Remember these?? It’s amazing how technology has improved over the past decade. I remember growing up with corded phones and dial-up internet, and computers were these slow clunky things. Now everything can be accessed from a single smartphone. Google tells you the answers to everything. You can sync your music, or your fit bit. You don’t need a physical map to navigate a new city. Sounds great, right?
Well, all good things in life seem to come with a catch.
Instant accessibility is great – until you don’t want to be accessible 24/7. We love our smartphones today because we can text, email, or call anyone anytime. Chances are they have their phones with them all the time and will reply quickly. But what if it’s your boss?
I received a message from my supervisor at 11pm last week. I wasn’t at work, but it had to do with a work-related issue. Can I ignore it and pretend I never saw it until the next morning? Or does it need to be addressed immediately? (FYI, I saw it and responded within an hour). Our medical school actually sent out an email a while back explicitly stating that it was our responsibility to check our school emails regularly, and reply in a timely manner. But what does that mean?
The line between work and life has become blurred. In the past they had to call you at your house phone and probably leave a message on your answering machine. They couldn’t expect you to be at home waiting for a little red light to start flashing. Now they know that they can reach you on your cell phone in an instant. Work now follows you, wherever you are and at all hours of the day. When I check my email in the evening after work (or morning before work), I usually have 5-10 emails waiting in my inbox. I am constantly connected.
Certainly, in the old days (and even in more rural areas now), physicians had always been on call virtually 24/7. Maybe they had a partner so they can split the evenings 50-50. However, anything outside “normal” work hours was reserved for urgent matters and didn’t occur every day.
Now I find myself reading messages from work all the time. It might be just a little note, or a reminder, or a question from someone. But they quickly add up. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just shut off my cell phone after I get home. Would the world fall apart? Probably not. It has become ingrained in our heads that we must check our emails at least 2-3 times a day, and for me, that usually means work- or school-related emails.
So what do we do about that? I honestly don’t know. We all want things, and we generally like to have them quickly. Smartphones let us achieve that. I don’t think we should go back to the old phones where talking was the only available function (though I could write an entire post about how this generation no longer talks on the phone anyway). Besides, I like the internet. A lot. Our society as a whole has become dependent and addicted to our smartphones, and I doubt that will change. But I wonder if there isn’t a way we could disconnect, so that we can experience and enjoy the rest of our lives outside of work without distraction.
Bipolar in Medicine 