Shouldn't Technology Make Life Easier?

By TIM WILSON

August 28, 2000

In France, many employees now enjoy a 35-hour work week. In other European countries, employees are given five weeks or more of vacation, which sometimes includes a three or four-week "holiday" during the summer months.

In the United States, we have Labor Day.

Next week, American employees will get a pitiful 24-hour respite from the grueling work schedules they put in during the rest of the business year. I don't know about you, but I'll probably spend mine doing something really fun and luxurious, like grocery shopping or lawn maintenance or any of 1,000 other chores I don't normally have time to do because I'm working.

Is this the land of the free, or the land of the I'm-tied-up-right-now-but-I'm-free-next-September?

Some people might blame all of this on the American work ethic. Me, I blame technology. In the 1960s, my mother promised me that one day I would have robots doing my housework and computers doing my office work. This pledge was passed down from her father, who promised her the same thing in the 1940s. It still hasn't happened.

Americans--the most plugged-in, mechanized society in history--are working harder than ever. Rather than creating time for leisure, our technology is creating ways that we can do more work at home. Cellular phones, palmtops and Internet access devices are making it virtually impossible to escape our jobs. Technology is diminishing our leisure time, not increasing it.

Even the American concept of time has changed. Now, working on "Internet time," we have more to do and less time to do it.

A few lost days--even lost hours--could mean losing out to the competition. And a skyrocketing number of employees are learning that working at a start-up company, even for stock options, can make indentured servitude look attractive.

Now I don't want to sound like Ted Kaczynski here. Clearly, information technology, particularly the Internet, is helping people communicate and collaborate in ways they never have before. And it's a chief reason for the prosperity that we currently enjoy.

But as technology people, shouldn't we be finding ways not only to make our companies more productive, but also to create more leisure time for employees? Couldn't IT be used to help people work less, rather than just work faster?

Last month, my wife and I broke the manacles from our desks and took a vacation to the lovely state of Maine. One day, we took a drive through Acadia National Park, a tour that culminates on Cadillac Mountain, the highest peak on the East Coast. It was a beautiful, quiet trip that helped us unplug from work and remember what life is really about.

When we arrived at the summit, however, we found a man sitting on a rock and talking to his office on a cellular phone. Stress was painted on his face, and we avoided him like he had leprosy. But the damage was already done: We were both thinking about work again.

If this is what technology has wrought, maybe this Labor Day is a good time to rethink it. If you're not too busy running errands, that is.

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