WMDs – yes virginia, they do exist

December 11, 2008 by ksolo
Filed under recipes for life

I had lunch with a friend a while back, and at the end of our meal we both lamented returning to our respective okiyas.

Me to friend: “You know, I really wish I was at the point where I wasn’t doing any work, but just telling others what to do. I mean, what’s the point of having a Manager title if you still have to do all the work yourself?”

Friend to me: “Yeah, plus at my gig when you’re a manager, you get a Blackberry. You can tell who all the managers are, because they have their Blackberries.”

Scrrreeeech. Pump the brakes.

Nah. Uh-uh. Though I sometimes covet all the perqs that come along with being in ‘upper management’, that Blackberry thing is where I draw the line. If I never get assigned a Blackberry for my entire career, it’d be too soon. By some miracle, I’ve avoided having to carry one of those detestable devices so far, and I’d be willing to sacrifice as many farm animals as needed to the gods of all things electronic to keep the trend going until the day after forever.

Sure, it’s great technology and especially useful if you’re often away from your office or desk. But very few people I’ve seen with a Blackberry are actually using this little device as a productivity tool. It’s more like a weapon of mass distraction.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been sitting in a meeting, on a plane, or in some other place where the pre-Blackberry behavioral norm would have been active human engagement, and seen people hunched over their Blackberry in a thumb-twiddling frenzy completely oblivious to anything happening around them. On those occasions, I can’t help but: 1. thank God I’m not them, and 2. wonder wtf is so damned important that it can’t wait for a more appropriate time and place?

This past Monday I was suffering from a rather uncustomary email glut. Though I had actual, physical work product I needed to get done by the end of day, when quitting time came, I realized that most of my time had been squandered composing swift, well thought out responses to the steady barrage of incoming messages. To all those email recipients, I’m sure I appeared to be quite productive, but in truth, I’d gotten very little done.

Which is my major issue with the Crackberry – it’s simply a tool that helps you keep up the illusion of productivity, without actually doing anything. Besides that, the Blackberry has become a status symbol that screams, ‘Hey look at me, I’m so important that I can’t be away from email at any moment. As a matter of fact, I’m so important that I can’t bother to talk to you.”

I’ve been in the busyness world for over 10 years, and I’ve yet to be in or observe a situation that is a life or death event (well, perhaps with the exception of 9/11). The truth of the matter is, business people are not surgeons, and if we don’t respond to a request within a matter of minutes (or even hours), no one will die. At the very worst, a decision that requires our input might be delayed a while. But if we have an informed and empowered set of co-workers, there should be extremely few times that even that happens. And the notion that this little thing effectively puts its owner ‘on call’ 24/7 is a complete violation of every work-life balance credo I cling to like dogma.

I’m not saying that Blackberries and similar communication devices are bad. I’m just saying, from where I stand observing all of the uber-engrossed thumb-twiddlers, it’s often hard to tell which of them is really the tool.

cheers,