Is it about "Work Life Balance" or "Work Life Separation"?

Work Life Balance is such an over used word these days. Every employee complains about it. Complains about long working hours, working on weekends, working on holidays and the list goes on and on. Every manager tries to justify their actions by blaming it on the markets, business pressure and top management. Top management usually ignores such sentiments. Poor helpless HR folks are caught right in the center of this never ending whirlwind discussion in every employee forum. 

Technology was supposed to make our life easier right? Have we given a thought then, why this has actually back fired? Remember the good ol' days when we used landlines and desktops? Once we were out of office we couldn't access mails or calls and hence we organized our work very thoroughly especially before going on a holiday. We stretched on important days to ensure 100% work is completed before we called it a day. I remember having pizza dinners in office with my team during PMS days (the only time when HR folks work right ;))

Do you realize that the biggest mistake we are making by over using technology is that we are carrying our work with us 24/7 in our pockets? We are not leaving "office" ever. We are less disciplined and even a tad bit lazy due to technology. We were supposed to adopt technology to work smarter, but it turns out that technology is using us instead. 

I don't think that work pressure has increased, or the workload or the demands of work itself has changed drastically over these years. A sales guy then had as much pressure as a sales guy now. What has changed is our inability to separate our personal and professional worlds! 

Balance will not be achieved by trying to balance it anymore, but trying to separate it!

I hope i have provoked you just enough to think about this a little bit, would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this too.