Overworked and Overwhelmed

If You Feel “Overworked and Overwhelmed”

John owns a consulting business. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, he worked a 17-hour day. His activities included navigating through tough LA morning traffic, making a conference call to Denmark while driving, attending an all-day meeting, dropping off a client at the airport, participating in an evening conference call, eating dinner and preparing for the next day by reading emails before finally going to bed.

Increasingly, managers and professionals report their lives seem out of control due to economic pressures and to ever-increasing use of technology. As downsized corporations “learned how to do more with less,” their surviving employees faced the “blessing and the curse” of “the rise of the smartphone.” Smartphones can be fun, but they make it, first, possible and, then, nearly necessary to work around the clock. A survey of executives, managers and professionals (EMPs) found that a typical smartphone-wielding EMP “is interacting with work” 72 hours of each 168-hour week, or about 43% of the time. Factor in sleeping, eating and grooming, and EMPs have only 40 hours a week – about 24% of their time – for other activities...