Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

Mobile Technology Frees Workers to Work Any 20 Hours a Day They Choose

Mobile technology is allowing workers to work wherever and whenever they choose.

That’s both the good news and the bad.

As most people already know, the shift means less time in the office, but also more time working.

A new survey from Good Technology finds that the typical American is working more than a month and a half of overtime per year, just in the amount of time spent answering work phone calls and responding to email.

The amount of total work done outside of the confines of the office adds up to 30 hours per month for the average worker.

And while more than half of workers ascribe a lot of that work to just trying to keep organized, nearly half feel like they have no choice but to stay connected. And half of us are taking our cellphones to bed with us.

So how is all this extra work going over at home? Well, a quarter of those polled said that it has led to at least some disagreements with their partner, though more than half reported no arguments, presumably because their spouse or significant other was too busy doing their own work to notice.

Anecdotally, it’s hard to disagree with the findings of this study. I’m writing this article from bed at 10:30 pm on a Sunday.

Here are a few other findings:

• 68 percent of people check their work emails before 8 am.
• The average American first checks his or her phone around 7:09 am.
• 50 percent check their work email while still in bed.
• 40 percent still do work email after 10 pm.
• 69 percent will not go to sleep without checking their work email.
• 57 percent check work emails on family outings.
• 38 percent routinely check work emails while at the dinner table.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik