Too wired for football

By Selwyn Parker

An Australian company which specialises in rest and recuperation for executives requires them to surrender their cellphones when they check in at a lodge in the Queensland bush.

After brief withdrawal symptoms, they learn to cope without their phones.

Indeed, staff say that after 48 hours, their guests start to treasure the fact that they are incommunicado.

In time the conversation turns from work to deeper issues like personal beliefs, family, nationhood, and the meaning of life.

"Many of these executives say their biggest regret is that they were too busy to see their son's big football match," says one staff member.

What was it all for? A survey some years ago of retired chief executives of Fortune 500 companies recorded that, almost to a man (they were all men), they regretted not having seen their children grow up. And now it was too late.

Harry Chapin wrote a song about it, Cat's In the Cradle, telling of a man too busy to be a father because he had "planes to catch, bills to pay, and a lot to do".

That was before cellphones became ubiquitous.

If anything, the principle is even more relevant today. As communications technology presents more and more ways of wiring oneself to the office, fundamental lifestyle issues have begun to emerge.

Is it really that important to be hooked up 16 hours a day? Do all those calls and connections really matter?

Are people learning to phone before they think, using the cellphone as a sort of dummy, instead of taking responsibility themselves?

Are these late 20th-century tools impairing people's ability to reflect and, if so, do they damage the quality of decisions?

And should our lives be run by cellphones, beepers, modems, palmtops and pagers?

To harassed managers, it must sometimes seem the communications giants are devising ever more imaginative ways of depriving them of a private life.

Just launched in the United States is the Advantage Myna Pager, a $US49.95 ($94.20), 61/2cm-wide beeper that comes with nine pre-set melodies, and the $US359, 9cm-wide RIM Inter@ctive Pager which can do wireless e-mails, paging, faxes and hook into the internet.

Nearly everybody is grizzling about the explosion in e-mails.

It's nothing for senior managers in New Zealand to get 100 a day including attachments, and that's probably too much.

It is a worldwide problem. At Waterside, British Airways' extremely wired new headquarters near Heathrow, a campaign has started to reduce e-mail.

"Too much time is spent reading e-mails," scolds the airline's internal survey on Waterside.

It's going to get worse before it gets better.

One of Sydney's top law firms has given its partners portable computers as their prime communications tool so they can work seamlessly from home after business hours, including weekends.

In a nice irony, the same firm has also initiated a study to improve the quality of partners' private lives.

Getting away from it all has become much more difficult.

Most American managers expect to be in contact with their offices over their summer breaks, says a study by the American Management Association.

Of 1800 executives surveyed, only 340 - 19 per cent - intended to leave their cellphones behind on holiday.

But 28 per cent, or more than 500, expected to be in daily contact with the office.

This wasn't usually the managers' preference but their companies' insistence.

Fifteen per cent said their employers required executives on holiday to make regular contact and 40 per cent said they had to leave not only their contact numbers but their itineraries with the office.

Nobody's denying that many of today's communications tools, such as laptops, cellphones and beepers, are a boon which set staff free from the office while still keeping them in touch.

E-mail is a very good way of sharing information and delivering messages.

But judging by the number of private complaints from most levels of management, it's time to tame the torrent of electronic communication before it impedes managers' ability to step aside and clear their minds for the important work.