You've Got Mail. Check It. Now. There was a great little story in The New York Times on June 23rd that brings up the case of a scuffle between ABC and some of the writers that work there. The question at hand? Whether answering emails on your BlackBerry from home constitutes work that you should be paid for or not. The Writer's Guild is making a stir because they are desperate to avoid what they call "the 24/7 workplace." The article is small, taking up only a couple of inches at the bottom of Monday's Media page, but the message within is huge. It pinpoints what is perhaps one of the greatest dilemmas of the present moment, when it comes to working and living. Is work becoming inseparable from life? Are we doomed to always be connected to our jobs?
 On the one hand, we here at The Lattice Group are huge proponents of working from home, telecommuting, and, above all, flexibility (I am writing this from a temporary home in New York while communicating with current headquarters in Stockholm). Flexibility and freedom are possible in our day and age thanks largely to the gadgets that keep us wired and reachable at all times. Yes, you can work from your sailboat— but you are still responsible for responding promptly to work-related inquiries sent your way. And that can be the downside. Once you start being wired all the time, you are suddenly also on-call all the time. While the gadget opened the door to flexibility in the first place, it may also have drawn the curtain on being “free.” When work ceases to be contained to a place and a time, it commences to be everywhere, all the time.
On the other hand, this may be an inevitable development of our time even for people without an explicit desire for “flexibility.” The fact is that the globalized economy is increasingly competitive. And the Western economy is increasingly talent-based and creative. For a large part of the population, especially the college-educated segment that The Lattice Group focuses on, work will never mean punching in on a clock. Work will be an intrinsic part of you, all the time. Defined by what you think and create. Even by what you write in a facebook message or a gchat.
The Writer’s Guild is fighting back against a 24/7 workplace, but they may be too late. For many of us, the 24/7 workplace is already an irreversible reality. Gen Y is the first generation to be completely reared in an age of constant accessibility. We are the guinea pigs for this human experiment under the banner of the BlackBerry. The question is: what kind of a generation of children will we, as always-on-parents, raise? - Astri Read the full NYTimes article here. Photo by bhikku on Flickr under Creative Commons License.
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