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The Rise Of Gadgets Mean We're Working Even When We're Playing
from the answering-emails-while-away... dept
A new study has found that, thanks to the rise in gadgets like PDAs, mobile phones and laptops, it's increasingly difficult for people to separate themselves from work. People who go on vacation often take their gadgets with them. 76% admit to checking their email while away, but that might just be to avoid having an overflowing email box when they return. The study also notes that (not surprisingly) this also applies when we're not on vacation, but just at home. The rise of such gadgets mean that we're all checking our emails and doing work while at home also, often increasing the overall amount of time we work (and still companies want to punish workers for the occasional personal surfing). One other interesting aspect of this, is that employers may need to get better at helping employees manage all this mobile technology. Traditionally, IT staff has been able to keep the office up and running, but when that "office" can be anywhere, it's often more difficult. Most IT groups aren't prepared to be supporting virtual home offices, or the employee who is having trouble logging in from vacation -- and it's only going to become a bigger issue.
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Employers (for the most part) don't WANT to help workers "manage" their technology. They want increased productivity...and they LOVE the dozens of little tasks they can get you to do outside of office hours...
I mean, if you factor in the time you spend doing things that don't seem a big deal, on their own, like returning an email, faxing a report, calling a contact or fixing a quick bug in a production system or whatever...those add up to HOURS that they don't have to have you spend during the day. Each of those little things on their own are hard to refuse (ESPECIALLY if they DO make your life seemingly easier if you do them), but put them all together....
(Its the same idea as the tiny service fees that keep popping up everywhere like fungus...80 cents for that, a buck for this, 15 cents extra for this...nothing worth spending hours tracking down and objecting to on its own...but they add up to millions every quarter for all companies involved)
We are being nickeled and dimed to death both in our wallets and with our time.
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