Blackberry Blackout

Longitudinal studies show that over a nine-month period the average 47-hour work week has increased to 71 hours for Blackberry users. Recently, Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Richard McFadden declared a Blackberry-free zone, banning use of the device from meetings, and between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and on the weekends. He believes the workforce is already stressed enough. There’s a rumour that cabinet ministers have to leave their Blackberries at the door before entering a meeting.

Linda Duxbury, a professor at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa and a leading authority on the role technology plays in the workplace and in the balance of  work and life, says that other corporations have adopted this notion – Loblaws declared no Blackberry use on Wednesdays and Google put a ban on Blackberries every other Friday. But for one huge pharmaceutical company (Pfizer?) the only way to get their Blackberry-laden employees to comply to the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. ban was to turn off their servers.

Users are so dependent on their Blackberries, they can’t imagine 12 hours (six, seven, eight of which are unconscious hours) without them. Reports show that over-users are experiencing phantom buzzing, where they think they feel the loveable device purring somewhere on their body. Three weeks ago, a three-hour outage created an “angry Blackberry backlash across North America,” and affected 12 million people, says CBC Radio’s Michael Enright of The Sunday Edition. Proof positive that we are too dependent on these devices.

Duxbury believes that Blackberries are used inappropriately and refers to the device as “an electronic leash.” Everybody notices when you’re “doing the Blackberry prayer” in meetings, during dinner or at home. Ironically, it sends the wrong message. The flip side of this, however, is the boss who believes you should be chained to your Blackberry 24/7 and if you don’t comply with this belief, there will be consequences.

Duxbury says that Blackberries are decreasing productivity, because senders want a quick answer and there’s a confusion between quick and correct. It decreases the sense of urgency and confuses real priorities of the job. If you’re responding immediately to each message as it comes in, then how are you managing your work life and other responsibilities? The priority becomes immediate response to the message, so that you can delete it from the inbox and forget about it. Where’s the creativity in that? Where’s the strategic planning? Where’s the risk? All this does is tell your client you have nothing better to do than answer emails.

The best advice I’ve heard about responding to emails is from my instructor Jessie-May Rowntree. She advised us to set aside one hour out of our work day to respond to emails and to make sure recipients were aware of this practice. Duxbury adopts a similar approach to her email and on Fridays, she cleans up her inbox.

Attitudes have to change. Instead of promoting people who sleep with their Blackberries, we should treat them with disdain. Duxbury’s studies show that over-users have higher burnout levels and health issues, as opposed to responsible users who do not. She believes it can be a real addiction and more often than not, people welcome incoming messages as a distraction — something to pull them away from what they are doing.

Here are my questions: If Blackberry is affecting lives so much, what will Twitter do and how will it contribute to the increase in hours over the work week? Will people hear phantom tweets? And generations from now, will evolution see the need to equip us with two thumbs on each hand?