HEALTH PLUS: Divisions between personal and work time, while essential, are being eroded
IT SHOULD be so simple. Life should be easier. With technology removing the burden of many manual and mental tasks, energy should be higher, time should be greater and space created for what is important to us.
But this has not happened. It would seem that we are more mentally tired, more physically exhausted, more socially stretched, more stressed about work, more time-tied and with higher expectations of ourselves than ever before. Life has not got easier.
Working days are longer, tasks more numerous; time- management is more intense, systems more complex; and we have less personal time, private time, reflective time and family time than ever before.
The maxim that "all work expands to fill the time available for its execution" suggests we engage in repetitive, redundant activities to rationalise and occupy our allocated time on tasks regardless of what time is available to us.
But we can also condense time, try to fit more activities into a short time than is possible and favour quantity over the quality of what we do.
Each time we invent or invest in a labour-saving commodity; a more rapid means of communication or more diverse communication methods, we can create as many problems as we solve.
The propensity to raise the bar is evident. As soon as we find a quicker means of doing something, we either find more of those things to do more quickly or alternative tasks to fill the gap from those previous endeavours.
For example, the magic of the word-processor, its speed, its capacity to alter, insert, delete or expand documents on command, to improve, justify and to print many copies should surely have reduced the pressure of paperwork in many lives. The converse is true.
If documents are easily typed, more of them can be prepared. If alterations may be made, visual perfection is the norm. If copies are available, everyone should have one.
The capacity to do more should not lead, in a mindless, ill-considered way, to doing more, unless what one is doing in the first place is worth doing and unless it is enhanced by doing more of it.
More is less if life becomes a tyranny of tasks. More is less if we do not create appropriate time to reflect on what we are doing. Because as individuals and organisations we need to ask, at regular intervals, what we are doing and why? We need to ask if doing more of the same does more for anyone.
Recent examples in large organisations of the danger of "doing" without reflection on the rationale of what was being done has shown how necessary it is to factor self-reflexive practice into our professional lives and our organisational strategies. Size matters. Bigger is not necessarily better. Greater is not necessarily good.
Time matters. If we are accessible all the time then can we be equally mentally available and alert at all times that we are contacted? If there is no reprieve from communication, if there is nowhere that one cannot be contacted, how does that impact on our mental health?
For we are becoming increasingly clinically aware that if there is no safe zone from phone or text, nowhere we cannot be e-mailed, faxed and accessed, that this has real psychological stress effects on us in the long term.
The avalanche of e-mails in the inbox, the number of voice- mails that await us overnight, the extent of texts and the overload of communication, means we cannot truly disconnect from the relent- lessness of messages that others wish to send us and to which they want a prompt reply. Divisions between personal and work time are essential and are being eroded.
With immediacy of communication there is an expectation of immediate response. Yet if we are to process information properly, reflect upon our answers, consider options, respond in a co-ordinated way and keep in mind the larger picture in the daily detail, then we need some space to do so. We need recursivity between thinking time and operational time without which individuals suffer, organisations flounder and things go wrong.
The essential mental rejuvenation and physical regeneration that drawing boundaries between work and home once provided meant that the elastic of working life was released often enough to ensure it did not snap. Scientist Hans Selye's early work in this area on the "General Adaptation Syndrome" confirms that whether we snap under stress depends upon whether there is a regular reprieve from stress or whether it is persistent and prolonged.
Time is our gift. The tyranny of time is our creation. The consequences are clear.
• mmurray@irish-times.ie
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD