Freedom to work?

• Brad Howarth
• 30 June 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Susie Robinson jokingly describes her addiction to her Motorola hiptop smartphone as ridiculous. Everywhere the founder of public relations company PR Darling goes, her hiptop goes with her, keeping her connected to email, SMS and MMS messages, MSN Messenger, Twitter and Facebook.

“My job is to promote people and communicate with them actively, so every time the hiptop flashes, it could be something exciting,” she says. “And given there are many different ways to contact me, it’s constantly calling for my attention.”

Highly connected? Yes. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“People expect you to update your Facebook status, people expect you to update Twitter and get back to emails. You have to be across them all the time.”

Robinson has dived into the world of constant connectivity. The ubiquity of mobile communications – particularly high-speed mobile broadband services such as Telstra’s Next G – means there are few places where we can’t be in constant and instantaneous communication with our work and our social lives.

According to the telecommunications analyst Paul Budde, in 2006 only 50,000 Australians used 3G mobile broadband. That grew to more than 1 million last year, and will be close to 2.5 million in 2010.

For entrepreneurs like Robinson, being in constant communication with clients enhances the service she delivers. But for many workers, it has simply allowed work to encroach further and further into personal time to the point where the boundaries between the two are hard to define.

Breaking the habit

Sometime this decade the question swapped from when to be connected, to when not to be. It is a choice that not everyone has realised is theirs to make. The addictive nature of constant communication can be very real – there is a reason why these devices have nicknames such as Crackberries.

As a child of the 1980s, Zoe Warne grew up connected. She started her first business, a graphic design consultancy, a decade ago aged 18. She took advantage of every device available to keep her connected to staff and clients 24/7.

“On several projects I was co-ordinating up to 15 freelancers in a project team, but it nearly broke me,” says Warne. “I found the more I gave to clients, the more they wanted. It became an insatiable monster that kept coming back for more. I never did do a stocktake of the hours I was available to clients, but I’m damn sure I wasn’t getting paid for them.”

Now she is a director and co-founder of the Melbourne web development agency August, and has access to even more communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook. But Warne has broken her connectivity habit.

“After hours is ‘Zoe time’ – so unless something catastrophic happens, it can be dealt with during working hours,” says Warne. “It means I’m more focused when I’m ‘on’ and able to recuperate and recharge when I’m ‘off’.

“I work a lot smarter now. I feel like I’m the boss of my workload and projects, not the other way around. My response is a lot less reactive.”

The productivity challenge

Greater connectivity does not automatically equate to enhanced productivity. For Australia’s human rights commissioner Graeme Innes, finding the right balance means being able to shut everything down when necessary.

“I’m in a role where I need information quickly,” says Innes. “So for me connectivity is really important, because it gets a lot of information to me in the fastest possible way. That’s why I use things like Twitter.”

He recalls one situation where he received a crucial statistic on immigration issues 10 minutes before giving a television interview.

“I was able to use that information in the discussion,” says Innes. “I just wouldn’t have got that without the connectivity that I have, and that’s just one of numerous occasions.”

The challenge, however, is being able to set aside chunks of time to ensure that he actually performs the tasks that are expected of him. That means turning everything off.

“It’s like shutting my office door – it’s the same thing,” says Innes. “I don’t do it very often, but sometimes I have to. It’s about being organised. It’s about knowing who’s in control. This is my phone and I can turn it off.”

Customers demand constant availability

Daniel Monheit, co-founder of the digital advertising agency Hard Hat Digital, says clients expect him and his business partner to be reachable at all times.

“There is an unspoken policy – when one of us is in the country and on, we are on 24/7,” says Monheit. “I don‘t even put my phone on silent when I sleep, which is a bit tragic. But in the digital space, your work is always showing and you’ve got to be available.

“That is the world we choose to live in, especially the industry that I’m involved with, that’s what you sign up for. The flipside is that when one of us is away, when we are not on, we’re not on at all.”

While Monheit says most clients will refrain from making contact after hours, that is not universal.

“You just have to find ways to manage that. It comes down to client education and setting the right expectations with them.”

Managing constant connection

This capacity to be connected in a dozen different ways, anywhere at any hour, has led to a slew of guidebooks, web pages and courses on managing connectivity. There is even a theory that highly connected people rewire their brains over time to better handle multiple near-simultaneous information flows, suggesting that our abilities to manage different channels of communication may improve over time.

Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com and David Allen’s Getting Things Done describe methodologies for managing inputs and tasks to maximise productivity. Many of these have their basis in the bible on the topic, Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

For digital media consultant Nick Crocker, there is no substitute for simply shutting things down and focusing. Crocker responds to email no more than four or five times a day, only logs on to Twitter or Skype when he has a task to perform, and does not keep multiple pages open in his browser. He even tries to put his phone out of reach.