Obsessive phone checking amounts to three extra weeks of work a year

If you rely on your phone during a normal working day, you’ll probably find yourself constantly checking to see if that important email has arrived, looking up what time your next meeting is and staring blankly at your screen waiting for the call from your boss that you’ve been dreading.

Due to the fact we can respond to emails, take calls and schedule meetings wherever we are from the palm of our hands, the line between work life and home life has become well and truly blurred. Or just erased completely.

However, if you had to guess how much time you spend on your phone doing work-related things out of standard office hours, how much overtime would you guess you’re putting in a year?

Well, a new study from Good Technology aimed to find out just how much extra work we’ve been doing by obsessively checking our phones and scrolling through emails in our own time and it’s three WHOLE weeks a year. Three. Whole. Weeks. We want to know two things, how the hell did we manage that and most importantly, who do we invoice for this time?

As mobile technology provides us with access to our emails wherever we are (kinda), then we can stay connected to our work lives whether we’re in the office or the bath, so this is bound to have a big affect on our behaviour and working habits. However, the research from Good Technology also showed us some even more worrying stats, like the fact most of us have checked our emails by 6.51am, 29% of us will continuously check our phones over the dinner table and a third of us admit we respond to work emails from bed. Awh, and they say romance is dead.

So why are we just so obsessively switched on? Well according to the research, a quarter of us want to impress our bosses, half want to make sure they stay organised (these are the types that tweet INBOX ZERO in a really proud way) and over a third feel they wouldn’t be doing their job properly if they weren’t constantly checking their work emails.

So does this make us productive and dedicated little worker bees or sad zombies who really should have spent that three weeks laughing, travelling or just doing anything else?

[Image via Jenny Bunkers Flickr]