It's Mental Health Awareness Week, I thought I would launch a series of think-pieces about mental health in the workplace. As it's something I'm passionate about and is important we address.
The first is a trend of having mobile work email and phone, not just in the form of a laptop, but in our pockets. Constantly.
However, being virtually tethered to the office - even during evenings and weekends - means we're always in work mode. Adding to our stress levels of meeting deadlines, answering queries and feeling the pressure of an ever-expanding to-do list.
This week, The Guardian reported that three in four Britons felt overwhelmed by stress. Worryingly, this leads to one in three feeling suicidal and one in six self-harming.
The article states; "work issues, including working outside normal hours, and a poor work-life balance is the next commonest cause."
It's easy to see how this has occurred. Increasingly, due demand on desk space, most companies have a flexible working policy, meaning we're all set up to work from home (fab), and hot-desking.
While it's great that this forces us to declutter our working environment, so we have a Spartan attitude to gonks on the desk, printing out forests of documents and hoarding stationery (guilty of the last two - I miss print) and being a bit feng-shui. It also means that we have laptops and no desk phone.
In my last role, I was given a work phone for this reason. It lived in a pocket in my bag from the early days of getting it to the moment I left the role. I occasionally fished it out to charge it, but as no one contacted me on it, the task was purely academic.
Before that, I found I was constantly checking it. I'd be sitting in a pub with friends and I'd find myself frantically tapping on the BlackBerry keyboard like my life depended on it.
I thought if I didn't answer an email, it would reflect badly on me like I didn't care about my job or didn't have career aspirations. I thought that if something awful happened, I could nip it in the bud before it became an issue. Or if I forgot something, I could quickly respond.
One year, I even took it on holiday, just in case. My plan was to check it once or twice, I ended up checking it every time I was in the hotel room. And when I wasn't in the hotel room, I was panicking about what was going on in the office in my absence or that the phone will get nicked by the maids.
Basically, I allowed myself to drown in an incessant whirlpool of anxiety by taking the office with me everywhere I went.
I could never decompress or relax. What happened if I got really drunk and my boss called or I sent that ranty email to stroppy Simon in the dev team.
Never being able to just switch off, dissect the day and take myself out of it made me ill and my work was terrible. I was desperately unhappy, but I blamed myself for being shit at my job, not on the pressure I put on myself, magnified by the enabler in my pocket.
All of this was psychosomatic and could've been avoided if it wasn't for the technology and expectation that comes with it.
These days, I don't have a work phone. Nor do I have an app on my phone that links to Outlook. I've informed all of my colleagues of this. And, as they only have my personal number, they only call me in work hours and if it's urgent.
For freelancers, it's worse. As any email or message missed could be money. But even so, remain disciplined and only work office hours. You're not saving lives and everyone will be in the pub and won't see it till tomorrow, so don't sweat it.
Modern technology has made our lives easier in so many ways. Revolutionising how we do things and communicate. However, it also means we're always on-call. Becoming a slave to Good/Capsule/Outlook could be detrimental to your wellbeing.
