Sunday, April 18, 2010

Why do you work such a long hour?

All day back-to-back meetings from 9-3.  Barely have time to inhale lunch during conference calls putting myself on mute.  Finally got to sit down in front of my computer, there's a long list of email waiting for me to reply.  By the time it's 5, I finally sort through all the "needed to reply" email but take home with me a list of to-dos that came out of the meetings the past few days.  


Sound familiar?


Chatting with a few friends who have worked for 3-5 years already now after college.  We found ourselves in the same situation.  The 8 hours work day is filled with communication, there's just no time to do real work to move projects forward.  What's going on?  Why can't we get all the work done at work?  


With remotely accessible computer to your work network, conference bridge, and blackberry, it makes it awfully easy to bring work home.  Because there's no time to get real work done, people bring it home to do it with all these technology that happens.  We all ended up working 3+ hours additional at home.  That's a 11+ hours day + commuting time.  This phenomenon resulted in employee burning out, higher divorce rate, more sick leave, and more stress in people in the workforce.  


Compare to my parents generation who are born in the 50s, before the internet and computer era, things are a little different.  The society is existing in a much slower speed.  Internet and computer enable the world to move along so much faster.  Before internet and computer, people can get things done faster than information is being transmitted or communicated.  Now, it is the other way around.  People cannot catch up to the speed of information is being distributed.  Since there's no longer the barrier of the availability of information, companies and consumers are expecting things to be done instantaneously.  


Everyone tries get things out of the door and have no sufficient time to think things through thoroughly, to evaluate and assess for the best solution, and to look back and learn from things that we do.  There's no time to take care of the people, and build relationship among co-worker.  Work became work, work and work.  There's no time to do other things.  


Internet and computer change the whole world.  It enhance communication and information distribution.  However, are we prepared for the aftermath?  Is faster and more really the better?



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