Tribal Wives is on BBC Two tonight at 9 pm (and will be available via iPlayer) and the BBC has a report on one such journey.
Before she went to the Ecuadorean jungle to live with the Waorani tribe, Karen Morris-Lanz was a BlackBerry-toting workaholic single mother from Milton Keynes. Here she explains how life with this remote people helped teach her to relax.My life before the jungle was very busy. I tended to work 24/7 and never stop.
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Now I’m self-employed with my human resources firm Waponi [the Waorani word for “beautiful” or “everything in balance”]. Since I’ve become a consultant, I can stop. I don’t have a BlackBerry now. They rule your life.
Work-Life balance is something I’ve not been monitoring recently. The day job requires an awful lot of time, including regular callouts in the middle of the night and additional work on Sundays to make sure everything is working for Monday morning production.
A few years ago, Mac-Sys received a commendation from the e-Commerce awards in the area of TeleWorking. This was on the basis that Mac-Sys was a company which was operated by parents for the most part. Our engineers had families and we were very flexible with their home requirements and the same went for our administration staff. School runs (morning or afternoon) were catered for and we trusted the staff to put in the hours necessary to do the work and provided laptops, VPNs and VoIP (including Video) facilities for all staff. For many of our clients we put in place remote support options which meant they could time-shift some of their work to when they wanted. A side of effect of this was that administration work was then carried out out-of-hours which suited the clients better.
Providing this level of access doesn’t sit well with everyone and is seen most obviously in the increased numbers of executives who switch off their Blackberry devices in the evenings and weekends. Speaking to a colleague in New York recently, she described the Blackberry as a ball-and-chain and that she feels manacled to her desk by it.
I have to admit that my life is filled with technology. At home, my network is wireless, slingPlayer and printers connected via WDS-enabled Airport wireless devices. I have multiple computers and a couple of handhelds which all access this network, though not simultaneously. I carry my iPhone everywhere – and before that I carried three devices – a SonyEricsson K800i, a Nokia N800 and an 80 GB iPod Video. I enjoy having connectivity and I enjoy having this all in one device even more.
I usually turn off all email/text notifications overnight (though being on call means I cannot simply switch off the phone) and I enjoy catching up with email/twitter in the morning. Most of my interactions with my devices are social or research/reading for enjoyment.
I’ve refused a Blackberry for the day job – a telephone call is enough. A Blackberry would just have me receiving and sending email in the wee small hours and would not increase my productivity any. (On the other hand, a laptop configured with company software would go a long way but nooo…)
I don’t have an issue with the technology in my life. I do currently have an issue with the work/life balance.