A new survey from mobile security firm Good Technology confirms what we already knew -- that Americans' work-life balance is going from bad to worse. The stats read like a depressingly familiar roll call of what's wrong with our hectic connected existence.
Some 68% of us check work email before 8 a.m., with half of us doing so before our heads leave the pillow. (The average check-in time of the 1,000 randomly-selected respondents: 7:09 a.m.) At the other end of the day, 69% of us can't slip into slumber unless we've checked that old work email one last time.
But perhaps the most eye-popping part of the survey is how much all that extra time adds up to. Simply by answering work-related calls and emails when we've left the office, the average respondent is working an extra seven hours a week. That adds up to 365 hours a year.
Assuming eight-hour days and five-day weeks, that's around two months per year of unpaid overtime -- and you're putting it in voluntarily.
Bad news for you, good news for your manager, right? Not so much. Another lesson these workplace studies teach us is the law of diminishing returns. The more you're "on," the faster you burn out, and the greater the likelihood that you'll make a mistake.
Deep down, it seems, we all know this. That's why we're drawn to stories about Facebook's COO leaving work at 5:30pm, for example, or a New York Times op-ed this weekend, which encouraged greater awareness of what it called "the busy trap."
Is your work life bleeding into your home life? What, if anything, can we do about it? Let us know in the comments.