“Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer and all it evokes: vacations, slower workweeks, casual dress codes, getting the pool ready and pulling out the outdoor furniture,” Bob Sullivan writes for NBC News. “It would seem an ideal time to take a break, but our ability to unplug and relax is under assault. A three-day weekend? We can barely get through three waking hours without working, new research shows. The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation — or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors’ questions.”
Sullivan writes, “‘It’s like an arms race … everything is an emergency,’ said Tanya Schevitz, spokeswoman for Reboot, an organization trying help people unplug more often. ‘We have created an expectation in society that people will respond immediately to everything with no delay. It’s unhealthy, and it’s unproductive, and we can’t keep going on like this.’ There’s a long list of horribles associated with our new, always-on-digital lives: You are dumber. You are more stressed. You are losing sleep, and more depressed.”
“It’s easy to blame the economy… It’s equally easy to blame gadgets, particularly smartphones, which have virtually tethered employees to their desks.Some experts think these wounds are self-inflicted. Laura Vanderkam, who recently published the eBook, ‘What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekends,’ says that many executives she’s worked with have learned they can unplug for a weekend without dire consequences,” Sullivan writes. “‘Many of us have an exaggerated sense of our own importance,’ she said, speaking on the eve Memorial Day weekend. ‘I can tell you that come Tuesday morning, the Earth will still be revolving, whether you have checked your email or not.'”
Read more in the full article here.
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