In praise of double lives
Ever wondered what it’s like to lead a double life? Like Batman or Superman, for example? Or Walter White? Would you be able to successfully keep the two parts of your life separate without one of them being discovered?
You might be surprised to hear that nearly all of us already lead double lives, we just don’t make a big deal out of it. More accurately, we’ve become so embedded in both that we don’t recognise we are.
Yes, I’m talking about our lives outside work and our lives at work. The truth is that no matter how much we bring of our everyday lives into work, our lives at work are still distinct. The role we play, our interactions with other people, the decisions we take, are all entirely different. Our personal identity may have an influence to some extent on who we are as workers but the two personas are still detached.
But things are changing. Time was that you would clock off from work, leave the trappings of your job behind and walk out the door into your other existence. That’s not entirely true anymore.
And the reason for this blurring between your two identities, your two separate existences, is the near ubiquitous proliferation of technology. You may have heard many times that we are now in the ‘always on’ era. But in order to achieve an ‘always on’ world, you need to extend the scope of work beyond its traditional confines and into the outside world.
When organisations boast of 24/7/365, that’s not a claim made entirely on behalf of the entity itself. That has to be delivered by the people who underpin it. While that doesn’t mean employees are suddenly working beyond their normal 35-40 hour week, it also fosters a culture where people are often contactable outside those hours. And once that becomes entrenched, their working lives start to seep into their personal ones.
Technology has enabled this process by making us always contactable, always summonable thanks to the likes of smartphones, laptops and smart watches. As an aside, it’s long enough ago that I can confess now to having resisted getting a mobile phone for a couple of years purely because I didn’t want to be reachable outside work.
The seepage of our working existence into our personal lives brings additional stress and strain. Take cyber security, for example. We’re frequently told that the greatest risk comes from human error. But if we’re being asked or even mandated to use work devices outside of the office and office hours is that really such a surprise given that the risk landscape is widened so dramatically? And if our work devices are also our personal devices that shouldn’t be any surprise at all.
Given the stress, strain and dangers associated with this seepage, some of us will be concerned by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s recent comment that 60 hours a week at work is “the sweet spot of productivity”. This appears bizarre given that our attention and concentration spans are inherently limited and tend to decline over time. It also seems strange when you consider that technological advances over the years were supposed to ease the burden on our working lives, which is partly why we have a shorter working week compared to previous centuries, not increase it.
On the other hand, perhaps Brin thinks he’s found an answer to the increasing seepage from work into our personal lives: spend more time at work.
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