The Most Important Reason to Be More Efficient At Work:

How many hours a week do you work? How happy are you at work? How does work impact your personal / family life?

According to some reports, we actually work shorter hours than our parents and grandparents did in the 1950’s. The average working week has shrunk from 48 hours to 37 hours.

In spite of that, most of us can relate to feeling stressed, burned out and just plain exhausted, far more so than we might remember earlier generations feeling during their lives. We aren’t wrong. All these negative effects have increased and the culprit is also the tool that could reverse that trend.

You guessed it - it’s technology.

While we may work shorter hours, statistically at least, we seem to pack a lot more into those hours. 

Not only that, but most of us are now involved in some kind of technology based service industry as opposed to being in manufacturing or agriculture. Not that there aren’t stresses in those industries, but in the first half of the 20th century, people usually had a job for life, provided they performed with a modicum of efficiency. 

Those days, 96% of men worked in full time jobs as opposed to just 75% today. Only 4% of people worked part time as opposed to over 25% in 2012. Only 1 in 2 women of working age were employed outside the home as opposed to 2 in 3 today.

Despite the idyllic conditions we see in old sit-coms, things weren’t a bed of roses in the ’50’s. The greatest war of all time was recently over. Many men hadn’t come home. A new era of prosperity was just dawning but people still had the mind-set of working hard and making do. The average house cost was around $7,000 just a bit more than 2 years annual income at an average of just over $3,000 per year.

Today, depending on where you live, house prices can be many multiples of an average annual income. On the flip side, factoring in inflation, the basic cost of living was actually higher in the 1950’s with regard to appliances, food and so on.

Somehow, despite longer hours, less luxuries and more physical working conditions, people were less stressed. When they went home at night, they could forget about their job until the next morning and spend time relaxing physically as well as mentally.

Today, we are connected 24/7/365. Annual leave in not mandatory in America, although most employers do provide at least a few weeks per year. Many people actually don’t take a real ‘holiday’ from work. Firstly because of fears over job security and secondly because they are just an email, a text, a phone call away from work wherever they happen to be, whether on holiday or not.

Being so connected and having the technological capabilities we have today is wonderful. It can be a blessing - if it’s managed. 

Technology is the main reason we can be more efficient, more productive. In fact, if we value our mental, physical and spiritual health, we must manage it well. It allows us to achieve a tremendous amount during our work time and allows others to access what we’ve done whether we are present or not. This improves productivity and streamlines business operations. 

What we have to guard against is allowing ourselves to not be fully present during personal time because we are ‘sort of’ still present at work. 

Recognizing that taking time off actually makes us more productive is an eye-opener for many. Think about it. If you know you have a vacation or a trip coming up, you tend to work harder during the preceding days so as to avoid any delays for co-workers and clients while you’re away. You also try to ensure that you are freed from many daily tasks during that time.

However, if you still constantly worry about work while away, it defeats the object of ‘working ahead’. You have to actually ‘switch off’ mentally from work and focus on being fully present in the moment. It’s the only way to truly de-stress, relax and reap the physical, mental and emotional benefits of having time off work.

Fortunately, the same technology that keeps us connected can also help us disconnect. It’s one of the motivations behind Nimbulis. 

We felt it was important to create a platform that would not only benefit business operations, but one that would make life easier for people. After all, business is run by people. People who have lives, dreams and commitments that extend beyond the bounds of the corporation. We feel that creating better lives for people makes perfect business sense. What do you think?

#FutureWork #Stress #Technology