Work 24/7 - The Connected Life

As a self-employed freelance designer, I’m used to working odd hours to fulfill client requests. Sometimes I work late into the evening and other times I wake up early to finish a project. While other days, I work only during the day while the kids are in school. But in the end, I limit myself to roughly 30 hours a week to leave time to do everything else that fills my life.

My husband, on the other hand, is a full-time employee elsewhere. He actually works as a systems engineer to support a health-care system, which means he does have some on-call time. He and his co-workers seem to work not just their regular day, but also at night and seemingly whenever they can.

I wondered if his situation was unique, and then I realized how often I have been working late and a client has actually responded! Just last week, I was working as a sub-contractor for an agency who was tasked with creating a web site for a legal organization. I sent an email to both my contact at the agency, and the client representative at 10pm one evening. I was shocked when just five minutes late BOTH men responded to my email! We continued to carry on a work-related email conversation for about 30 minutes before the task at hand was finished.

So when I take all of this in, I realize that even for full-time employees the “normal” work-week seems to have disappeared. PDAs, Email, instant messaging, even new web apps like Twitter keep us connected 24/7–to work as well as to friends and family.  We’re so connected, it seems, we don’t ever “log out” of work. I can’t help but wonder if all this connectivity isn’t going to come back to bite us in the end. What do you think?