The 24-hour work life

They used to say that technology and automation will set us free, shorten our work hours, and give us more time to do the things that we want. Well, just like the paperless office, it's not happening anytime soon. What I find personally is that my time is more fluid and flexible, and that the typical 8-hour day no longer applies. It has a bit to do with my current role, industry and also my work style. With my tools (Treo 650, iBook G4) I am obsessively in near-constant communications 20 hours a day, anywhere I go. SMS is on 24 hours a day, of course. My email downloads automatically once an hour, 16 hours a day. Aside from this, I check email at home first thing in the morning. I check email when getting home and before sleeping. Check email when I wake up in the middle of the night. The trend is I work 16-20 hours a day, spread out in smaller chunks of time - as little as 30 seconds to send an SMS or as much as 4 hours for a management meeting. As such, I have more time to do personal errands and projects. At the same time, this means that I am almost always "switched on", including weekends. For a pure block of uninterrupted "leisure time", I schedule an appointment with myself. In Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley, petrol stations (gas stations to Americans) are rapidly being equipped with WiFi access, and are open 24 hours. Aside from the issue of safety (bringing an expensive notebook to a near-deserted public place in the middle of the night) this means that high speed, semi-reliable Internet access is available just about everywhere. GPRS is finally getting affordable, with unlimited access packages, and of course SMS is getting cheaper all the time (now typically 5 sen per SMS - roughly US1.3 cents). So yes, in a way, technology is setting me free - to do more work!