The illusive free time

What is the incentive for any CXO to invest his/ her spare time towards anything related to work? Do organizations really expect 24X7 attention? The portable computer was just the beginning, the tablet is not the end; increased connectivity driven by technology advances in telecom coupled with mobile-enabled work processes as well as applications leave few areas unexplored. But these are optional to some extent and do not impact everyone in the same way. Reality is that work expands to fill all the time like traffic expands to take up available bandwidth in a network. Are you doing what matters?

So is there a way out? Different strategies work for different people. Some take the discretionary route to carefully decide what occupies their precious time. It could be reading newsletters, industry research, business magazines or management books, or just the general newspapers, fiction; and other categories like travel also find their place. It is the discipline that keeps them going. The time thus spent is invested in gaining perspectives or insights that could help in various walks of life. The remaining choose to stay away from such mundane activities.

The dying habit of reading

While I make a general observation from my limited span of friends, colleagues and acquaintances I have interacted with, the fact is that reading as a habit or investment is waning. Most IT professionals slog to acquire various degrees and certifications, but stop short of expanding horizons. This is despite the fact that it is a lot easier to find information in all forms, print or digital. Reasons and excuses revolve around paucity of time, to work pressures to just plain inertia.

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/Oh-I-See/learning-never-ends-neither-does-work/feed/ 0 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/Oh-I-See/cio-vacations/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/Oh-I-See/cio-vacations/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 07:48:21 +0000 Arun Gupta http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/Oh-I-See/?p=335 Earlier this month I was confronted by a peculiar but innocent question from a young professional: “Do CIOs take real vacations, I mean, real long vacations with friends and family, free from all the worries of workplace and fighting fires that keep them at work beyond the normal hours?”

I began to wonder about the question. The more I thought about it, the more it troubled me; I mean, vacations without my email, phone, laptop, no connectivity; that was eons ago.

Today every executive, irrespective of hierarchy, is consumed by the need to stay connected with the workplace. Downloaded information and alerts keep the buzz going 24X7. Approvals via phone, business intelligence on the fly, are the norm; one cannot ever claim: “I was not informed” or “I did not have access to information”. To add to the clutter, friends and partners want to stay connected using various social networks.

So what is the vacation about? Working on the road with interruptions on the phone, balancing the laptop in between site-seeing trips, late night responses to emails with long attachments, talking to a vendor while soaking into the natural beauty staring in the face? For most of us who travel across time zones, the first reflex is to reach out to the phone to see what came through while we caught up with the forty winks.

What does it take to sell the Ferrari and become a monk who has no links with what we call ‘work’, while immersing into ‘life’. Is that a possibility in the hyper-connected, fast paced activity-conundrum? We CIOs created this paradigm for our enterprises to which every corporate employee is a willing slave.

Imagine if we did not answer the phone (may make us appear rude), stopped responding to emails and had an active ‘Out of Office’ message, let team fight the fires that make up a regular day at work; would it make a stress free day? Nine out of 10 times, people would say, ‘yes’, but nine out of 10 times they will suffer higher stress levels, wondering about what is, indeed, happening.

So is there a way out? I would hazard to say, ‘yes’. And it requires excruciating will power to execute; go at it one hour at a time. That is like taking baby steps and setting a realistic target because stating that I will not look at that device called the phone for a week is unlikely to happen. Feeling awkward, I called many CIO friends who took vacations recently and asked them if they did what I have outlined above. No prizes for the result of the survey.

I think Bob Dylan had seen the future when he wrote in the year I was born: “The answer my friend…”

Guess what, next vacation I am going to try it. (It’s always the next one, isn’t it?)

“Go ahead, mix your worlds,” proudly says an advertisement by a mobile service provider, justifying the jumbling up of internet social media world and the workplace.

Disappearance of personal space, time
Ever since the time of portable computers to the current paradigm of everything on the handheld device, be it mobile, tablet or the laptop, work transgressed the boundaries of what was earlier a 9 to 5 or whatever hours people worked. The dividing line between what was referred to as work and life has disappeared.

It is normal to expect a response to a mail 24X7 and many obliged. In an interconnected world, with business being conducted across time zones, this became a way of life. Umpteen cases have reflected the damage this phenomena causes to friends, family, and the individual.

As we grew up through school, there was a sense of relief that there will be no homework when we start attending a job in an enterprise. The irony of the situation is that work has expanded to fill all the time beyond the cubicle or cabin reaching the bedroom, thus permeating every nook and corner of life, threatening to follow like the shadow.

A state of imbalance
So a debate on work-life balance is an exercise in intellectual stimulation; the reality for most executives is that balance is a utopian state never to be reached, with the swing all the way towards work. So if work activities are standard fare, why not allow the life to creep into the workplace?

Why do organizations abhor the thought of employees occasionally checking personal email or posting a few updates on social or micro-blog sites but expect them to work on the presentation or spread sheet while traveling or in their homes? Security is one of the justifications and then corporate data travels all over the world. Consultants will tout productivity loss due to distractions not recognizing the gains in after office hours.

This is more so now with the IT function with networks, ERP systems, messaging and collaboration, you name it, is buzzing with activity through the day and night. Downtime, what’s that? And then, the scheduled downtime shifts again and again until the breakpoint is imminent. CIOs struggle to retain teams engaged in keeping these aspects running. Weekends, holidays, vacations belong to an era gone by; the executive is now chained on a Wi-Fi, GPRS, or 3G network which cannot be unshackled.

Role of IT policies
IT and work policies straightjacket the behavior on premise and often off premises too when using corporate assets like the laptop, smartphone or others. We all accept using these as a way of life. Progressive organizations have taken a lenient view of some digression; as of date, they are the exceptions. I believe that productivity will be higher when knowledge workers have the flexibility to escape a few times. Unfortunately, there are no empirical data or solutions to validate this. Contradictory claims make such decisions difficult while burnouts continue. Incidences of fatality are getting younger with stress induced by work pressures and lifestyles that may get promotions, but what is a promotion worth when you are dead?

I don’t know what can help alleviate the issue; unless life is allowed to creep into the work hours.

P.S. I wrote this past the midnight hour on Saturday.