It’s easy to get into a routine of spending long hours in the office, tied in with even more hours working from home in the evenings. But is being a workaholic really helping your productivity? As Joe Robinson of Entrepreneur writes, being a workaholic is actually counterproductive to your career success.
“Most of us are ‘sucessaholics,'” says Leslie Perlow, author of Sleeping With Your Smartphone. “That’s what we think is necessary for our organization to succeed. If you try to do things differently, you will find it incredibly valuable. It’s rallying together to recognize that if we continue to work in this way, it’s undermining our productivity, our sustainability, our creativity.”
Perlow conducted a study with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to see if it really is necessary to be available 24-7. Half the executives that participated in the survey said they worked more than 65 hours a week, which doesn’t include the extra 20 hours they spent on their smartphones. As part of the experiment, Perlow told the participants to take one entire night off a week. What she found is that productivity as whole increased because the entire team was forced to better coordinate tasks with each other.
“It unleashes an incredibly powerful process for these teams,” Perlow said. “They were planning better, prioritizing better, delivering better products to their clients. In the meantime, they had more predictability and control of their lives.”
Perlow also says the introduction of the smartphone has created a sense of urgency to every email and task that is sent our way. However, no one ever really stops to think to turn off said phone or ignore it for a quiet evening at home.
Does your smartphone control your life?
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