It’s time to say goodbye and unplug our message obsession

Terry Prone reflects on our over reliance on technology and why instant messaging does not make us productive.

DIDN’T email Stephanie once last week. Not once.Nor did I text her. I did get the shakes a couple of times from withdrawal, but I did it cold turkey. That’s because she was on holiday. Stephanie is a colleague, but that’s to understate it a bit. She is the one to whom I have outsourced my brain, and so, whether it’s bills to be paid, water allowances to be claimed or speaking engagements to be sorted, incoming emails hardly get a chance to rest, even briefly, in my inbox before they ricochet to her.

But, because you are SUCH a co-dependent, because you have such a need to be wanted, you opened every message and replied, didn’t you? And don’t tell me that you did it only at one specific time of the day and never went back to your smartphone thereafter, because I’m not going to believe you. You worried yourself into all-day engagement in electronic ping pong.

What happens, particularly with texts, is that the person to whom you send the first text feels they must respond, even if the matter does not actually require them to. Then the original sender gets grateful and replies because they feel they shouldn’t let a text silence fall. Heaven forfend.

So the comet of the original message has a tail of follow-ups of decreasing length and increasing pointlessness. This is the text version of that maddening habit so many people have at the end of phone calls, where, instead of clicking off, they say “Bye bye bye byebyebybyb.” One of these days, I’m going to pre-empt that comet-tail conversation-closer by saying to a friend “And please don’t now say ‘Bye bye bye byebyebybyb,’ because you’re driving me out of my mind every time you do it.”This will end a friendship, but probably not a habit which has infected half the nation.

If I had emailed Stephanie last week, not only would she have opened it, she’d have dealt with it. She’s like that. She would never consider for a moment the option of putting that notice on her inbox. You know the one that says “I’m out of the office until January 2. If what ails you is urgent, talk to some replacement in my office. Otherwise bug out of my life.” Not that any of them are so crude. They’re just so humourlessly formal that the wannabe correspondent feels they’ve been smacked in the face with a stale kipper. They’re also so unnatural that the people who post them always forget to UNpost them, so you have an animated phone conversation with someone about how wonderful their holiday was (inevitably, it ends “Bye bye bye byebyebybyb”) and promise to send them a document they request. Then, when you try to send it, you get this notice promising that the recipient will pay attention to it when they come home on a named day. Which day has, you note, through gritted teeth, already passed. At least you have the consolation of knowing that two million emails have piled up in their inbox, including the extras arriving after they came home. That’ll teach them.

The thing is that the outward and visible signs of sucking up to the corporate culture constantly change.One year, you prove your commitment to your employer by working until at least seven each evening. The next year, you prove it by being available on email and text at all times and on all occasions, whether it’s christening your baby, burying your mother, teaching your toddler to swim or sleeping in.

Unless you work for Daimler. Daimler, the posh German carmaker, has put its substantial foot down on this one. They have instituted something they call “holiday mode,” which allows employees to put up a notice saying a) they’re away, b) they can’t be reached, and c) here’s the name of a good substitute who will take care of the person emailing. So far, so standard. It’s what happens thereafter that’s significant. Once the emailer has the information allowing them to get their problem solved by another staff member within Daimler, their email disappears into thin air. It self-destructs. It does not sit in the holiday maker’s inbox, waiting to reproach them when they return from their holliers.

The way the Daimler people see it, this means their employees can fully enjoy their vacations, without going through that final week dreading the loaded inbox. Effectively, they come back to a clean electronic sheet. Nor are Daimler alone among German industrial giants in introducing controls on employee emails. Volkswagon and Deutsche Telekom have gone further, so that their staff don’t get tormented by emails at weekends and at night. Of course it could be suggested that those employees could show a little self-control by simply not opening their emails in the evening or when Saturday comes, but peer pressure in a large company can be exigent, and so it may be much more effective to do as these employers have done: cut emails off at source and remove any obligation, real or imagined, from those employed.

Research done by an American professor has found that, onaverage, workers check their messages more than seventy times in a day. They haul their phone out from under the pillow before they put a foot to the floor in the morning.

They check what’s up on the sly at meetings and family meals. And, as one mobile phone saleswoman recently told me, “They do it in the loo. Why do the huge majority of insurance claims on destroyed mobile phones result from them falling into the loo? Because people can’t even spend three minutes in the toilet without checking who’s saying what to them.

The truly crazy aspect of this is that it’s the least effective, most delusional employees in any company who spend most time on their messages. They do it because it makes them feel needed, relevant and important — even if they have simply been cc’d on a general email of no particular relevance to them personally. They do it because they believe in multi-tasking. (Yeah. Like the guy who drove over the Californian cliff while texting, thereby terminating his capacity to undertake any task in the future, he being completely dead.) They do it because they’re rude, insulting the human being in front of them (colleague, partner or child) in their determination to catch up with their eletronic relationships with distant humans who may merely be exemplifiying the “Bye bye bye byebyebybyb” syndrome of inability to end a conversation.

Twenty-four hour slavery to messaging devices may look like productivity, but it’s the opposite.

They haul their phone out from under the pillow before they put a foot to the floor in the morning