34
votes
Technology is making people busier during their so called free time
Link information
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- Title
- Technology is stealing your time in ways you may not realise - here's what you can do about it
- Authors
- Ruth Ogden, Joanna Witowska, Vanda Černohorská
- Published
- Dec 6 2023
- Word count
- 909 words
I read this on my phone while eating lunch... Whoops.
More seriously, this isn't the first article to discuss this trend by any means and it won't be the last. Right to disconnect is a great step forward but until wages rise relative to cost of living significantly, it will be difficult for most people to disconnect. Part of the mania for work is driven by the sense of instability prevalent in our world, the sense that if you slow down you'll be left behind, maybe even fired.
Is this phenomenon any different than my father reading the newspaper at breakfast? Is it different than grandma chatting on the phone while she cooks dinner?
Technology gives us different ways to distract ourselves, but it's not fundamentally different than previous generations. It's up to you to figure out your limits, especially with regards to work life balance, but I don't think it's necessarily bad to read this while eating, as long as you're not neglecting other things in order to do so.
I disagree with the conceit of this article. It's pretending that technology is some big bad force for evil. Technology doesn't have an alignment, motivation, or any anthropomorphic traits. The problem is people. It always has been and always will be. You're not taking work calls at home because your phone demands it, you're taking it because your boss demands it and you're not assertive enough to say no. It seems to me that you don't need to have an explicit "right to disconnect" because you already implicitly have one. If you're not being paid, you can't be forced to work; it's basic labor law.
I'd also really would like to know what the heck they are talking about when they are saying that online banking actually takes more time than in-person banking. That sounds like BS, and the link they put in that paragraph for "our research" doesn't actually point to any research.
There also is an issue of people setting boundaries between work and their normal life, and technology plays a significant part in that. Sometimes I'll send an email to a professor and get a response late at night, which leaves me a bit concerned.
I think that the user interface of the technology, the notifications etc, combined with bosses being aware that connection at odd hours is now possible, contribute to the problem.
I’m not saying that technology isn’t being leveraged to create this situation. That was always an inevitability. But it’s nowhere near being the cause of it.
Specifically re technology and interface, Johan Hari's book Stolen Focus has some interesting ideas about design choices meant to create addiction.
But I agree it's a complex problem
Work notifications are off until it is my working hours. If I go on holiday, work notifications are off the entire holiday. My work is good enough to respect our time off. Yes, I am lucky enough to not be in an on-call position.
For personal time, I try to follow a "one thing at a time" philosophy. No phone during meals. No phone during watching TV. No phone during car rides or public transport (I look out the window or people-watch instead). No phone while socializing with friends (very occasionally broken if I get a text from a family member or looking something up relevant to the conversation).
Something that I’ve personally noticed about the nature of technology under capitalism that I think is related to this is how often when something does save the average individual a lot of time and/or effort, it also makes it a lot easier for them to rationalize giving even more of their time and effort to their employer instead of it just making life easier overall. It wasn’t even 100 years ago when having to keep a well stocked pantry of dry, whole ingredients that you’re able to process into whatever you need was just a fact of life. Now nobody has the time or energy for it despite it literally never being easier to acquire all the same ingredients or make all of the same foods (at least in an absolute sense).
We save both time and money by cooking soup with whole dry beans in a pressure cooker or slow cooker. We make our own jam, pickles and yogurt.
But I understand that that is rare.