In a study that analyzed de-identified, aggregated meeting and email data from more than three million workers from 21,000 companies around the globe, data showed: Compared with the eight weeks before pandemic-related lockdowns started, in the first eight weeks of pandemic-related lockdowns, employees worked nearly 49 minutes longer per day on average and sent about 8 percent more emails after business hours. More people working from home since the start of COVID-19 has not necessarily, yet, improved the lack of balance. Yet many of us do allow work direct messaging alerts, emails, and smartphone notifications to interrupt our personal lives. It was a problem pre-COVID, but right now it’s even more intense.”Īnd for most people it’s work that creeps into personal time much more than personal time creeping into work.Ī lot of people don’t necessarily have the flexibility during office time to make their personal lives the priority without disrupting office norms (or facing consequences from employers), Carter says. Today, many of us have the ability to be constantly connected to work, says Carter, who wrote The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. There were the hours you worked and the hours you didn’t work an office for work and space where you didn’t work. There used to be a separation between work life and personal life. “We need basic boundaries so that work doesn’t seep into every waking minute - and sometimes into our sleep.”Įmployees as well as employers have not taken that step back, Carter says, first, to acknowledge that everything is different thanks to the technological changes of the past few decades having massively shifted the way we work and second, to figure out how to adjust to the sea change. “People need predictable time off,” Carter says. It’s the familiar phenomenon of technology tethering us to work 24/7, combined with our failure to set expectations and boundaries. Just because you can work anytime from anywhere doesn’t mean that you should work all the time, everywhere. Carter agree, is that the overload is more widespread - and worse. The idea is to live in a way that we feel productive and not burned out at work, and that we have a sense of fulfillment at home and in our personal lives, says Christine Carter, PhD, a senior leader at BetterUp and a sociologist and senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California in Berkeley, who studies happiness and productivity. “You can overload people if the requirements they have from one role, such as one at work, conflict with the demands of another role, such as that of a parent,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in California and author of the book Dying for a Paycheck. Psychologists and productivity experts have been studying it for decades to better understand what actually makes people happy, so that they can improve work environments and overall mental health. When Did We Start Talking About ‘Work-Life Balance’ Anyway?
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