Reachability

As a career technologist, something has been building inside me for a while. I grew up through a lot of technological change in our society, and in retrospect, those good old days were actually good for a reason.

For those of you who are my age and remember, there was a time we weren’t reachable, on-demand, at any time, any day of the week. Up until the late 80s, most people had a home phone – one home phone. In most houses, that phone had a cord long enough to stretch from the hallway to the kitchen. In some houses, the cord was long enough to stretch to nearly every room!

Some people were fancy and had an Answering Machine. Yep, a purpose-built device with a cassette tape that would answer the phone after a certain number of rings, letting the caller leave you a message. Usually it was family or friends, asking you to call them back. The tape would eventually run out of space, so there were only a certain number of messages that could be left.

The most advanced computer in the average household was Pong, or an Atari 2600. Or if you were really lucky, you got a Nintendo in the later 80s! For those schools lucky enough to afford computers, Apple IIe dominated the market. Kids found Carmen Sandiego all over the world, some of them survived the trip along the Oregon Trail, and Printshop was amazing!

The most important part of all that though, was when you left work, you left work. You were largely unreachable after hours. If you weren’t home when someone called, they didn’t get in touch with you. Or if you had an answering machine, you screened the call and decided if you needed to talk right then and there, or it could wait. Work plans and to-dos were captured in written memos, sitting on a desk in an office somewhere, untouched and unaddressed until you were next in the office. You may have even had an Inbox and Outbox on your desk for papers to shuffle their way through. We got to sit down in the evenings, have dinner, watch the game or a show on TV, read a book, or miraculously sit outside to “enjoy the evening.” Your off time was your off time to spend as you wished.

As technology advanced, along came pagers for those people who just HAD to be reached in a crisis after hours. Suddenly your time wasn’t REALLY your time, but it was only in cases of emergencies, and only if your job really needed after-hours work. Then came along cell phones, where now you could be reached whether you were at home or not. You may be out to dinner with the family, but instead of waiting to have a conversation in the office the next day, people could just call you and discuss right then. We adapted to our new reachability over the next decade, slowly becoming accustomed to frequent interruptions.

Then came Blackberry. Not only could you be reached via phone, but those memos sitting on your desk didn’t need to sit and wait until the next day! Now you could receive them AND respond, in the form of an email, from the comfort of your couch, within minutes! What started as a slow progression of reachability became the slow progression of Always On. Of course, with the introduction of the iPhone and every smartphone since, the capabilities, connectivity and means of interaction have only exploded.

In just a few (shortish) decades, we have gone from having a home life away from work to enjoy as we please, to squeezing in some relaxation between the constant barrage of connectivity. I believe it’s human nature to communicate and listen – when you suddenly hear someone speaking in a room, your brain tunes in to listen. But our brains incorporated that with other communication too – someone just texted me, I need to see what they said! Someone sent me an email, it could be important! Someone messaged me on Teams after hours, it’s probably urgent! Not to mention the Tweets around someone’s ideas of politics, the Facebook posts of the latest something to be outraged about, the Instagram of someone’s newest kitchen creation, and on and on and on. Our brains think we are being communicated with, so they tune in, even when we try not to. And since people can email, text, message or post any time of day, our brains are constantly waiting for that next new message to come through. We are Always On.

From a technology perspective, to my fellow technologists, I challenge that we should think through these capabilities before adopting them. Are they really what’s in the best interest of the people receiving them? Why can’t they be scheduled for delivery during normal business hours? Reserve the phone calls or text messages for something TRULY important and relegate the rest to normal business hours. Outlook lets you schedule a time to deliver your emails – 4 onerous clicks later and on a message-by-message basis. It’s 2025 – in all communication apps, let the users specify their normal business hours and stop alerting outside of those.

From a business perspective, I challenge people to think through the desired result of your product. Is it so sensitive that it needs to be right in front of 100+ people’s faces the instant it gets sent? ?Are we really more productive? Is that employee stopping their dinner to read and answer while ignoring their family truly more effective? Or are they providing a quick, distracted answer to check it off the list, while feeling that ever-building sense of annoyance and frustration that their time no longer belongs to them? Studies have shown that the Always On connection of our society has had negative impacts, though I can’t and won’t cite any of them here for you. Should any business process be built such that the function collapses if the people off work don’t respond? It should be built in a way that after-hours means after-hours, and critical functions are actually staffed after-hours.

I’m not a psychiatrist, and I don’t play one on TV, so I won’t pretend to espouse the mental impact our connected society has had on us. But I’d be surprised if nearly every person reading this post hasn’t, at some point, felt that same brewing discontent that their personal lives are so thoroughly intertwined with work, social media, and the expectations thereof. I also don’t hate technology – there are amazing ways it has transformed our society. But this is NOT a positive example, in my humble opinion.

The irony of me posting this on social media isn’t lost on me ?? But is, in truth, why I so rarely use it.