Before the early 1990s, if you wanted to work from home, it was tough. “Briefcases weren't big enough to contain a file drawer's worth of information, and there was no easy way to look at a set of engineering drawings or a year's worth of monthly budget printouts on the kitchen table,” Mr. Gordon writes. As technology made it simple to download two years' worth of numbers from home, people hailed the technology as a godsend.
Then, the ability to work anywhere at any time slowly turned into an expectation to work everywhere, all the time. If Mary down the hall could crank out 12 e-mail messages at 3 a.m., why couldn't the rest of the team? And as more work landed with a weighty, if virtual, thud on the home office desk each evening, personal tasks – from making doctor's appointments and scheduling car maintenance to, what the hey, a little rest and relaxation – weren't necessarily ignored, but reassigned to the hours between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
“Because we can work any time, anywhere, we have a tendency to also take more personal time within the workday,” says Kerul Kassel, author of Stop Procrastinating Now: Five Radical Procrastination Strategies to Set You Free.
In fact, according to some time-management experts, because we've become so dependent on working outside 9 to 5, many employees are actually less productive during regular business hours. If you know you can finish the report at 10 p.m., why not do a little Christmas shopping online right now? Not surprisingly, the shopper gets behind at work and has to catch up at night.
And the cycle continues.
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Time's a wastin'
Xerox Canada Ltd., decided to tackle another productivity problem – too much useless office e-mail – so employees could be more industrious during business hours and not feel pressured to take work home. Sasha Fraser, senior counsel for the company, spearheaded the project and helped employees learn to use online bulletin boards rather than sending out the same e-mails every few weeks.
And don't get her started on the problem of copying e-mail to everyone. Over-inclusiveness is a big no-no now. Research shows that it takes an employee one minute to read and process a new e-mail. Send one e-mail out to 300 to 500 people and you've just lost the equivalent of one employee's entire working day, Ms. Fraser says.
The message caught on. A couple of months after employees received a training module on proper e-mail use, one employee sent out a mass e-mail to alert everyone he'd found a lost Starbucks card.
“I took a walk around the floor to cool off and I heard at least two cubicle conversations along the lines of, ‘Can you believe the e-mail [he] just sent?' ” she says.
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In a crisis
This isn't to say that technology does more harm than good when it comes to working agreeable hours. Before computerization, employees often simply stayed at the office rather than coming home for dinner and working later.
And when it comes to handling emergencies, some technology can't be beat. Take Rove Mobile, a software company in Ottawa that provides software for handhelds such as the BlackBerry. The products allow users to manage networks remotely. Rob Woodbridge, president and CEO, says business is booming as handheld screen resolution gets better and wireless connections pick up speed.
“I would say we've been in hibernation for the last six years waiting for this market to arrive,” he says of the seven-year-old company.
A company client, Billy Zhao, manager for client connectivity at Deutsche Bank in New York has been using the software for about five months. It gives him peace of mind that if there's a system outage and there's no one close to a computer to handle the emergency, he can log on using his handheld and fix the problem.
“It could mean the difference between an extended outage with a potential for a lot of lost revenue, and being able to get back up on our feet,” he says.
