The New Normal: Work can reach you anywhere

We’ve all been through this painfully familiar scenario. After an exhausting but fulfilling day at the office, we return to a quiet home to gather our thoughts and to sit in silence. Our energy tanks are depleted, and are in need of renewal. Just as we’re about to turn in for the night, the phone buzzes ominously.

“Hey, sorry to disturb, could you take a look at this urgent question?”

More often than not, these requests aren’t at all urgent. They come in at these invasive weird hours because of the following forces:

1. Technology has achieved the ability to allow for smooth communication between people anytime, and anywhere. While this has created immense value of the world, this means you’re also at the beck and call of every text message, call, tweet, post, tag, email that’s being sent to you. We now live in the world that’s not starved of communication, but starved of attention.
2. It’s incredibly convenient for our colleagues to send messages without considering the true urgency of the matter. There’s no short-term incentive for our colleagues to care whether they are interfering with your down-time.

Even if no one expects us to answer work-related texts, the time we spend clearing a work-related text includes the time spent ruminating and thinking about work when primed by the text message.

Our phones place the world’s resources in our hands. What they don’t tell us is that we also hold in our hands the world’s expectations to respond, react, and reply to things. Though an uncomfortable reality, we have come to accept it as the new normal.

To choose an optimized life of calm, we need to start by being aware of these little boundary violations. To be aware of the ways these ‘urgent’ requests creep a little into your personal bubbles of refuge. By starting with awareness, we then start to slowly challenge these norms.