People today are expected to be always reachable. And why shouldn’t we be? We have direct access to phones and emails in our pockets.
All aspects of life are impacted. Friends and family expect you to take the phone when they call. People even feel that they need to excuse themselves and explain why they couldn’t answer.
And of course, there is no exception for professional life.
Emails in the evening and during weekends are common. People tend to answer them, even when the company culture tries to separate professional and personal life. Employers give mobile phones to their employees. Even if they don’t call them, an email or a message on WhatsApp or Teams is directly visible on the phone that, most of the time, they also allow you to use for personal use.
A few days ago, I told this story to a CEO in the technology consultancy sector.
The Managing Director for France of a publicly listed engineering company used to go every summer for a month on his boat. During that month, he was simply not reachable.
The CEO was outraged. For him, it almost constituted professional misconduct.
The most interesting part is that this French Managing Director was responsible for five times more employees and ten times more revenue. And the CEO who was outraged plans to retire, because he is tired, at a younger age than the Managing Director.
A true story that should make us think about the place we give to being reachable.
I remember when I was working for a geotechnical company around ten years ago. The company had been active since the 1970s. When we had a new project, we always looked to see if we had done another project nearby, to get an idea of the geology and soil conditions.
Sometimes, it was a very old project.
I was always looking at the communication with the client. Old letters written with typewriters and sent by post. The project files were mostly empty of communication, because there were no emails and of course no mobile phones. A few days between a question and an answer. Projects took much more time to realize.
Totally in contrast with the daily long list of emails and phone calls we had to answer.
We were sometimes even paralyzed in our working capacity by the amount of communication. People were expecting us to answer immediately.
The best moments were when we received a fax. Yes, we still had an old fax machine and sometimes we still received one.
It was like magic and going back in time.
Speaking about going back in time, if you were living in the 18th century, distance could almost mean disappearance.
If you wanted to visit someone in Paris and they had left for Vienna for a few months, your choices to contact them were very limited. A journey between major European cities could take days, crossing the continent could take weeks, and a letter could travel no faster than a horse. Sending one was also expensive.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, railways and postal reforms were collapsing that distance. Weeks became days and sometimes hours, and sending a letter became accessible to much more people.
But even then, you could still become unreachable by leaving Europe.
Cross the Atlantic and you could disappear for weeks. Go to Australia and it could be months.
Then came the telegraph.
In 1866, the first durable transatlantic telegraph cable connected Europe and North America. Australia joined the international telegraph network in 1872.
Distance started to mean much less.
You were still not immediately reachable. Someone had to send the telegram, it had to arrive somewhere, and someone had to bring the message to you.
But technology continued to evolve until the mobile phone became common in the 1980s and 1990s.
Since then, people have almost no reason to be unreachable, except when there is no network, which today happens very rarely.
A new generation has grown up in this stressful environment where you always have to be reachable. But we don’t necessarily experience it as something negative. For people, all these technologies were amazing progress.
When we are offline for a few hours, our first reaction is often to connect and see what we have missed.
At work, emails are answered at incredible hours. Chat and video conference applications have added an extra layer of immediacy.
For two centuries, communication technology has moved in the same direction: reducing the distance between people. From months, to weeks, to days, to hours, and finally to seconds.
Today, distance has almost disappeared.
But perhaps technology will now go in the other direction.
What if our AI assistant could answer most of our emails and phone calls for us? What if we could focus only on the calls and messages that we really want to treat ourselves?
Someone needs a document? The AI can send it.
Someone has a simple question? The AI can answer it.
Someone calls while you are spending time with your family? The AI can take the call and decide if you really need to be interrupted.
We currently think about AI as a technology that will make everything even faster. More information, more answers, more productivity and probably more notifications.
Perhaps it could do the opposite.
For two centuries, technology has made us more reachable.
Perhaps AI will finally give us back the right to be unreachable.