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Ephraim Schwartz decries eroding personal time through ubiquitous expectation: Ephraim's InfoWorld column is dead on, in this writer's opinion. Ubiquitous access to information shouldn't be translated to mean eternal work. I believe that eternal work is as close to damnation as we're allowed to see on this material plane.

It's one of my pet peeves that productivity is required to increase every month to indicate a healthy economy. In fact, increased productivity often comes at the expense of the family life so beloved by pro-business politicians. In the blue-collar world, increased productivity means a faster pace (and thus more accidents or decreased quality) or illegal off-the-clock hours. It rarely means more money.

White-collar workers of all stripes are expected to spend ever-more downtime hours working so their days start when they wake and check email, extend through the commute into the office, and follow them home and over weekends.

When my uncle worked at HP in the 80s and 90s as a manager, they tried to get him to take a very early personal computer home, and he refused. He knew they would demand that much more work from him on top of his long hours. (Ah, the days, when you could turn down a computer.)

To quote a popular phrase at Amazon.com after my time there: you can work long, hard, or smart; pick any three.

I can also reference a brief item from Scott Adams's latest Dilbert Newsletter: one of his correspondents described how his wife, before she quit her job, tried to convince her bosses to let her work part-time when she had a baby. They took her to lunch and said, we don't understand. You work so hard already -- how will you do everything in half the time?

My personal vision for wireless communication is one of liberation, but it's so easily subverted. Instead of spending so much time dealing with the mechanisms of data interaction (making a connection, waiting for data to move), you deal with the result: email you can respond to, a presentation that you needed. The outcome should be less time and in more venues that you appreciate. Instead of handling email when you arrive home, instead you answer it while on the ferry or the train. Although that erodes a different part of your downtime, perhaps it frees up the more important periods.

My cousin might have a cautionary tale. When he worked at Pacific Bell and voicemail was new, as a lower-level manager, he had a limited number of voicemail messages he could have in his inbox. When he was promoted to a higher-level position, that number increased--and so did the messages. Instead of dealing with a dozen messages at any given time, he was into the dozens. His workload suddenly extended without an end in sight.

I'd have to say the moment that I decided to leave my job at Amazon.com after only six months over 96-97 came when it hit me that no matter how hard I worked, my job would only become denser: more tasks packed into the same time and I was working as hard as I felt capable of already. I gave notice a few days later.