Communications Curfew

Interesting article by Jean Singleterry about employer's efforts to get employees to quit checking their electronic devices, for work purposes, after hours:  Personal Finance

There's simply no denying the massive intrusion that cell phones, and in particular smart phones, have made into many professions' personal time.  It's really interesting to consider the evolution of this over time.

A century ago, 1912, most people in my office profession had no direct contact with their work outside of their office, unless they were on a work related mission. By the same token, however, and often missed in all of this, doing some work at home on an emergency basis was pretty common.  I think perhaps modern technology, starting with the telephone, has greatly reduced that.  By this sort of at home work what I mean is, for example, it wasn't wholly uncommon for somebody to show up at a lawyers house off hours if there was some sort of an emergency that seemed to require it. This was even more common, much more common, in the case of the medical professions, where after hour contacts were part of the expectation of the profession.  This carried on well after the introduction of the telephone for doctors and dentists, and probably actually dramatically increased.

Offices at home were often quite common for various types of professionals.  When an office is at home, work at home is going to occur.  Quite a few lawyers kept offices in their homes.  Some still do, but at that time it was quite common.  This was also quite common for doctors, who often had their offices in their houses.  But even other professions did that.  A really nice re-worked house here in town, for example, that is now a near downtown law office was once the home, and office, of a cattle buyer here named Murphy.  The house has a fairly large front room that was probably Murphy's office at that time.

All of this is not to say, however, that the cell phone hasn't changed things for many professionals, and simply average people.  Quite a few people now use texting to contact employees and professionals. As the cell phone keeps no real hours, texts can be sent any time and, of course, received any time.  The fact that most homes now contain a computer also means that many people whose work is computer based, or which features email, can pretty much return to work at any hour. As part of this, even if they do not have to be working, the blending of work and home in this fashion, or rather work hours and off hours, creates a discipline problem for quite a few people, as it's hard not to check a work related message and respond.

Of course, a missed aspect of this is that now that work follows people around in the form of the smat phone and the computer, private and home life comes into the work place in that fashion as well.  For much of the 20th Century this was only true for most people when they received a private phone call at work.  Even as recently as 10 years ago or so, quite a few employers did not approve of very many personal calls at work.  Employees who took quite a few personal calls would hear about it from their employers.  After cell phones started to become common that began to break down.  Now, with text messages and email, it's nearly completely broken down and a fair number of people have bits and pieces of their private lives occur at work every day.  It'd be my expectation that, for those just entering the work place, the concept of leaving home life at home completely would be so foreign that it just won't occur.

Which brings  up an odd fact that, in some ways, the cell phone actually doesn't create a new environment, as so often imagined, so much as it brings back a really ancient one.  If we go far enough back, there really was no distinction between work and home life at all, and many people were in constant contact with the immediate members of their family and tiny village.  We seem to be doing that with cell phones once again.