Phoning it in

Could you bear to switch off that smartphone; or are you too scared of missing out on that important work email?

Say what you will about the French – admit it, the words ‘rude’ and ‘snobbish’ are hovering close to your lips – you have to admit that they have life sorted. They eat loads of butter, cream and cheese, wash it down with red wine, smoke a cigarette afterwards, and still remain thin and healthy (the rates of heart attacks here are among the lowest; what the rest of the world calls the French paradox). They work the least number of hours in the week (35, since you ask) and yet have a standard of living that rivals the best in the world. And it is a country in which even a Monsieur Flanby (French for ‘wobbly custard’) like Francois Hollande can have the most ravishing women fighting over him. What’s not to love, right?

And now, apparently, things are getting even better for les Francais. News reports last week had it that their labour unions had negotiated a new deal with the employers associations, according to which employees would no longer be expected to answer or even look at work emails outside of office house. So, while the rest of us wage slaves are anxiously peering at our smartphones just in case the boss has mailed us about (yet another) work emergency, the French are faffing off, sitting at a café, smoking a Gauloise, sipping an aperitif and wondered what to cook for supper.

Well, okay, I exaggerate. Like all things French, there is a bit of hyperbole and myth making going on here. (And yes, French women do get fat and their kids do throw food around.) It turns out that this ‘agreement’ only applies to people who don’t work the 35-hour week, and they are required to steer clear of work emails for 11 hours at least (the 6 pm deadline beaten to death by the media was a figment of the over-active imaginations of some reporters and columnists).

But all of this begs the question: if you were asked – indeed, required by law – to put away your smartphone for 11 hours and not even sneak a peak at it to check if something had gone catastrophically wrong at work, could you do that? Or would a part of you always be nervously wondering about what you were missing? What would be more stressful for you at the end of the day: staying connected with work or cutting yourself off completely for a period of time?

Speaking for myself, I have to admit (a bit shame-facedly) that the first thing I do every morning, and indeed, last thing at night, is check my emails. And the very thought of being parted from my smartphone, even for a couple of hours, makes me panic just a little.

And I suspect that it is much the same for most people in our hyper-connected generation. Staying in touch, staying connected, and remaining available for work throughout the day (and night) has become a part of life for us. And even if we resent the hold our workplaces have on us thanks to our smartphones, like Pavlov’s dogs, we have become attuned to clicking on to every email that pops into our inboxes, and typing out a reply right away. Anything less, and we feel that we are slacking off.

There are those who maintain that being hyper-connected actually allows them to take more time off than they could in the pre-email and pre-smartphone era. Now at least it is possible to leave office early enough to take your kids for a game in the park and deal with out-of-work-hour emergencies on the phone. It is easier to go off on holiday for a couple of weeks without worrying about what will happen in your absence, because you can always check in virtually every day. And working from home is now a genuine option in a way that it never was before.

But in a world where work is only an email away, is there any way to genuinely switch off and relax? Is there any way to enjoy some real downtime without worrying about what’s going on at the office? It is even possible to carve out some personal space when it is impossible to get away from the professional sphere?

Well, there is only one way to find out. Switch your smartphones off before you start dinner with the family. And switch them on only after breakfast the next day. If you still have a job by the end of a week, then you may be on to something!

Switching off

Why can’t we bear to be out of touch with the world for even a nano-second?

What is the first thing that you do when the wheels of your plane touch down on the tarmac? Do you send up a silent prayer for having arrived safely at your destination? Do you hastily scramble around to collect your reading glasses, shawl, book, magazines or whatever detritus you have strewn around you? Do you rummage in your purse for a lipstick so that you can repair your face before facing the world?

Or do you dig out your mobile phone/Blackberry and switch it on even before the seat belt sign is off?

I’m guessing most readers will be ticking the last option. Going by my own experience on flights this is what everyone does the moment the plane lands, defying the airline staff’s plaintive request that no one should switch on their mobile until the aircraft doors are open. So, even as you are taxiing down the runway, the air is abuzz with messages, emails, and phone calls coming through the ether.

Some are self-importantly scanning their Blackberries for all those crucial emails they missed while in transit. Others are calling their drivers to tell them to drive up to the exit gate so that they don’t have to wait even a couple of minutes for their cars. And then there are those inveterate social animals who can’t wait to get off the aircraft to firm up their dinner plans for the evening.

But every single passenger is on his or her phone, checking smses, the list of missed calls, tapping out messages, scanning e-mails, or making phone calls.

What is so important that can’t wait even for the five or ten minutes it takes to disembark from the aircraft? I am guessing here, but I wouldn’t mind betting that it’s nothing at all.

It’s just that we have become so used to the idea of being plugged into things at all times that we begin to suffer withdrawal symptoms when we are out of touch with the world for the few hours we are in an aircraft. So like a junkie craving a quick fix of his drug of choice, we reach for our phones with a certain desperate urgency the moment we are on terra firma.

What did we miss, we wonder as we switch on our lifelines. Was the boss looking for me with an urgent message? Did the sentence on Ajmal Kasab come through while I was mid-air? Did the sales and marketing team manage to swing that new contract? Did some new controversy break out on Twitter? Did my daughter do well in her exam? Did the stock market recover from that setback earlier in the day? Did India win that T-20 match against South Africa?

Yes, the questions are just bubbling over in our heads and we simply cannot wait for the answers that are lurking in the electronic memory of our phones. So, the first thing we do is switch it on to reconnect with the world. And as the screen comes alive with messages, e-mails and phone calls, in a very real sense, we come alive as well.

See, that’s the thing about modern living. We simply cannot stand the thought of being out of touch – with the news, with our friends, with the office, with social networking sites. No matter where we go, what we do, we must be plugged in. It’s the information age after all; so who could bear to be deprived of information?

Even if we are on holiday, when you are supposed to get away from it all, we want to stay in touch. What do you think is the first question most people ask when they check into a hotel? No, it’s not about what treatments the spa offers. It’s not about what time breakfast is served in the coffee shop. It’s not even about what speciality restaurants there are in the hotel.

No, what people want to know right away is how they can access wi-fi in their rooms. And this is as true of business hotels in big cities as it is of resort hotels in far-flung corners of the world where you should be enjoying the natural beauty all around you instead of surfing the Net. And yet, there we are, logging on to access our mail, check the news sites, and upload photographs on to Twitter and Facebook so that everyone knows exactly what we are up to (and we know what they are up to as well).

If there’s one thing that we can’t bear to do it is switch off – from the mad whirl of events that make up our world; from the constant thrill of the 24-hour news cycle; from the incessant pressure of our workplaces; and from the over-sharing that is such a defining feature of social media.

And we certainly can’t bear to switch off our mobile phones without suffering pangs of anxiety about what we are missing out on.