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How Do You Keep Work From Taking Over Your Life?How Do You Keep Work From Taking Over Your Life?
Blogger Dave Taylor describes a major lifestyle change -- he's <a href="http://www.intuitive.com/blog/powering_down_computer_5pm_work_life_balance.html">shutting off his cell phone and computer at 5 p.m. on weekdays,</a> and all weekend, too.</p>
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Blogger Dave Taylor describes a major lifestyle change -- he's shutting off his cell phone and computer at 5 p.m. on weekdays, and all weekend, too.
It's the bane of modern digital existence, I think, the gradual expansion of the Internet tendrils to encompass all our waking hours. From my BlackBerry Pearl to my pervasive Wi-Fi connectivity throughout most of the places I frequent to my Mac and PC laptops, a typical day for me seemed to involve 12 or more hours of pecking away at the keyboard, sending messages, visiting Web pages, reading news, or related tasks. Hours and hours and hours spent online.
No more.
As of last week I have called quits to the ever-on lifestyle and now shut off my cell phone and computer at 5 p.m. every evening. That's right, if you need to get ahold of me, well, it'll have to wait until the following morning. And on weekends I'm completely offline, so if something terrible happens Friday night, I'll have to catch up on Monday morning.
Startling? Actually, it's quite a relief...
I've been struggling with this issue for years myself. The first thing I do in the morning and the last thing at night are to check e-mail and information.com traffic. In between: 12+ hours of work and recreational Internetting. Oh, yeah, I also squeeze in time with my wife, engaging with the real world, and reading books. But I'm sorry to say those things seem like afterthoughts sometimes.
This week, I made a conscious decision to start going to bed hours earlier, getting up earlier and, getting away from the computer for an hour or more before bedtime.
Increased connectivity has made it easier for us to work all day and all night. Thirty years ago, we talked about bringing work home from the office. You don't hear that expression much anymore because you don't have to bring work home anymore -- it's already there, waiting for you over a VPN connection, or in your BlackBerry in your pocket. One in five people bring laptops with them on vacation.. Others wish they had.
Our parents needed to make a conscious decision to bring work home with them -- now, we need to make a conscious decision to put an end to the workday.
Do you draw boundaries between work and personal time? If so, how? Leave a comment below and let us know.
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