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I am writing this column
while taking a short vacation at a friend's house outside of Palm Springs, California.
The last time I visited here, my friend had nothing beyond dial-up to offer his
guests -- now we've got a broadband cable modem and a wireless LAN, so we can
surf poolside. That is the new American Dream -- to be on vacation, (especially
the part about the pool) and still connected to your broadband fix. Heaven
forbid that we forgo our daily dose of electronic messages, being out of touch
with our correspondents around the planet and not getting up to the minute
information about who-knows-what. It is all kind of sad.
I am visiting here with my
teenaged daughter and her friend. To set their expectations, I told them before
we set out on this journey not to pin their hopes on the always-connected
lifestyle that both of them have come to expect when they are at home. So I was
pleasantly surprised to find that all I needed was to pop in a wireless PC card
in my laptop and I was off to the races. And she was hard at the computer once
I finished this column and told her the good news.
Lest you think I exaggerate
about this connected lifestyle, my daughter asked me when we were on the flight
out here if she could IM (instant message) her friends from the plane. I told
her that while this was certainly possible, at $3 or so a minute for the
connect charges I wouldn't recommend it, unless she wanted to foot the eventual
bill. She took it all in good nature though, and ended up watching a DVD on my
laptop. What ever happened to reading a book? But I digress.
We adults are no different --
instead of IM, our technology addiction is squarely email. And when we aren't
within email range, many of us start to twitch, just like an addict without
their fix. I asked several people at our Breakaway Xchange conference in San
Diego this week what do they do with emails when they are vacation. The
depressing consensus was that even then, most still regularly check email. Many
had developed interesting habits to try to avoid exposing their fellow family
members to this nasty habit: doing it late at night or in the early morning
hours when the rest of the brood is fast asleep. Or staying back while the
family does some fun activity so the emails can flow uninterrupted. This is a
Good Thing?
The problem is the daily
email load that we have come to operate under: it doesn't really matter how
many messages a day you get. If you are away for a week or two, you can't relax
thinking about how many messages are piling up in your inbox, waiting for your
perusal when you return. Your correspondents have come to expect a certain response
time when they send you emails. As a result, the vacation without email is now
a rarity.
I am no different I should hasten to add. Look at me: here I am composing this column on the weekend myself. I try not to check my work email address over the weekends now, but sometimes I just can't help myself. I guess I suffer from Email Separation Anxiety too. Hi, my name is David and I get about 150 messages a day, and I usually check my emails in the early morning, And I am ashamed.
Email Separation Anxiety is
somewhat of a different concept from what I have seen called Bandwidth Separation Anxiety. This term is used to describe
logged-on executives who cannot be more than five minutes away from a
telephone, pager or Internet connection. This can even be a desirable quality
to have in such individuals who are not usually known as a group for their
typing skills, let alone the ability to retrieve messages from all over the
planet.
Michael Dell has
spoken about this often. "I suffer from bandwidth separation anxiety. It's
a syndrome that occurs when you're not near a high-speed connection. It happens
to me. You kinda get the shakes. It's the way we communicate, the only way we
know how to get things done. We're connected all the time through wireless, voice
recognition, handhelds."
You can spot
people who are suffering from ESA quite easily. At the airport, they are the
ones sitting near the AC power outlets, the better to stretch their batteries
on their laptops. They are the ones at Starbucks that order a cheap cup of
regular coffee so they can sit at the table and grab that wireless bandwidth.
On the airplanes, they have their BlackBerries out and powered up before the
wheels have hit the tarmac, and some surreptitiously check their messages in
flight too. They are known to utter the phrase "Honey, I will just be a
minute after I finish this one last message." They carry not only their
own Ethernet cable, but a spare hub in case that is needed too, and have a
backup AOL account just in case they have to go to the mattresses and use
dial-up as a last resort.
So what is the
cure? Unfortunately, neither medical nor computing science has found any known
cure for this affliction. I used to travel without a laptop, and that seemed to
work for a while until Internet cafes sprouted up faster than inflated dot com
stock prices, and before long I could find my email fix no matter how remote or
foreign a country. It does take strength of will, determination, and the
ability to just relax and enjoy oneself on vacation. Maybe those should be the
qualities that executive recruiters should look for for the next crop of CEOs.
(That and just raw honesty might be good, but we'll leave that for another
day.)
So just like
Catholics have some meatless Fridays, I suggest taking a day (or what the heck,
live dangerously and try two or three) away from email. Enjoy your families,
friends, and the new vistas that Mother Nature provides outside of the view of
your graphical desktop. And when you return, send me a note telling me your own
strategy for coping, so we can all share the pain.
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David Strom
dstrom@cmp.com
+1 (516) 562-7151
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