Do you take work home? Do you check your work email in the evening and on the weekends? That's such a workaholic thing to do right? What about calls or emails from people at work expecting responses during non-work hours? What defines your work time and your non-work time?
This is such an interesting topic and changing a lot lately with the work world. One of the books I recently read and liked a ton was, "The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World" by Vince Poscente. (Random sidebar: so the book is pretty short and is about speed, but it took me a while to finish, not because it was boring, but because I'm a slow reader - I just thought that was ironic given the title). In this book, it talks about the increasing blur between work and home. The book references the origin of the location of work - going back to when society shifted from agricultural to industrial. What happened was workers moved from being on the farm (living where you work/working where you live) to working in factories. So, once that shift happened, work was defined by where you were - if you're at the factory, you're at work, if you're home you're at home. Location was everything, it was impossible to work at the factory if you were at home.
So, clearly a lot has changed since then. I actually saw this progress through observing my dad's career. When I was a kid, my dad was a plant manager at a textile company in Providence, RI and much like the reference above, there really was no way for him to take work home and computers weren't really used a lot (this was before the days of internet, laptops, and smart phones). Later in his career, he work in the title field (doing real estate title searches as a part of the property transaction process). Doing this type of work, there was a ton of homework - finishing up the day's work and prepping for the next day utilizing technology in a way that was never possible in his previous job 15 years earlier.
It's kind of obvious that technology advances make us more accessible to our work. We can leave work, but still get called or emailed anytime and any place on our smartphone and get roped back into work. We can do video conference meetings to anywhere in the world. I'm sure there are a lot of other cool technology advances and communication methods that I don't know about or don't use in my field. Ultimately, all these things just create an increase in ways for our work to bleed into our home life.
So, how does this stuff affect you and your work and/or life? Why is that that we feel loyal and dedicated when we take care of work at home, but feel guilty taking a personal call at work? Am I the only one who feels that way? Let's talk about it. How does the mix of work and home take effect in your life?
