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PRESS
"In his book Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life, Joe Robinson offers both anecdotal and statistical evidence of rising incidences of burnout, depression and divorce caused by overwork as 80% of men and 62% of women put in more than 40 hours a week on the job."  "When it comes to work, a lot of us have a little problem: We don't know when to say when. Or worse still, we can't. Nearly half of American workers put in more than 50 hours a week on the job. A quarter work all year without taking a vacation. The American work ethic has been hijacked by a culture that encourages overwork, says Joe Robinson, author of Work to Live: The Guide to Getting a Life. We say we like to work hard and play hard, but we don't actually leave much time for play. We survive layoffs only to be saddled with multiple jobs. Then, hoping to protect those jobs, we put in late nights and long weekends and defer comp time or time off. In the process, we become, if not workaholics, then lousy employees: tired, depressed, mistake prone, resentful, and eventually burned out." "The Work to Live philosophy is simple, and seductive. It is based on a staggering irony: Instead of leading to increased productivity, working constantly may actually make us less productive. MRI scans of fatigued brains look nearly identical to those of sleeping brains…After digesting Joe Robinson's hard facts and thinking about all the days I have wasted when I could have been floating on my back in clear turquoise water, I am hell-bent on making it to Tulum—naturally when I can find a time that works with my schedule." "Some have found the urge to message so overwhelming that there is a special glove to protect injured CrackBerry thumbs, and others seek treatment for uncontrollable sending and receiving at clinics normally reserved for drug detox, according to the Times of London. Used obsessively, the devices become a kind of digital meth, feeding the high that comes from vanquishing the anarchic forces of nonproductivity…The impulse behind Connection Addiction is the fear of missing out on something, of being out of the almighty loop…The dinging, buzzing and bonging of e-stowaways are sounds that we are needed, wanted, connected…" "You know the old adage that work expands to fill the available time. With today's technology, that has come to mean all the time. But it is possible to relax before the grave, if we can just move beyond the new standard default behavior-where work always takes priority over our personal lives-and do for ourselves what we do for our kids: Set boundaries." "To show you how pervasive the guilt reflex can be, the top executive of one large firm told me that at the end of the day he goes through the same rituals as his staff. "I'm waiting for my managers to leave, so I can leave, and they're waiting for me to leave, so they can leave. It's a standoff." |
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