Over Christmas I have been lucky enough to be at home. The office is closed and the majority of my team have not been on mail so I’ve been given some time to think about…well…time.
Time is my most precious commodity. It seems that no matter how much I streamline, organise and write to do lists I never quite have enough of it. In an agency time is also a commodity; we sell it and quite honestly many businesses I’ve worked with seems to try and squeeze as much out of the 7 hours in the day as they can.
Robert Dempsey’s blog post ‘do you ever sleep.’. Robert paints a familiar picture; a global businessman, he works overnight to make a success if his US business and then is a family man during the day. Roberts choice seems to work for him; he has a successful blog and it sounds as if business is going well – he chooses to forgo sleep because of the benefits he personally sees from this decision. However, his post made me think about whether it is now always a choice to live and work in this way.
But I’m wondering if social media has something to do with this too: the best connected people have the highest klout scores, those who tweet more tend to get more followers, you have to checkin to stay at the top of the game on foursquare. Has social media taught us to value people more when they are constantly “online” and respond to us in an instant?
Countless times this year, I have heard people praised for their ability to go without sleep, as if their ability to drink coffee and get out another hour at the office demonstrates how great a marketeer they are. (This sometimes is the case; the more dedicated players are the ones who wil stay late at the office or get in early in order to be organised before everyone else appears at their desks. But again this is a choice, not a necessity.)
Now that we carry our emails around in our pockets, it is expected that we will respond more swiftly. Now that brands have Facebook pages, consumers expect a swift response when they write negatively on that brands wall. Being connected and socialised has given us the ability to respond to each other quicker than ever before and we now expect this behaviour and value it. One downside of this seems to be that the super social amongst us spend more time connected and connecting. Stephen Carrick-Davies’s Guardian article on no screen time suggests that our longer working hours are driven by ourselves and our addiction to being online, rather than a changing societal expectation. To paraphrase:
we tell them that they are getting addicted to our screens but they see that we are too. It’s just that we call our screen addiction work
It’s a good point. But I think that screen addiction is a need to be online and that there is a wider pressure here; to be good at your job, to be perceived to be a social butterfly, to be successful in our supersocial society we need to be connected, responsive and ultimately to be creating content that shows just how great we are. All this takes time and therefore sleep, the activity of the least social value is getting dropped. Thus it goes hand in hand that if you can manage with less sleep you have a better chance of fitting all this in. ergo (and you see where I am going here) we come to equate not sleeping with success and see sleep as a sign of weakness.
What do you think; is it changing values or our own need to be connected and online that is keeping us awake? Have you come across the attitude that those who snooze ultimately loose out in business?
Image courtesy of espsos.de
