We’ve all heard of work-life balance or work-life integration. Regardless of what you want to call it, one thing seems to be clear. We are spending more time bringing our personal lives to work and our work lives home to our personal lives. At conferences I’m frequently asked what I think of this blurring of work and life. From what I have seen, if you don’t like your job, you’re more likely to have clear-cut boundaries between your work life and your personal life. Once the clock hits 5 or 6pm then you’re out of there and don’t want to see, hear, or think about work for the rest of the night!
But, if you love what you do, those lines become less clear cut. Suddenly you don’t mind working later at night or early in the morning; you find yourself having fun while you work and it becomes harder to actually distinguish what work really is. In other words the more you love what you do the more blurring there is.
However, we are moving towards a world where everyone is going to be more connected more of the time. This means that a bit of work/life blurring is going to inevitably happen. In fact, we are already seeing this as companies deploy various collaboration platforms. Many employees around the world are already having a hard time balancing connectivity with availability, just because you are connected doesn’t mean you are always available.
Ultimately, it will be up to us to manage our work/life balance in an effective way. I explore this in more detail in the latest episode of The Future in 5 live from Madrid, Spain. Leave me a comment and tell me what you think!
Hi! I think that the whole concept of Worklife balance indicates that there is work and there is life and as a consequence there is no life in work. Which is misleading. I would instead call it “life balance” regardless of work or not…
Hi. I agree on Pia-Marias comment below. And would like to emphasize the word “balance”. I do not think is so much of a question of liking your job or not. It is more dependent on the amout of creativitiy, problem solving, development in the work tasks. Elements which are dominating the work day for knowledge workers. As a knowledge worker you have to be and want to be updated with news, research, gossip, etc which are or may be relevant to the tasks you are obliged to solve. And here the problem starts.
My term for this is digital stress. “Digital” means 1) an overwhelming stream of information (in any knowledge area) which the knowledge worker needs to qualify, “is this information relevant for my task or not”. And once qualified the information has circulated in such pace that the knowledge worker again have to qualify hir or hers earler qualification of information. And so it goes on.
“Digital” means also 2) boundlessness, the possibility to try to catch up 24 h 7d and everywhere.
The quantity and the quick turnover pace of information demands a lot of attention. Too much attention. And here is the balance lost, between attention and non-attention. Knowledge workers are risking to be too attentive, at least according to the inherent capacity of the human brain. Prefrontal cortex have a maximum attention capacity of 7 plus/minus 2.
Torkel Klingberg, neuroscientist and author of “The overflowing brain” expresses the situation very well: “With the development of information technology and communications to provide us with information at an ever faster pace clarifies the brain’s limitations” (p 9). Klingberg says that the human physiological attention capacity is insufficient versus the flow that demands our attention.
This is why I like to use the term “Digital stress”. The balance is lost due to characteristics embedded in “digital”. And it is human to want controll and to be updated. And for the knowledge worker it is a credo to know. Which in practical is impossible. But you try and the balance is threathend, digital stress. If lost, then “disorder of attention ability,” aka Attention Deficit Disorder, ADD. The individual is digitally exhausted.
Sure, but I think what you call is less important that what it actually produces!
Thanks for taking the time to post such an in-depth comment. However, I think how you feel about your job is also a big contributing factor to the amount of stress you perceive. If you don’t like your job then any simple digital experience will feel stressful whereas the opposite is not necessarily going to be true. Interesting concept, thanks for sharing it!
True as well. There is stress and there is digital stress according to my view. If you don´t like to go to work your are probably stressed because of that. If so, your tolerance for digital stress is probably lower. As a reversed analogy I heard many years ago, I do not know if it is true, that you can listen to music you like very loud without getting a hearing problem. …. Though, to restate, stress is a psychological reaction to promote the survival of the individual, and when not feeling good about your work, the stress reaction is healthy. Digital stress is a reaction because the biological capacity of prefrontal cortex is challenged. The two types are linked but not by causality. I think we need to have a separate term for the attentional insuffiency due to the flow of digital information. Digital stress will affect independently of general stress. Therefore, any individual, and knowledge workers especially needs to have a strategy promoting balance between attention and non-attention. And every knowledge organization needs to develope balance strategies as well, otherwise the individual knowledge worker are exposed for “swimming upstream”.
I disagree, as the word now points to the lifeless condition of most work and this is not what is intended – so the word DOES matter a great deal in my opinion, since it’s descriptive.