vast majority of us can now check our work e-mails on our phones and we are as a result on call 100 percent of the time.
This trend is as much about how portable our gadgets are as anything else. We can carry around in our hands a device through which we can access the world of work: A wonderfully exciting innovation, but a very recent one and one we are still adjusting to.
And it is all happening at a lightening fast pace: experts estimate that the word wide take up of smartphones is ten times faster than that of PCs. Not only can we now read emails, we can of course surf the internet. All on one tiny piece of metal and plastic. So I believe the phenomenon was visible a long time before broadband came into our homes with its super fast access to the world wide web. It started with the BlackBerry and in some ways we have gone downhill since.
If the major result of portable gadgetry is that we spend less time talking to each other, less time enjoying ourselves, and more time looking at a small, flashing screen, then it is right to question how exactly advances in consumer technology are helping us. It is fair to say that if we are working harder and spending less quality time with our families, then we have taken a backward step — gone back to the past.
Of course it is not all doom and gloom. Mobile technology arguably raises productivity — I say “arguably” because it is highly debatable; many would say these phones are a huge distraction during working hours because they have all manner of non-work related apps on them. But if productivity does rise that is good for business and — usually — what is good for business is good for jobs.
The other key positive is not being tied to your place of work. Advanced mobile technology, especially the new tablets, make working from home a realistic option. I have spoken to many employers over the years who are openly cool about this issue, but I now think they are stuck in the past. Study after study has shown that productivity rises if people work from home. People tend to take fewer breaks throughout the day and also fewer days off for sickness. They concentrate better. In countries where there are cultural or religious rules on male and female workers mixing at work, mobile technology is a great way to boost female unemployment.
I began with a confession and I will end with one: I am as guilty as anyone else of spending too much time tapping away on a smartphone, no doubt checking something that does not need to be checked or replying to an email that could easily wait until the next working day. My conclusion then is this: Mobile technology has the power to enrich our lives in many ways. But like anything else, if smartphones are overused they become dull and, as people, we become duller for overusing them. There is no reason why we should not draw a happy medium and define strictly when we use them. For office workers, how about cutting those two hours a day down to 30 minutes for a start? I for one shall do so immediately. As soon as I’ve checked my emails, that is...