Navigate to the article Main Article Optimizing Your Technology Sleeping with Your Smartphone Aiming for Zero The Future of 24/7 Technology

We live in a ‘24/7 connected’ world, thanks to the mobile technology that has grown exponentially over the last decade. The possibilities it presents for our work and personal lives are endless – but using it wisely, say experts, is key to increasing our productivity.

Thirty years ago, when chattering fax machines and beeping pagers were considered cutting edge and ‘mobile’ phones were the size of house bricks, technology began to point the way to a bright new tomorrow. Yes, those innovations were rather unsophisticated, but they were making a real difference to the way we lived and worked. So where would the machines take us, we wondered? What would their potential be for businesses around the world?

Now we know the answer: technology has revolutionized our working and personal lives in ways that we couldn’t possibly have imagined three decades ago. On the cusp of 2013 – with the internet, smartphones, tablets, email, texts, real time messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, Skype and video-conferencing all the norm – it’s tempting to surmise that tomorrow has come; and that the technology we now use without so much as a second thought has gone as far as it can.

It hasn’t, of course. Cloud computing and other 24/7 innovations will undoubtedly see to that. Asana, for instance, is a US-based company, which helps people manage their work flow more effectively and has produced technology called Inbox which, it believes, is “the first credible postemail application.” Then there’s Google which is currently developing ‘wearable’ augmented reality glasses which will send information to a head-up display in front of your eyes, so you need never miss a text, email or incoming call again.

Plugged-in

But that’s tomorrow’s world. Back in today’s, we can only speculate how we would cope without constantly being connected to the internet, messaging capabilities and social networks via our smartphones and tablets. Technology instantly plugs us in to work, colleagues, customers, friends, media, and an infinite information channel that is always ‘on’ and always accessible. Being cloud enabled means that you can access your workstation anywhere, so you can now be ‘at your desk’ at home or on the road.

So could we, if we had to, operate without 24/7 connectivity?

You might think you could function perfectly well without it – but try this. Switch your modem off for an hour so that you can’t check your email or browse the internet. Turn your mobile off, too, just for a short time.

Now. How do you feel? Free? Or slightly twitchy?

If it’s the latter, it shouldn’t be a surprise because that reassuring ‘ping’ you hear when an email arrives may be more addictive than you care to admit.

In 2007, researchers from the University of Glasgow conducted a study into email use and found that half of the participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals checked up to 30 to 40 times an hour. The University of Glasgow, in connection with the University of the West of Scotland, followed this up in September 2012 with a study identifying a total of 15 bird-like characteristics of email users. These included the Compulsive Woodpecker (can’t resist reading email at all hours of the day and night); the Night Owl (the midnight emailer, who fails to understand that others wish to have ‘time out’); and the Back-Covering Emu (sends emails in order to be able to prove, at a later date, that the information was passed on.)


So there’s no denying that 24/7 connectivity has transformed our lives. It’s made us more mobile, flexible and more contactable. In short, it’s given us more opportunities, wider networking capabilities and greater business potential. Yet the Glasgow studies show that it’s healthier if we are in control of the technology we use, rather than the other way around.

Predictable time off

Leslie Perlow agrees. She is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School and the author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work.

Professor Perlow – who conducted a fouryear experiment involving workers and their technology at the offices of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) – believes that controlled use of 24/7 technology can make us more productive, not less. In the introduction to her book she makes the point that 24/7 technology can make us feel “exhilarated, challenged, rewarded, and freed from the shackles of the office.” She also believes it can, if used without limits, make us feel “overwhelmed, overworked, always interrupted, lacking time to focus.”

“I’m not against technology and I’m not saying you should be ‘off ’ all the time,” she insists. “I’m saying you should have what I call periods of ‘predictable time off’ (PTO) which engender a sense of control and make people feel revived, creative and refreshed. The very act of creating those time-off periods gives you a feeling of being in command and, ultimately, is very productive for everyone, as we found at BCG.”

Professor Perlow points out that PTO won’t solve all your problems. “Nor is it about being always off in a world that is always on,” she writes in Sleeping with Your Smartphone. “Rather, it is about incremental changes that promise to improve your work-life and your work in ways that make them notably better.”

State-of-the-art

When we do switch on our 24/7 technology, the most noticeable thing about it is how easy and user-friendly it is these days. It wasn’t always this way. From our cutting-edge 2012 perspective, we can see that the technology we used a decade ago was limiting and frustrating. Video conferencing, for instance, is technology that has been around for three decades; but it’s only really become state-ofthe- art in the last five or six years with the advent of broadband and high-speed IT networks.

Other video innovations have similarly taken face-to-face meetings to another 24/7 level. In fact, you don’t need a video suite to connect, eyeball to eyeball, with a customer: just fire-up Skype, Facetime of any other over-the-internet video call service on your laptop or smartphone and you can make an immediate and more personal connection. It cuts down on carbon-emitting travel time, too.

Then again, in his book about networking techniques, Connecting Forward (www.connectingforward. com), Dr Jordi Robert Ribes points out that however sophisticated the communication technology, it’s no substitute for a trust-building face to face meeting.

The message is that we need to use the empowering 24/7 technology we have to our best advantage. Think of it as the ultimate support tool, manage it properly, use it wisely, don’t let it dominate you – and dream about where the machines will take us in the years ahead.

Sleeping with Your Smartphone

Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School and the author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24-7 Habit and Change the Way You Work. Professor Perlow’s goal is to identify ways in which organizations can alter their work practices to benefit both productivity and employees’ well-being. She works closely with organizations to implement these changes and study their impact.

You’re not anti 24/7 technology, are you?
By no means. I think we all recognize the benefits of 24/7 technology; but it’s because of those benefits that we sometimes turn a blind eye to the costs. My argument is not that we shouldn’t acknowledge the benefits – but that we simply better manage the costs.

By switching off technology for periods of time you have found we can break the ‘cycle of responsiveness’. Can you explain this?
‘The cycle of responsiveness’ is, for me, the crux of the matter. There are legitimate external factors for why we’re ‘on’ a great deal. It might be for customer service reasons; or it might be because we manage across time zones. Whatever our reasons, we can create a culture of responsiveness. We start expecting to be in continuous contact with each other. We constantly check our messages and find ourselves responding to nonurgent requests straight away – simply because we’re continually checking for the urgent ones.

Why do we do that?
It might be to show we’re committed or because we want to cross the request off our ‘to do’ list. It doesn’t really matter WHY. The result is that we end up signaling to others that we’re accessible. The more we do that, the more contact we get from other members of our internal teams. Not because there’s a true need for it, but because we’ve created the need for ourselves. We used to be able to turn off by leaving the office. Now, because of 24/7 technology, you can leave the office much more frequently – but never turn off. That’s why I think we must change that system of expectation.

But what if requests are urgent?
I always ask: ‘Think back to last week. Did you really need to respond to that message that came in late at night?’ You might tell me it was urgent – but my question isn’t whether the request was urgent. My question is whether it HAD to be urgent and whether there are alternate ways you could work together to address it.

Do you practise what you preach – or is your smartphone on 24/7?
I try very hard to practise what I preach! I’ve discovered that when we work together at a team level we can be much more productive if there is a covered system in place. The problem occurs when there isn’t. Then it’s you alone checking your messages in case requests are urgent; but you get sidetracked by all the non-urgent messages.

How easy is it to adjust to ‘predictable time off’?
It can take people a few weeks to adjust. But what I found is that once you do it and realize that you’ll be valued – not devalued – for it, people start to really like it.

leslieperlow.com

The Future of 24/7 Technology

We are currently living through a quiet technological revolution – one that is being powered by the smartphone. Samsung knows this well. A global leader in semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence technologies, the company began life in Korea in 1938. Now it has offices in over 70 countries and a range of products – from smartphones, tablets, cameras and camcorders to internet-ready TVs, fridges, washing machines and ovens – that are used worldwide.

Along with Apple’s iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy SIII is a market leader in smartphone technology. The Mobile Handset and Smartphone Tracker, a report by Futuresource Consulting published in July, found that Samsung was the success story of 2011 and 2012, being the number one smartphone and handset seller in the first quarter of this year. Along with Apple, Samsung takes over 90% of industry profits and its Galaxy range is a massive global success story. In 2012, says the Futuresource report, the company is expected to double its smartphones sales to nearly 200 million units.

These figures are staggering, but Hans Wienands, Senior Vice President, Samsung Germany, is not surprised. He points out that smartphones used to be seen as a communications and connectivity perk. In the last 18 months to two years, however, that view has changed.

Smartphones are now seen as a communications and connectivity ‘must-have’. Indeed, smartphones are now the most popular technology sold by Samsung, although sales figures for internet-ready smart TVs are rapidly increasing. “In the past, a TV offered passive consumption,” says Hans. “People would simply lean back and watch it. Now, though, it offers ‘lean forward’ activity, too. Of all the SMART TVs we sell, 60% are connected to the internet. That’s a lot. Forty-five per cent of these customers are using their TVs on a daily basis to search the net for information, shop with it, share photographs and connect it to their PCs.”

It’s strange to think that today’s 10-year-olds won’t be able to remember a time when such stateof- the-art technology didn’t exist. Hans remembers talking to one of his customers about this very subject. “He said that his eight-year-old son had asked him: ‘Daddy when there was no internet, how did you get into Google?’”

Yet if you think technology has reached its peak, think again. Currently, most people use their smartphones for social networking, web-browsing and emailing; but pretty soon, says Hans, more and more of us will be using them as a secure payment tools, too, linked to our credit or debit cards. Hans can also see a time when ordinary stationary devices will be 24/7 connected, too – such as kitchen appliances. “It’s come to TV already,” he says. “But soon, connectivity will spread rapidly to any appliance that needs to download a software update, or get information or access remote services.”

The cloud will have a big impact on our technological futures, predicts Hans, once consumers come to terms with sending their data to an off-site provider. “People need to think of the cloud in a different way,” says Hans. “I was talking to one provider who said: ‘Actually, we don’t talk about ‘the cloud’. We say the information is stored on a secure data server in Germany.’ Once people understand where their data is going and that it’s protected, they will utilize it. And for private data, cloud storage will become the norm because speeds will be quicker.

Managing this new technology will be crucial because it can become addictive. We’ve seen it already with smartphone and tablet usage.

“It can be a positive addiction, because you need this new 24/7 technology to survive in our fast, globally connected world,” says Hans. “On the other hand, everyone has to have the discipline to say ‘this is my undisturbed time’. Nothing can be so important that a text or phone call can’t wait 10, 15 or 30 minutes. I think we’ve learned some discipline over the last 10 years in dealing with emails, but it’s something that parents definitely need to teach their children as technology progresses.”

Tony Greenway