“of the 76% of managers who can use devices including smartphones, laptops or tablets to work, almost half (49%) check their emails just before going to sleep at night and a quarter (24%) check them again on waking before they get out of bed in the morning.”

This is consistent with the research project I did as part of my MSc into over-connected behaviour among smartphone users. This compulsive checking is not great for a number of reasons including lack of rest and recovery during sleep and the crowding out of deep thinking and reflection.

The article is goes on to say that the CMI has done two things to help: 1) launch a free smartphone app and 2) run a competition to find the UK’s most helpful book on management. I was going to be a bit dismissive of the idea of an app to stop you checking your smartphone but I just got an email from my publisher to suggest entering “The Activity Illusion” for the competition…

Instead, I will simply ask whether we can really use more technology to address issues that are 100% about human behaviour. Microsoft and AT&T seem to think we can. If you haven’t already seen the “Really” ad for the Windows phone, check it out here.

This follows a post I wrote a few months ago about BMW and RIM teaming up to enable you to sync your BlackBerry with your car. However, what my friend is using is one of a couple of BlackBerry/iPhone applications that are now on the market. This particular one is called www.DriveSafe.ly and you can see a CNN segment about it here. The sales premise for DriveSafe.ly seems to run along these lines: since it’s dangerous to check your email while driving [research from the University of Utah suggests that you are 23 times more likely to crash!], then having them read to you constitutes safe driving.

I’m far from convinced about the road safety implications as I think a computerised voice reading an “urgent” message from your boss will inevitably distract you from driving. More than anything else, however, I am depressed that the desire – and ultimately the requirement – to stay on top of new email messages is bleeding into all parts of daily life. I recently worked with someone in a client context who described his drive home as precious “defrag” time where he could think over everything that had happened during the day. We are losing these valuable opportunities for our frontal cortex to indulge in a bit of deep-thinking. This has consequences I think for productivity, cognitive ability and behaviours.

Feel free to email me about this post but it’s just possible I’ll be in the car and won’t hear you…

“The combination of meeting the requirements of our many stakeholders around the world and the 24/7 nature of my responsibilities, has made this period extremely demanding on me personally.”

Such releases from public companies are normally sanitised so this admission suggests a real personal cost. There is a macho assumption that the CEO should take on a relentless 24/7 globe-trotting role and the technology makes it easier than ever. But what does this do to some of the fundamental dimensions of great leadership such as delegation, resilience to stress, work-life balance and so on? Surely time to think again?

Based on a survey of 4,000 workers, Premier Inn concludes that most Britons only enjoy a one-day weekend:

- they don’t unwind until 12.38pm on Saturday night

- by 3.55pm on Sunday they are starting to worry about work again

- nearly half checked their email over the weekend

- 53% were “too tired” to fully enjoy the weekend

Is the weekend under threat from the trend towards boundary-less jobs, 24/7 communication and the pressure to be virtually present? Maggie Smith’s Dowager asked in Downton Abbey “What’s a weekend?” This was a fair question as workers still worked Saturday mornings in 1912 and had only just got Saturday afternoons off, hence the birth of professional football. This was thanks in part to technological progress. Forty years further on and Churchill, then PM had a vision of “giving the working man what he’s never had – four days’ work and then three days’ fun.”

So where did it all go wrong? Why has an era of accelerating technological advancement caused us to go backwards with leisure time so that the weekend is steadily disappearing?

I can’t think of any aspect of the world of work where the science and what we actually do are further apart. Some great articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review from the likes of Charles Czeisler and Robert Stickgold on the value of sleep for our health, productivity, cognitive ability and effectiveness. And yet so much of what we do diminishes the amount and quality of sleep.

I am forever coming across people who admit to checking their BlackBerry when it buzzes in the middle of the night. But rather than stigmatise people that don’t get enough sleep, we do the opposite and celebrate people who work to the point of exhaustion. I recently met Marcus de Guingand of Metronaps and he tells me that in Japan, there is a concept called inemuri (literally translated as “sleeping while present”) which high-powered executives feign in meetings to show that they are so hard-working that they can’t help nodding off.

Tony Schwartz commends Google for putting a few pods in their office (supplied by Metronaps, I believe) but we are years away, I fear, from looking dispassionately at the science and re-thinking the way we work.

“The 50s put their active lifestyle down to “feeling young” and making time for themselves, but the 20-somethings said they were too knackered to get out as much as they like to.”

Financial pressures aren’t mentioned at all – can 20-somethings really be too “knackered”? Or does this say something about the way 20-somethings work? The research is pretty compelling on the impact of multi-tasking on our cognitive ability and our resilience - is all that multi-tasking leading to mental exhaustion?

Read more about the survey on the Basex blog and take the survey here.

One paragraph struck a chord with me particularly so I quote it in full:

“…socialising and investing time in social ties are generally seen as less important than “productive” activities like work. Writing about loneliness in 21st century America, Harvard professors of psychiatry Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz refer to the ‘cult of busyness’ that has become a modern badge of honour. They suggest that we face so much pressure to be ‘productive’ that we neglect ‘unnecessary’ relationships that are as vital as food and water. Long working hours are frequently cited as having a negative impact on family life. For many people, working long hours is a necessity to support their families, rather than a choice. “

What the research does not offer any explanation for is this natural curiosity that the brain has for “information” just beyond its reach. My feeling is that it’s the same impulse that makes us want to check each email as it comes in. It’s “gossip” which in our ancestral environment might have been a crucial nugget of information about something fundamental to our survival. Our brain has not yet caught up with the idea that it might just be about someone else’s frozen lasagne.