The Day The Work Started Following Us Everywhere

I can still remember the day I got handed a T-Mobile Blackberry phone, and I thought I had finally made it.

The year was 2006, and I was 23 years old, working for a startup company where I sold advertising in digital displays at airports and on subway systems across the country. I was traveling between Seattle, Detroit, and New York City, and when you’re 23 and given that responsibility, you’re living large.

One day, my boss walked in with a box and threw it on my desk. It was like a scene in an ’80s movie where the boss comes to reward their junior employee with a smug, “you earned it, kid,” type of gift. When I opened the box and powered on the device, my emails started to populate, and in my hand was more computing power than I knew existed.

Little did I know this was the beginning of the end for all of us.

Before that day, there was a time when you walked into work, logged into your desktop computer, made calls from a company phone, and then turned it off and went home.

You didn’t get emails at home. You didn’t get phone calls for work late at night. There were no Zoom meetings.

I can even remember a time when the power went out at my office, and everyone just went home. There was no internet, your phones didn’t serve as a backup, and your laptop wasn’t portable to a coffee shop. Nobody had a hotspot to all of a sudden power a conference room.

That was it.

We all just went home. It was amazing.

Today, if your power went out, some asshole would remind everyone that there is a satellite Wi-Fi plug-in, and you’d all grab a battery power pack and work until your boss finally went home.

So why am I writing this like your Uncle who is giving a speech to a recent group of college grads? Because there was a time when we separated life and work, and we intentionally hung around in conversations with our family and friends without the distractions of MacBooks and iPhones, Slack messages, and more.

I’ve written before about minimizing distractions, so this isn’t about that; it’s about spending intentional time in intentional places, where you can engage, connect, and recharge appropriately.

When was the last time you just sat with your thoughts without listening to a podcast? When was the last time you had coffee with someone without a distraction of a text or a phone call? When was the last time you sat through an entire family meal without checking to see if your boss sent you that Slack message?

There was a time when these activities were normal, and today you can’t get through a lunch with a friend without them having to respond to Brad from Accounting about their expense report discrepancy.

The irony is that all of this technology was supposed to give us more freedom. We were told it would make us more productive, more connected, and more efficient. In many ways, it has. I can send a message around the world in seconds, join a meeting from an airport, and run a business from a coffee shop.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, we stopped using technology as a tool and started allowing it to dictate how we spend our time, attention, and energy.

I catch myself doing it all the time. I’ll be sitting on the couch with my family watching a movie, and suddenly find myself answering an email. I’ll be standing in line at the grocery store and instinctively reach for my phone rather than simply existing for thirty seconds.

Every empty moment gets filled with content, notifications, messages, and noise. There is always one more article to read, one more video to watch, and one more Slack notification demanding our attention.

What I’ve come to realize is that being present has become a skill. It requires intention. It requires putting the phone face down during dinner, leaving it in the car when you meet a friend for coffee, and resisting the urge to check email every time you hear a buzz in your pocket. The people around us deserve more than the leftover attention we have after we’ve given the best of ourselves to a screen.

The older I get, the more I think back to that Blackberry sitting on my desk in 2006. At the time, it felt like the future had arrived. Looking back, it was also the moment the walls between work and life started to disappear.

Technology isn’t going anywhere, and I wouldn’t want it to. What we can do, though, is decide when it gets access to us. The people we care about, the conversations we’re having, and the moments we’re living through right now deserve our full attention.

Those things are far too important to compete with a notification.