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Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career - Softcover

Gordon, Gil E.

 
9780609806975: Turn It Off: How to Unplug from the Anytime-Anywhere Office Without Disconnecting Your Career
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0609806971 ISBN 13: 9780609806975
Verlag: Three Rivers Pr, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

An expert in mobile office technology explains how to manage e-mail and voice mail so that it does not control one's personal life, offering practical solutions for wired workers on how to set limits on the virtual office and how to balance the demands of the modern business world and the need for a personal life. Original. 15,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GIL GORDON is a telecommuting and virtual-office expert who has been featured in publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today for his work worldwide with clients such as Citicorp, AT&T, and Merrill Lynch. He lives in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey.

Aus dem Klappentext

le Finding the Off Switch on Your Laptop?

E-mail, cell phones, laptops, personal digital assistants ... they were supposed to liberate us from the workplace, but instead mobile office technology has taken us hostage. For millions of "wired workers," the good news is the bad news: thanks to all this gear, we are now able to conduct business anytime and anywhere, but we can no longer shut the office door. We check e-mail on the weekend or late at night, answer pages at all hours, send faxes from home, work while we're on vacation-all because we can. It's out of control. How can we reclaim the boundaries between work life and personal life and still excel at our jobs and maintain our professional livelihoods?

Packed with practical advice, Turn It Off will show you how to regain control and obtain a sense of balance between the very real demands of today's business world and your personal need to get-and really live-a life. Mobile office technology exper

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Chapter 1

How Did We Become So Attached to Our Offices?

None of us wakes up one day and decides, "I think I'll give up my free time on weekends, answer my pages during dinner with my spouse, and carry my laptop on vacation." Those intrusions of work into our personal time result from a process of slow erosion, not sudden upheaval. As employees, we ourselves have unwittingly contributed to that process and ended up stretching our workdays and workweeks.

One of the characteristics of office work up to the 1980s (and thus before the deluge of technology) was the containment of most office work within the office. Certainly, the briefcases came home, the traveling businessperson worked on a plane or in a hotel room, and the sales rep caught up on paperwork in the car. But when far less office work was as easily portable as it is today, the types of work that could be packed into that briefcase were much more limited.

Employees who still had items on their to-do lists at 5 p.m. were more likely to stay late in the office than to simply pack up the briefcase and plan to finish everything after dinner. Briefcases weren't big enough to contain a file drawer's worth of information, and there was no easy way to look at a set of engineering drawings or a year's worth of monthly budget printouts on the kitchen table. At-home evening and weekend work was mostly limited to reading, drafting memos and reports on yellow pads, and grinding out budgets using a pocket calculator -- absolutely archaic activities by today's standards.

If we fast-forward to the late 1990s, we can see that the limitations on the kinds of work that could be done from afar disappeared almost entirely. Looking for the sales reports from the last two quarters? Just log on to the corporate network and download the files. Need to get out a rush memo to the entire sales force? Draft it on your laptop and upload it to the mail server, and it's in the sales reps' mailboxes in seconds. While every aspect of every job was not portable, enough were to enable most office workers to leave at a more desirable hour, get home in time for dinner, and still be able to finish the day's work at home after having had at least a little time with the spouse or family over the dinner table.

So far so good -- until the point when those of us taking work home slipped into some bad habits. The idea that came to us for the new marketing campaign could now be sketched out on the laptop at 10 p.m.; instead of being hastily scribbled down on a note to be taken into the office and worked on the next day. The budget planning that was going on with the overseas offices could now be compressed from weeks to days because global fax and e-mail meant that the morning message sent from Tokyo could be read in the evening -- at home -- by the financial analyst from the New York office, and so on.

You might ask, "What's wrong with that? Isn't business life today all about doing things faster and faster? Isn't it good to be able to save time by taking advantage of these tools?" The answer is, of course, yes -- but I believe it's a qualified yes. No doubt there are times when a faster response is not only better but absolutely essential. The problem arises when the people involved don't differentiate between the value of and need for having it faster on one hand and the desire to have it faster just because someone can send that e-mail from home at 11 p.m.

There are many benefits to being able to work extended hours at home instead of staying until all hours in the office and making do with a vending machine sandwich for dinner while your spouse or family stares at your empty chair at the table. It's great to be able to do increasingly sophisticated, complex office work at home; it's not so great when we aren't able to close the door (literally or figuratively) on the home office and wind up working well into time we'd rather reserve for ourselves.

Why I Wrote This Book

I am quick to note that I've been as guilty as anyone about failing to maintain the separation between work and the rest of my life. To give one example, I distinctly remember my "telephone sprints" during the first two years or so after I started my home-based consulting business in 1982, after spending almost ten years in the corporate world. My office is downstairs and the main living area is upstairs in our house; when I'd go up for lunch I'd be reluctant to turn on the telephone answering machine for fear that I'd miss the big call that would bring me fame and fortune -- or at least a little bit of consulting work. At that time in my fledgling business, every call was a "big call" because things were, to put it mildly, slow.

I'd be up in the kitchen having lunch and would hear the office phone ring, and would drop my sandwich in mid-bite and fly down the stairs, risking life and limb to get to the phone before that prospective client gave up and hung up. It's a wonder I didn't break any bones. It took me two full years before I realized I could give myself the luxury of an uninterrupted lunch break in my own home simply by turning on the answering machine.

As the technology I used became more complex and more integral over the years, it became evident to me how my technology-enabled work was squeezing free time out of my life, and squeezing me out of my family's life. I became intrigued with how common these problems were for others as well and started paying serious attention to work-life boundary issues in the early 1990s. They were becoming especially evident in my work with my Fortune 100 class corporate clients implementing telecommuting or telework programs. Those experiences, plus my observations of "road warriors" doing work at unusual times in unusual places, prompted me to bring this book to life.

In particular, I noticed the following signs and symptoms as I worked with my corporate clients:

* People seemed to be increasingly stretched, stressed, and almost breathless as they made their way from week to week. I would walk into a client's office for a Monday- morning meeting and almost everyone looked and acted as if it were 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon.

* I began to get e-mail and voice mail messages that had been sent late into the evening or on the weekend -- and in some cases on holiday weekends or during times when I knew a particular client was on vacation.

* The excitement with which people used to describe the tools they used (laptops, cell phones, e-mail, and so on) was replaced with a sense of resignation or even resentment. It was no longer, "This is really great! She was able to e-mail me the budget so I could work on it at home." Instead, it was, "Can you believe it" She e-mailed me the budget at 9 p.m. one night and expected me to have the updates done and back in her e-mail box before her 7 a.m. meeting the next morning!"

In addition to these observations, the most compelling reason for writing the book was seeing the reactions when I told colleagues and clients about it. I'd mention that I was starting a new book, and the title words Turn It Off were barely out of my mouth before I'd see the person's eyes open wide, followed by a knowing nod of appreciation of the problem that the title implied. Then I'd hear them say something like "Boy, do I need that book -- now!" or "I can think of a couple of people who should read it," which confirmed their interest. The fact that this issue was so much in their awareness, and that so many people seemed trapped by the long hours and almost endless work, convinced me that the time was right for this book.

The three background factors I'll review shortly help explain why I'm seeing what I did, and why, perhaps, you feel like you do. You'll see throughout...

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Verlag
Three Rivers Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0609806971
ISBN 13 
9780609806975
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
228
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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