How Much Time Do You Spend Reading Email On Weekends, Holidays, Vacations?

In this age of BlackBerrys, SMS, IM, email, recorded teleconferences and iPhones, how much time do you spend, on the job, tending to your personal communications and how much of your time, off the job, do you spend tending to your business communications?

The lack of work-life balance is growing. And, rather than separating work and personal activities (and computing technologies), they’re getting more and more blended together. Despite tough talk from security wonks and policy promulgators, the tide of control seems to be going out to sea.

Besides the traditional concerns about security, litigation, IP protection and whatnot, what is this intermixing doing to our health and real productivity?

Pew Internet & American Life Project is out with a new report on use of the Internet and Email inside and outside of work.

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We’ve also been doing research in a similar vein, surveying non-IT people (people in marketing, sales, distribution, engineering, manufacturing and other departments, people without IT responsibilities) to get a better feel for how “consumerisation” is proceeding. (Unlike Pew, we limited our recent surveys to people working for firms with 500 or more employees.)

Pew found that 54 percent of employees with personal email accounts say they at least occasionally check their personal inboxes while at work and most do so on a daily basis. We found 63 percent of employees who use networked computers at work (48 percent of the overall working population according to our stats) check personal e-mail while at work and 48 percent of those who check personal email at work do so daily or more often.

(In aggregate, we find that 75 percent of employees with networked computers access the Internet on the job for job related purposes. That provokes some interesting discussions about who is in control and how can enterprises benefit from their learnings.)

Given this intermingling of activities (and cross-use of technologies), I honestly worry that we have lost the ability to separate work and personal spheres. Does this bother you? Is it impacting your organisation’s effectiveness? How are you managing the (lack of a) divide?

The author is Vice President, Gartner and has been a Gartner fellow since 1997.

For more blogs from Tom Austin, log on to http://blogs.gartner.com/