Work-Life Balance: There's 24 hours in a day, so why aren't you working 12?

When your PC has more face time with you than your wife, you know that things aren’t what they used to be. We owe this rearrangement of our lives to Hotspotting – all communication empowered by the web. The 2 main facilitators? Cloud Computing and SaaS, software as a Service.

The tools that flow from these two are (amongst the many out there):

• Email, instant messaging, and texting
• Twitter and blogging
• Peer2Peer productivity black holes/hobbies – Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, etc
• Then there’s fumbling in your car with mp3 players, map books, following GPS
• 2^nd Life – as a fantasy world hobby, as a customer support tool
• Unified communications, especially for ‘Road Warriors’ & Virtual Customer Support Contact Centers
• Collaboration – Google Docs/Wave, WebCasting, WebMeetings, TelePresence (videoconferencing on steroids), and Wikis

You might ask, “What’s next?”. Well you guessed it, an unveiling of a car brought to you by by Ford and Microsoft, allowing your car to read Twitter messages, with drivers being able to Tweet replies using voice recognition; enabling the drivers’ social lives while keeping their eyes on the road.

Now while some of us think of these tools as god sends (except perhaps for a car that can send and receive tweets), one can’t help but to wonder if all of it is really making our lives simpler or more complex. Wi-Fi/Wi-Max Warriors and a new generation of 1099ers have to use the new tools 24/7/365 to be competitive with local labor, which could prove a double edged sword for us knowledge workers.

No matter what, a once ‘proper’ Work-Life balance may now be passé and an impossible dream till the costs of those economies move closer to ours. So while the hours we work may not necessarily ever improve, hopefully the our view will.

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