A GTalk friend from a close friend, even as you are clearing your work email..
While you are enjoying your dinner at a restaurant, with your family, a Banjo alert suggesting that a colleague is within 500 meters of you..
You are making a presentation to your team, and an incoming Skype call rings, even while your computer screen is projected up there..
And with such criss-crossing of life, you ending up sitting late to clear your backlog, or unable to catch up on any reading, etc.
You may consider this as a stressed out life or at least a very busy one.
I am trapped into this kind of life a fair bit, even though I am conscious about it, and have made few attempts to grapple with it.
But all in all, it is challenging.
Analyzing the situation, I am leaning towards the following reason for the challenge:
Our Unified Life on an Omnipresent Device!!
Where does personal life end and work life start?
Time was when at 6-30 / 7 pm or whenever you closed shop, shut the briefcase and went home, the physical separation from work ensured that one life closed and another began.
Even when laptops came by, but until the Internet was not that big, you only carried “some” homework, which perhaps you worked on, at home.
Then came email, and it got just a little more pervasive.
And it’s been all downhill since. From the Blackberry (never used one, but have known many who are / were slaves to it!), to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Banjo, etc. etc. and all of their phone apps. From cheaper Internet access to 3G and now heading to 4G, so that all of these not only come to you whenever and wherever, but they also come cheap and fast!
In the circumstances, it is hard to work in silos of life.
And then, in absence of the silos, you are constantly switching, and for every switch that you do, there is loss of efficiency, and a loss of quality as well!
I continue to be in this trap, and working hard to resurrect myself.
Can I switch off my phone once I am home? I know a friend who does that. He says those who really must call him, know his home number, and the rest can wait till the next day!
Can I work with one app, one window open, and shut everything off, when I am working? So I don’t check the browser when I am on my Excel sheet, or even when I am on the browser and reading some interesting research, I don’t need to attend to the email that pops in, into Gmail..?
Can I switch off my phone at the restaurant, or at least disable some of the apps for that time?
What are the kind of changes that are required? How do I get out of the trap?
I know few – very few – of my friends who have managed to “manage” their life in this kind of a situation. Most others, including yours truly, are struggling to find a way out.
If you have any interesting solutions to suggest here, do comment..
Random Musings 