William RevilleIn 1930, in a beautifully written essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within 100 years we would all be working a 15-hour week because of advances in technology, industrialisation and mechanisation.
Alas, 85 years later, the reality for many of us is that advances in computing, communication and information technology have had the unanticipated side effect of shackling us to our workplaces throughout most of our waking hours. And many people also voluntarily waste significant amounts of personal time vacantly ‘surfing’ the internet.
I will deal with the work-related issue first. Letters are rarely written and sent through the national post or the internal post system at work anymore. Most personal letters to friends and family are now sent by email and almost all communications at work are by email or text message.
The old-fashioned postal system has built-in lag phases. It takes at least 24 hours for a letter to be delivered by An Post and at least another day before the sender receives a letter in reply. This system allows us time to breathe and to consider.
On the other hand emails and text messages are delivered to the recipient immediately after you click ‘send’ on your computer or smartphone and they subtly demand an immediate response as they wink at you from the inbox. Also, with the advent of the smartphone, we are all instantly reachable throughout our waking hours.
Email was supposed to create or free up time for us at work, e.g. sending an e-mail instead of scheduling a face-to-face meeting, but now because we are all instantly contactable 24/7, work emails invade our out-of-work lives, haranguing us to respond and extending the workday indefinitely. Many people feel compelled to check work-related emails in the evening, on weekends, on holidays and even on sick-leave days. And some companies apparently encourage employees to be available to deal with work emails outside work hours, for example the Amazon corporation was recently accused of routinely sending emails to employees after midnight, followed by texts asking why the emails hadn’t been answered!
Not surprisingly all this continuous connection exerts a health cost as demonstrated in a new study by Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Volume 28, 2015 (http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-45450-001). The authors coined the name ‘telepressure’ for the urge to respond immediately to emails, regardless of when they are received. When you open work emails at home in the evenings they activate and lengthen your to-do list and expose you to workplace stressors. The study found that people who feel more telepressure also report poor quality sleep, higher levels of burnout and more sick leave from work.
Another recent study by Marcus Butts and others in Academy of Management Journal, Volume 58, June 2015 (http://amj.aom.org/content/58/3/763.abstract), focused on the emotional effects of emails received during non-work hours. Butts identified two categories of workers – segmentators and integrators. Segmentators want to keep work and personal life separate; integrators want to know what is going on at work when they receive emails or texts outside work-hours.
Butts found that out-of-work hours emails that were negative in tone or required a lot of time to deal with, made both integrators and segmentators angry. However, the segmentators got more angry than the integrators and the annoying emails interfered with their personal lives, preventing them from engaging in non-work life. Integrators got angry as well, but the annoying emails didn’t interfere much with their personal lives.
Family time
Out-of-work-hours emails are a significant problem for many people, robbing them of important family time, time with friends, time for sports, exercise and recreation, time for reading and personal growth, and so on.
Fifty two percent of Americans consult these out-of-work-hours emails even when they take a sick day, feeling that to ignore them is more stressful than sending off a quick response. The whole thing is just a bad habit and like any habit it takes a little effort to change. But the effort is worth it. It is best to send, read and reply to work-related emails only during normal office hours, except in unusual circumstances.
Many people, myself included, spend too much time on the internet. For some reason ‘surfing’ the internet is mildly mesmerising. You never feel satisfied – there is always a new search term that you can try. Hours can slip by with little useful information coming back. And many people are also heavy users of social media.
This problem can range in severity from mild time-wasting to full blown internet addiction. In 2008 the American Journal of Psychiatry advocated that internet addiction be added to the list of officially recognised addictions.
A 2012 study of nearly 12,000 adolescents in 11 European countries (T. Durkee and others, Addiction, December 2012 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22621402) found a 4.4% incidence of ‘pathological internet use’, i.e. spending so much time online it affected necessary social and professional activities resulting in either mental distress or clinical impairment. And 13.5% of subjects were categorised as ‘maladaptive internet users’, characterised by problematic but not fully disruptive behaviour. Problematic users were also more likely to suffer from psychological conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and OCD.
Emails, text messages and the internet are wonderful tools when used properly but most of us succumb to the temptation of overusing these tools to some extent. A small application of personal discipline is enough to correct such bad habits in most cases. A very small proportion of people suffer from internet addiction, a problem that calls for professional help.
*William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC http://understandingscience.ucc.ie