#UNPLUG:

HOW TO WORK HARD AND STILL HAVE A LIFE

Edited by Chuck Salter
Tweets about Baratunde Thurston’s #Unplug essay in Fast Company:
@ChelseaClinton:

Compelling piece by my friend @baratunde on what it is like to #unplug for

25 days.
danah boyd @zephoria:

As expected, @Baratunde’s approach to going offline is much more comedic

than mine. But msg the same: TAKE A BREAK!
Arianna Huffington @ariannahuff:

“I just wanted to be free of obligations, most of which asserted themselves

digitally.”
@SunilMalhotra:

Disconnecting devices doesn’t #unplug you, you have to switch yourself off.
@FastCompany
@leahlibrarian:

@ScrewyDecimal this is totally the article that convinced me I could do it:

THANK YOU
@JonathanDFW:

Unplugging from my digital life for a few days. This @FastCompany article
by @baratunde inspired me.
 INTRODUCTION

Let’s start with a simple and staggering number: 11,541. That’s how many
tweets Baratunde Thurston posted in 2012. He averaged more than 30 a day—
better than a tweet an hour. That doesn’t include his output on Instagram,
Facebook, Foursquare, and other social-media platforms.
No wonder Thurston won the Shorty Award for Foursquare Mayor of the
Year two years ago. And no wonder, the following year, he needed a break.
He felt he was too connected—addicted to constant connectivity, he
concluded. So Thurston, who writes a column in Fast Company, unplugged
for 25 days, during which he examined his relationship with personal
technology, social media, and the web itself. He vowed to make some
changes.
Thurston’s funny, personal, and instructive account of his digital detox
kicks off this collection, which we hope serves as a survival guide of sorts for
these always-on times. #Unplug: How to Work Hard and Still Have a Life
explores how and why to untether yourself from technology throughout the
workday, on weekends, and on vacation, without undoing your career. And
we outline how to plug back in, within reason.
From the beginning, Fast Company has explored the increasing demands
in the workplace, whether they’re brought on by new technology or an
economic downturn or globalization. “Work Is Personal” read the cover of the
magazine’s first issue. That was in 1995. Nearly 20 years later, work seems to
have become even more personal—and consequently, more problematic.
We’re still wrestling with the central tension expressed in the title. This book
taps some of our best coverage in this area over the years.
We travel to Norway to understand an alternative universe of work, a
place where balance is more than airy HR-speak. It’s considered a
competitive advantage. We profile a progressive company built around this
philosophy and the belief that flexible work arrangements are sustainable;
work mania isn’t. We go inside what amounts to a detox spa—an exclusive
program for hyperachieving, hyperstressed execs. We follow these
workaholics from the worlds of health care, TV, finance, and retail through
the painful process of facing their limits and redesigning their lives.
What makes these stories from the magazine and Fast Company’s sites
so useful and enduring is how personal many of them are. Hopefully, you can
relate to Thurston’s ambivalence toward technology—how fulfilling yet
burdensome social platforms became for him. Or to a young Rahm Emanuel’s
desire to fit in family life with a heady White House gig. Or to a Home Depot
executive’s inability to turn down projects for fear of missing out on growing
the business. Or to one millennial’s struggle to resist his generation’s lifestyle,
which revolves around screen time more than actual face time.
Or perhaps you’re a member of that rare breed, the happy workaholics.
We write about the reality of their extreme jobs here, too—at Goldman Sacks,
MTV, Citibank. Somehow, they make time to sit down with us, describe their
insane schedules, and even reflect. It—their happiness, their workaholism, or
both—can’t last forever, they concede.
In one early attempt to understand and reveal conflicted attitudes toward
work, Fast Company surveyed more than 1,000 college-educated, employed
adults. Nine out of 10 said making their personal life a higher priority was
important. And yet when asked which they’d take, a $10,000-a-year raise or
an hour more each day to spend with their family, 83% of respondents took
the cash.
If we’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that we all have more
control over our lives—our work lives, our home lives, our work-home lives
—than we often realize. Not complete control, mind you. We’re still realists.
There’s no escaping the need for a job, an income, a roof over our heads, and
our tablet computer.
But every day we make choices—for starters, how much or how little to
unplug—that enhance or detract from our lifestyle. We hope the stories in
#Unplug make you more aware of your choices so that you are at peace with
them or venture to make new choices.
Chuck Salter, senior writer, Fast Company
 CHAPTER 1
THE WORLD’S MOST CONNECTED MAN GOES OFF THE GRID
By Baratunde Thurston
My official biography, such as it is, reads as follows: “Baratunde Thurston is
the author of the New York Times best seller How to Be Black and CEO and
cofounder of Cultivated Wit, a creative comedic digital agency and product
development company.” I’m an author, consultant, speechifier, and cross-
platform opiner on the digital life. My friends say I’m the most connected
man in the world. And in 2012, I lived like a man running for president of the
United States, planet Earth, and the Internet all at once.
Physically, mentally, digitally, I refused to stay still. I published my
book. I toured hard for my book. One week, I hit seven cities in five states
across three time zones, employing three airlines, two hotel chains, and one
friend’s couch. My life became so mobile, I gave up the lease on my
apartment. I quit my job at The Onion. I started a company. I worked for the
Obama campaign, survived walking home through Hurricane Sandy, and live
hate-tweeted the final installment of the Twilight movie saga (someone had
to!).
Here’s a partial quantification of the year:
Trips abroad: six (seven if you count Texas as a separate republic)
Cities visited: 34
Days spent away from Brooklyn: 179
Facebook posts: 1,518 (four a day)
SMS threads: 3,702 (10 a day)
Photos taken: 4,845 (13 a day)
Tweets: 11,541 (32 a day)
Gmail conversations: 59,409 (163 a day)
Miles flown: At least 128,000, which is more than enough ecological
cost to outweigh the benefit of my reusable shopping bag
 By November [2012], I’d reached rock bottom. I was burned out. Fried.
Done. Toast.
I was aware that my daily routine and lifestyle were unsustainable. The
previous summer, I had hired my longtime friend Julia Lynton Boelte to be
my “chief of staff.” I gave her the grandiose title because “personal assistant”
was not big enough to capture her role in helping manage my business
relationships, travel, communications, and time.
Come November, after a short five months of employment, she politely
informed me that I was becoming grouchy, perhaps even nasty, under the
combined forces of my will, schedule, momentum, and addiction to constant
connectivity. Indeed, I had begun to resent the emails and the mobile
notifications, the many ways that an odd and wide assortment of people dared
to enter my life. Something drastic was required.
Julia and I started looking for ways I could take a break. I was worried
about slowing down or even stopping. I felt responsible for too many things:
my business, my political interests, my “brand,” my bills! Christmas seemed
the only possible escape. With the exception of Mr. Scrooge, everyone slows
down during the holidays, and so would I.
I considered fleeing to a remote island for a few weeks, but I realized I
wasn’t craving physical escape. I didn’t actually want to be alone. I just
wanted to be mentally free of obligations, most of which asserted themselves
in some digital fashion. I decided to stay still, find an Airbnb residence right
in Brooklyn (technically homeless, remember?), and step back from digital
interaction.
Yes, me. The recipient of the 2011 Shorty Award for Foursquare Mayor
of the Year would not check in. At least for a few weeks.

Prep Work

Julia and I decided that my digital detox would start at 5 p.m. on Friday,
December 14, 2012, and last through Monday, January 7, 2013. Twenty-five
days seemed appropriate for the depth of cleansing I desired. Now I had to
decide exactly what to give up.
I didn’t want to completely abandon the Internet. I love, depend on, and
frankly am made a better human being by the convenience of streaming
movies, online food ordering, and Google Maps. I did not want to sever ties
with friends; in fact, one of my goals was to strengthen relationships with pre-
Facebook pals. I wanted to go to lunch, attend holiday parties, and host
people for dinner. So I decided I could use my phone for personal calls and
texts, and could schedule these encounters with Google Calendar.
Two activities made the prohibition list. First, all business affairs would
be tabled. Call me self-employed, call me an artist, call me Supreme Allied
Commander of My Multi-Hyphenate Life; they all translate to “working all
the time.” I would not live that way during this vacation.
Second, for 25 days I would avoid all “social media,” including the
original online social network: email. I would not read, write, or be notified of
any electronic missive. I would not generate any activity whatsoever on any
social network whatsoever, including, but not limited to, seeing, reading,
downloading, syncing, sending, submitting, posting, pinning, sharing,
uploading, updating, commenting, tagging, rating, liking, loving, up-voting,
starring, favoriting, bookmarking, plus-oneing, or re-anythinging.
I needed advice on how to do this. So where did I turn? To Twitter,
Facebook, and Google+, of course. (Yes, I am aware of the irony, thank you
very much. I’m not that far gone.)
Not surprisingly, there is lots of advice online about how to move your
existence offline. Some of it was actually useful. For instance, there are plenty
of good recipes for hot toddies, so I grabbed a couple. There are a plethora of
posts on digital detox, including one called “How to Take an Email
Sabbatical,” by Microsoft researcher danah boyd, who goes so far as to auto-
delete all inbound emails and send an auto-reply informing senders “to resend
their message when I return.” I couldn’t commit to that. The FOMO (fear of
missing out) in me is strong. What if Kerry Washington (the Scandal star,
whom I have somehow never met) wrote me confessing her love and I missed
it because of some extremist view on vacation emails?
To ensure an inbox-free vacation, my chief of staff would log in every
few days to check that I didn’t miss anything urgent, such as a family
emergency, holiday party invite—or that message from Kerry.
With email under control, I tackled the other tasks I had to accomplish to
ready the world (and myself) for my impending departure from digitalhood.
First, Julia and I pulled together a list of VIPs who deserved personal
preparation for my disappearance. These folks included my agents, lawyer,
cofounders, landlord, show bookers, close friends, and sister. An email, a
phone call, or face-to-face interaction was required in each case.
Then I started making a series of loud announcements, both on email and
via the many social services I inhabit, about my impending departure. I
wanted to do this in as considerate a manner as possible, since both personal
and business matters are conveyed through these platforms. I’ve gotten client
proposals via Twitter direct messages and wedding invitations via Facebook
updates. To simply walk away with no warning felt rude and unprofessional.
So my announcements were recurring, clear, and very specific, telling
people the hour of my farewell, the few exceptions I would make, and the
date of my return to digital life. Along the way, I concocted a wish list of
activity for my disconnected time. It was a pleasure to contemplate places to
visit in New York, books to read, and people with whom I wanted to spend
some quality time. I included Alec Baldwin among that group, for reasons
that I cannot explain. I do not know Alec Baldwin, and I do not have a
burning desire to spend my vacation with him; but he made the list, and I
thought you should know.
The next steps, which I left for the very last day, were to appropriately
deactivate my iPhone and my social media services, including Facebook,
Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, Path, Instagram, SoundCloud, and voice mail. This
is where things got complicated. Disengaging from all this was a lesson in
just how locked in we really are.
As much as we all gripe about email, it is designed to be turned off.
Email comes with the vacation-message feature that alerts senders to the fact
that we are not available. We can set up forwarding rules that apply to
different subsets of contacts. People trying to reach us aren’t left in the dark to
assume we have met our demise, entered witness protection, or placed them
on a no-reply list of enemies. Email lets us leave.
Social media services, however, are not interested in making absence
easy. Senders have no way of knowing whether our nonresponsiveness is
personal, technical, or something else. The services offer no “vacation mode.”
Sure, we can “deactivate” or “suspend” some accounts. But those options are
well hidden, and their actual meaning is unclear. For example, I use Facebook
to log in to many sites. If I suspend my account, do those logins fail? After
much research, I still do not know. Social media sites are like planes designed
for perpetual flight. Anyone wanting to come down must signal wildly before
attempting a crash landing.
With no vacation mode available, I hacked the next best solution: I
changed my profile photos to an all-black rectangle with a simple message in
all caps: OFFLINE THROUGH JAN 7, 2013. EXPECT NO REPLIES. In an era of high-
definition, handheld, multiparty, and free wireless video chat, my best option
was essentially a smoke signal.
But that’s not all it takes to escape social media. I wanted to shut down
inbound noise while also creating no digital expression of my vacation
activity. I wanted to take pictures during my break, but I didn’t want pop-up
alerts if someone on Instagram started following me. I wanted to watch
Netflix on my laptop, but I did not want to publish that movie selection on my
Facebook Timeline. The more I tried to control these data streams, the more I
realized that everything is too integrated.
I had given hundreds of apps, websites, and services the rights to publish
my activities to Facebook and Twitter, or to interrupt my iPhone experience
with unsolicited alerts. Some alerts just add a number to a count on the app’s
icon, which seemed meaningless until I realized that little number is a
nagging reminder I’d never truly reach inbox zero. I never sat down in a
single signing ceremony granting permission for all of this communication.
Instead, I had clicked “yes” or “allow” or “check here” if you just want to get
to the actual apps you installed once in a while over several years.
Now I was trying to shut it all down on a single day. I was stunned at the
cumulative level of noise I had embraced and frustrated at how difficult it was
to silence. Had I really granted all of this? Did I really need the three most
recent alerts from GateGuru on my phone’s lock screen? On Facebook,
Twitter, and everywhere else, I was forced to mute services one at a time,
hundreds of times.
The same was true for my iPhone. While there is a nice “Do Not
Disturb” feature on newer iPhones (complete with a sleepy little moon icon),
all it does is silence calls and alerts. I wanted the apps to stop sending alerts
altogether. And believe it or not, it takes six screen taps to do that … per
application! This is what Apple must mean when it calls iOS6 “the world’s
most advanced mobile operating system.”
 Needless to say, I had not budgeted the time to flip all these switches.
While I had told everyone that 5 p.m. ET was my cutoff, I missed it by
several hours. I wasn’t finished until shortly before midnight. But, despite the
unanticipated delay, I had done it. I had successfully unplugged.

Day One

On the first morning of The Great Disconnect, I overslept.

I had made plans to rent a Zipcar and drive to New Jersey to get some
things I needed, but due to my late start, that wasn’t going to happen. So I
decided to redefine need and live without those items for a while longer.
Instead, I headed to the farmers’ market and stocked up on greens and cheese
and cider.
After dropping these off at the Airbnb, I made my way to Soho to read a
section of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at an annual fundraising
event for Housing Works Bookstore Café. When I had done the same event
the year before, I had posted photos to Twitter and checked in on Foursquare
and Facebook. This time I took no pictures, and I checked in by walking up to
the booker and saying, “Hi, I’m checking in.”
After the event, three friends and I went walking in search of a particular
Chinese dumpling restaurant. I knew its name lay somewhere in my
Foursquare history, but that was off-limits. Instead, we meandered toward the
three-dumplings-for-a-dollar bargain, along the way walking past a whole pig
stuffed into a plastic bag on the sidewalk.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I would have Instagrammed this image, along
with a suitably witty comment; instead I saved my snapshot for later viewing
by people physically close enough to see my phone. The afternoon lazed
along, and when I checked my phone at 5 p.m., I was shocked to find its
battery life at 50%, a historical high for that time of day. My detox was saving
battery life (!), which was saving energy (!), which was saving the Earth!
My only other fixed appointment was a massage. As I chatted with my
massage therapist, I discovered she had lived for several decades in the
Prospect Heights neighborhood where I was staying. Since I couldn’t query
my online network for local dining and culture options, my massage therapist
became my recommendation engine. She told me about several restaurants
and sites to check out. She transmitted this data by writing down the names on
a piece of paper.
I stopped next at a friend’s holiday party, where I engaged in
conversation without once taking out my phone to see what Twitter had to say
about my conversation. My mind left the party only when my body did, at
about 2 in the morning. I noticed that I was walking down the street with my
head held high and my eyes focused on the path before me, a path interrupted
by a group of people about my age who seemed lost. They asked me if there
was a diner nearby. Had they not been glued to their phones, they might have
seen the illuminated sign for the Ocean View Diner across the street.

Week One

The online world didn’t want to leave me alone. A few days after
disconnecting, my chief of staff texted me: “Was that you logging in to FB
today?” Someone had tried to hack my account. Given that I had told my
100,000 subscribers and my 1,000 or so “friends” that I was leaving social
media, and given that I don’t have 1,000 real friends, it made sense that
someone was trying to break in. Luckily, Facebook makes this fix pretty easy
—I guess because it involves keeping you around. I told Julia my password,
she went through Facebook’s suggested security steps, and I went back to
doing as little as possible.
When she logged in to my account, she hit another trip wire. Since I had
not disabled the Facebook chat feature, my friend Doug noticed “me” on the
system every time Julia logged in to deal with the security situation. He sent
“me” a quick set of accusatory notes: “Way to shut it down?,” “Don’t pretend
you were not online,” “You just can’t stay away!” Finally, Julia responded,
“This isn’t Baratunde, it’s his chief of staff.” “No one is buying that story,” he
responded. And since I didn’t see Doug during my vacation, he remained
sneeringly ignorant.
In the real world, however, my first week sans social media was deeply,
happily, and personally social.
A friend and I went to see The Book of Mormon and then went to dinner.
The waitstaff, my friend, and I were the only people aware of my order. I read
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, by Patton Oswalt and shared my thoughts on it
with seven people I had invited to dinner in my home. I wandered through a
nearby park and chilled near the Hare Krishna, close enough to take in their
incense and drumming, far enough to avoid their pamphlets. I bought a new
pair of glasses and shared my new face with the real people I spent time with.
Perhaps because I wasn’t always getting updates on events happening in
faraway places, I focused on the world around me, especially nearby
Vanderbilt Avenue, which turns out to be quite a place, especially for food.
Late one night, I entered a restaurant called Cornelius, lured by large-print
signs in the window advertising MEAT. WHISKEY. OYSTERS. I could not resist. At
the bar, my recently rediscovered heads-up display—aka my eyes—revealed a
person next to me, and for several hours I found myself in a fascinating
conversation with one of the dancers from the Broadway musical Spider-Man.
One morning at the Usual Restaurant, one of the Canadian brothers who
opened the diner 20 years ago engaged me with tales of the changing
neighborhood, in between his slightly sexist, outdated-but-charming jokes.
The pancakes were delicious. For lunch, I frequented Chuko, where the server
recommended the pork belly ramen. This was not the Yelp.com server, mind
you, but a human server who proclaimed, “Try the pork belly ramen.” What
an algorithm.
On another day, I happened to walk past Brooklyn Bike and Board. I
bought a bicycle. Turns out it’s easier to ride the thing when you’re not trying
to simultaneously check your Twitter account.
By the end of that first week, the quiet rhythm of my days seemed far
less strange. I was less stressed about not knowing new things; I felt that I still
existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on
the Internet. Seven days in, I felt prepared to fully appreciate one of the best
experiences of my time away: my “I am here” day.
The concept of “I am here” day originated with Priya Parker and her
husband, Anand Giridharadas, newly minted Brooklynites who avidly
supported my digital downshift. In a January New York Times column, Anand
defined “I am here” day as a time to “set aside our technology and to-do lists,
choose a quarter of the city we wanted to know better, and explore it for a full
day… . [It is] a kind of antimodern communal experiment: giving our gadgets
a secular Sabbath; reveling in friendship and conversation of a kind that
Facebook doesn’t do; being thickly in one place, not thinly everywhere.”
 For this edition of “I am here” day, Priya, Anand, and I were led through
a neighborhood in the Bronx by my friend Gustavo Rivera, who represents
part of the borough in the New York State Senate. Gustavo walked us through
the 33rd District, telling us of the controversy behind the new Yankee
Stadium, the historic grandeur of the Grand Concourse, and the racial
discrimination behind the Cross Bronx Expressway. He took us to the Bronx
Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, and a Mexican cowboy boots
shop. We walked the perimeter of the Bronx Armory and dined at one of the
city’s best Italian restaurants.
The connecting didn’t end there; on Gustavo’s recommendation, I
downloaded the 66-hour audiobook edition of The Power Broker, Robert
Caro’s epic biography of Robert Moses who, for better and for worse,
determined so much of what we know as New York City.
“I am here” day was the turning point in my digital detox, when I
stopped consciously thinking about the experiment and just started living it. I
was reading long books, engaging in meaningful conversations, and allowing
my mind to wander and make passive connections I had previously short-
circuited with social queries, responses, interruptions, and steady
documenting and sharing of unripened experiences.

The Long Bliss

I could regale you with more details of my time unplugged. There were so
many positive experiences. The beauty of giving myself 25 days was that
after 7 days, I still had 18 left! This disconnection was the gift that kept on
giving.
And the fact is, I maintained the same slow pace, the same sense of
discovery that I enjoyed during that first week. There were movies, there were
food trucks, there were friends, there was mulled wine. There was brief
consideration of a mulled-wine food truck.
Above all, there was an expansion of sensations and ideas. A writing
project that had stumped me before the break suddenly appeared to have
endless possibilities. The seed of an idea planted in November started to
bloom as I began looking at various Brooklyn buildings that could house a
hybrid retail-performance-dining-coworking venue centered around comedy
and creativity.
 I focused on the regional coverage in the New York Times. When I
wanted to share an article, I would text it to a couple of people. After doing
this two or three times, one friend replied, “You are really pushing the
boundaries of SMS technology.” But I appreciated the boundary and held to
it. Had I Facebooked or tweeted such articles, they would have been
accompanied by replies and reshares and notifications of comments. Had I
emailed them, that outbound message might have resulted in several new
inbound ones. A text was enough.

Reentry

The end arrived too soon. Despite the shocking fact that the Internet and the
world seemed to have gotten used to life without me, my nonvacation life
demanded a reinsertion into the Matrix. Startups don’t run themselves, books
don’t market themselves, columns don’t write themselves, and very few
people pay for prerecorded speeches.
On the day of my return, I posted homecoming messages to the major
networks, flipped my profile photos over, and prepared to reverse my
preflight checklist. But then I realized something: I didn’t have to reverse all
of it. There was no rule that I had to restore Shazam’s rights of interruption on
my lock screen. There was no law forcing me to be notified of each Twitter
mention. It was possible to enjoy music without auto-publishing each Rdio
track to my Facebook Timeline. I returned to my plugged-in life, but less
plugged in and armed with new habits that flowed from four important
realizations.

1) I had become obsessed with The Information.

Before The Unplugging, I wanted to read every feed and follow all the right
sources so I could be connected to every important event and insight as they
unfolded. There is satisfaction in feeling informed—our democracy depends
on it—so the more informed I was, the better a citizen I felt I was. Only when
I dramatically reduced my connectivity did I realize how addicted to
information stimulus I had become—and that I did not need to sustain that
constant high to live well and happily.

2) I shared too much.

In the months before my break, I achieved Peak Twitter. I averaged roughly
1,500 tweets in the months of September, October, and November 2012.
Much of that was due to the U.S. presidential election and that final Twilight
movie. But I spent an inordinate amount of time documenting, commenting
on, and sharing experiences. In the process, I wasn’t fully having those
experiences, since it was imperative that I tweet something relevant before
they were even over.

3) I was addicted to myself.

From the perspective of ego management, I’m a pretty dangerous

combination: performer, writer, CEO, youngest child. Our digital social tools
feed right into that ego trap, since pretty much my every piece of self-
expression is accompanied by performance indicators. I can measure how
many likes an idea has. If my tweet was not retweeted, did I even tweet it?
Never before have we had the ability to microgauge our own rhetorical value
to the world. I was judging my oversharing of uninhabited experiences. Since
the break, I look backward far less than before and I’ve tried to create more
discrete moments for checking email rather than maintaining a constant level
of inbox awareness, anxiety, and guilt.

4) I forsook the benefits of the Industrial Age.

The first season of Downton Abbey features a remarkable scene in which the
Dowager Countess, who is always quick to offer a sharp retort in defense of
tradition, responds to another character’s announcement of weekend plans
with a truly confused inquiry: “What is a weekend?” One major feature of
industrialization was the adoption of leisure time for those of us not among
the leisure class. Yet one major feature of the Networked Age is our de-
created ability to disengage. Will the concept of downtime have been a
temporary blip in the history of civilization?
The greatest gift I gave myself was a restored appreciation for
disengagement, silence, and emptiness. I don’t need to fill every time slot
with an appointment, and I don’t need to fill every mental opening with
stimulus. Unoccupied moments are beautiful, so I have taken to scheduling
them. Once a quarter, my chief of staff and I institute a zero-appointments
Blank Week, and almost every week I tune out of the Matrix for hours at a
time (yes, while I am awake and conscious). Perhaps the most life-affirming
change is that I rarely walk down a street while looking at or tapping on a
device. My reading or writing can wait, especially if it means I will be alive
later to deal with it.
I have stopped taking and sharing pictures of my food, because that’s
almost always dumb (unless I cooked the meal, in which case it’s art!). I have,
however, started taking photos in black-and-white; now that I consider myself
a more enlightened being, I’m far more pretentious.
Despite these new habits, I feel myself pulled back toward full digital
immersion. This is the first year in which I haven’t live-tweeted the Oscars,
Grammys, or Super Bowl, but the bombing and manhunt in Boston snapped
me back into my old command-center mentality. Given the significance of the
event and that Boston was once my hometown, I’m okay with the relapse, but
it reminded me of how easy it is to slide into digital obsession, and my post-
vacation numbers prove the power of its gravitational pull.
I am still a creature of my technological time. I love my devices and
services, and I love being connected to the global hive mind. I am neither a
Luddite nor a hermit, but I am more aware of the price we pay: lack of depth,
reduced accuracy, lower quality, impatience, selfishness, and mental
exhaustion, to name but a few. In choosing to digitally enhance,
hyperconnect, and constantly share our lives, we risk not living them. We
have collectively colluded to take this journey, but we’ve done so inches at a
time, not realizing that we have traveled leagues in the process.
For 25 days, I pulled back far enough to see that distance, and I needed
the cover story of a messiah’s birth to give myself that space. Could I have
done so during another less forgiving time of year? I am not sure, but I hope
we all—users and makers of these tools—allow each other more reprieves
from the hunt for constant digital connection so that we can find and maintain
other, deeper connections.
__
Fast Company, July/August 2013
 CHAPTER 2
DESIGNING A DIGITAL DETOX
 A NINE-POINT CHECKLIST FOR UNPLUGGING
By Baratunde Thurston
Schedule a vacation. Figure out when you can take a real break. If you want a
true digital detox, two weeks is far better than one.
Alert your key colleagues. A month before you leave, make sure that your key
coworkers know that you’ll be truly unavailable. This gives you time to work
out any real problems your absence may create. As danah boyd, a senior
researcher at Microsoft Research, says, “Warnings are the key to happy
relationship maintenance.”
Warn everyone. A week before d-day, send an email to a list of those who
communicate with you on anything more than an occasional basis, alerting
them to your departure. Make it clear to them that this is serious—no one will
believe you’re really capable of ditching the digital life.
Warn everyone—again! The morning of d-day, send an email to that list again.
Make it emphatic—mine began, “I Have Left the Internet.” If they don’t
understand that you’re for real now, they can’t be helped. They have, after all,
been warned.
Turn off automatic sync on your phone. You can live without notifications from
ESPN, Boing Boing, and Mafia Wars for a few days—a couple of weeks
even!
Set your away message for email. Your note should be courteous but firm: You
will return no emails (though you may choose to leave emergency contact
info).
Manage social networks. You can’t really turn off Facebook, Google+,
Instagram, and so on. So use your home page to establish your absence. Take
a photo of a stark message like: I Won’t Be Here Until [date of your return].
Use that as your profile photo.
Establish your emergency exceptions. There must be some way for people to
reach you. Set up a clear system with someone you trust, who can have access
to your email and social media.
Take a deep breath. Vacate. Completely. It’ll be scary for a day or two. And then
it will be great.
__
Fast Company, July/August 2013
 HOW TO UNPLUG YOUR DAILY ROUTINE
By Drake Baer
While we often imagine
ourselves as machines—that move linearly—we’re
actually organisms that move cyclically. And to do our most creative,
productive work, research suggests we need to step to that rhythm.
Digital strategist Tom Gibson put it elegantly in a recent blog post,
observing that these ebbs and flows of energy “make the pattern of organic
labor” and are not “to be worked around, to be ‘gotten over.’ ” If you
understand your rhythms—and work with them—you can do better work, in
the same way that knowing and tuning your truck’s engine fuels better
performance.
And then not working can become a part of your workday, as Gibson
continues:
“We need to incorporate ‘off time’—the outward breath, the ebb—into
our working patterns. Not with simple lip service like ‘you need to
sleep better,’ but as an integral, affirmed part of the process of
working… . We need to understand that ‘on’ is impossible without ‘off,’
and that the distance between the two needs to be made closer—like the
beats of a heart or the steps of a runner.”
The question is how to make that “off time” a part of your routine. That
practice is something that Fast Company writer turned consultant Tony
Schwartz has been considering for more than a decade: Productivity is a
matter of managing your energy, not your hours. What we need is to find
ways of renewing our energy when we get worn out through the workday. It’s
about having a rhythm between focused sprinting (and focused resting), rather
than a continuous, delirious, unguided, low-level crawl of distraction.
Here are ways to alternate between being on and off throughout the day:

In the Morning

“Just as noise is meaningless without quiet,” Fabrica CEO Dan Hill once
observed, “connectivity becomes meaningless when pervasive, when it is
without a few ‘sanctuary spaces’ as contrast.”
 For many, that contrast is most available in the early hours: Management
thinker Kevin Meyer does yoga after he gets up; Kayak cofounder Paul
English makes sure to meditate; novelist Somerset Maugham deliberated on
the first two sentences he would write while soaking in the bathtub.
The morning acts as a precedent for the rest of the day, and for many
people with busy work, family, and friend-filled lives, the early hours are the
ripest with uncommitted time, allowing us to do the physical, mental, and
emotional maintenance we need to do our best work. Here’s how.
Rise early—outrageously early.
Superlative executives tend to get up super early: AOL CEO Tim
Armstrong and Newton Investment CEO Helena Morissey both rise by 5 a.m.
Why? Rising early affords Armstrong time to work out and read, while it
allows Morissey to spend more time with the family later in the day.
Manage your devices. If you have an iPhone, extend the do-not-disturb time past
your wake-up time to add in some quiet. Alternatively, switch on airplane
mode—that’ll keep the noise out as you move through your routine.
Get some stillness. Try sitting still. Why? People who meditate a lot are better
at understanding what the hell it is that’s going on inside of them than people
who don’t. So if we want alignment between our personal and working lives,
we’d do well to become mindful.
And get enough exercise. Few things are better for getting yourself (and your
body) more primed to handle stress than exercise. To get enough, establish the
habit. And if you’re looking for stillness, mindfulness, and a bit of flexibility,
doing yoga on your own or in a class is a way to start. Research suggests that
even 20 minutes gives your brain a boost.
Make it an easy-to-implement ritual. Technology tends to erode structure—ever
forward an email before you’re out of bed?—while rituals give structure. Try
setting up your morning to be energizing from the start. Invest in an alarm
clock that runs away from you, forcing you to get out of bed. Put your
running shoes by the door—a mental nudge to head outside and get active.
Minimize your decisions. We can clutter our early hours with menial decisions:
which cereal, which socks, which exercise to do? Eliminate those by making
a few decisions about how you make decisions—that will lend your mornings
some much-needed spaciousness. If you plan your morning activity the night
before, you wake up knowing you simply have to follow through.

In the Afternoon

Even if we have a well-designed morning, we can be exhausted by afternoon.

By the time we reach 2:55 p.m.—a majority of polled Britons identified this
as their least productive time of day—many of us are fall-out-of-the-chair
exhausted.
The consequences are frightful. The more tired a person is, the more
decisions will be affected. A famous Israeli study revealed that judges gave
harsher sentences after lunch than in the morning. Job hunting takes a hit as
well: Hiring professionals tend to average out the scores they dole out through
the day, meaning that even if you’re an exceptional candidate at 4 p.m. and a
gaggle of excellent candidates come in before you, your shine will be
unknowingly tarnished. Fatigue erodes the quality of more menial decisions,
too: If you’ve ever felt too tired to brush your teeth, you’ll know what we
mean.
There’s a great Zen saying about the relationship between
Get some rest.
getting enough rest and being able to do good work: “Eat when hungry; sleep
when tired.” So if we’re feeling worn out in the afternoon, maybe we should
sleep. It’s progressive stuff, we know, but if you can place a nap right where
your energy begins to erode, it will energize the rest of the day.
Get some movement. Go for a walk. Go to a park. Exercise: It makes you more
productive, more emotionally resilient, and improves your cognitive
functioning.
Get some perspective. One of the pitfalls of endless busyness is not realizing
what we’re busying ourselves with (or why it matters). In other words, we
need to be mindful of what the hell it is we’re doing and why the hell we’re
doing it.
The Jesuit tradition gives us a practice for doing that. Saint Ignatius of
Loyola—who was very, very awesome—had a mindfulness practice he called
the examen. Chris Lowney, who was a seminarian before he joined JP
Morgan, gives a contemporary, universalized interpretation of the
contemplative practice:
 Remind yourself why you are grateful as a human being.
Lift your horizon for a moment. Call to mind some crucial personal
objective, or your deepest sense of purpose, or the values you stand for.
Mentally review the last few hours and extract some insight that might
help in the next few hours. If you were agitated, what was going on
inside you? If you were distracted and unproductive, why?

The Weekend

While the morning and the afternoon provide momentary opportunities for
renewing your stores of energy, 12 minutes here and 18 minutes there aren’t
enough to nourish the nonworking parts of our lives. Which, perhaps
counterintuitively, are necessary to doing our best work.
Why? Not separating your weekend from your week can unravel your
relationships, stymie your stress recovery, and ultimately ruin your
productivity, research suggests.
The detachment plan. We can avert personal disasters, scholars say, but only if
we learn to detach our grinds from our lives. “If you have a strong
technological boundary and self-restricted rules for using email, laptops, or
cell phones for work during off-work times,” explains Kansas State
University organizational psychologist YoungAh Park, “then you are more
likely to experience psychological detachment from work.”
That detachment is key. Why? When you’re detached from your work
over the weekend, as her and others’ research has shown, you are able to
recover from your workweek.
There are direct results: She’s found that people who unplug over the
weekend have higher satisfaction with life than people who spend their
Saturdays stuck in their inbox. And that wellness, we know, leads to at-work
achievement.
Fraying relationships. If you’re sleeping with your smartphone, you won’t be
connecting with the person sleeping next to you. Park’s research has shown
that if you’re continually stressed with work stuff at home, you’re less apt to
self-regulate hostile behaviors or support your partner. “If working couples
don’t recuperate from their job stress while at home,” she says, “they would
be likely to fall into a spiral of lost resources.”
Learn to weekend well. A joint study between American and German
universities found that weekend recovery comes in several flavors, including:

Relaxation experiences: joviality, reading a magazine, flipping through

a book, or, as the kids say, chilling
Mastery experiences: accomplishing something meaningful like
climbing a mountain or learning a language
Control: being able to decide whatever the hell it is you want to do
Detachment: anything that helps you get away from the situation at
work

But the weekend can have stressors, too: housework, partner, or family
conflicts, or, we have to add, dealing with that pile of laundry in your room.
Nonwork hassles, the authors add, drain your emotional resources and cramp
your recuperation. The implicit suggestion: Make at least part of your
weekend a total retreat.
That one caveat to this pursuit of balance, Park says, is that you can’t
segment your weekend from your week if your bosses and coworkers don’t as
well. If the norm in your office is to never unplug, you won’t unplug. But take
heart: You don’t have to be the boss to shift that culture, as Harvard Business
School professor Leslie Perlow has shown.
She found a potent example while researching her book Sleeping With
Your Smartphone. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), as elite
consultancies tend to be, has notoriously unpredictable hours. So Perlow set
about making non-proselytized, predictable time off happen there. “You can’t
mandate people to open up and have these conversations,” she says. But, “if
you have some small doable goal, it really rallies the team to work together,
and it legitimates all of a sudden talking about things you’d never talk about
before.”
The goal for the BCG team she worked with was one night off a week
for each member, regardless of what was due the next day. That specificity is
key, Perlow says, since it lets you set up a positive feedback loop by
congratulating people for unplugging. But this takes infrastructure.
For this particular team, a job-sharing system emerged; every person’s
work was 80% theirs and 20% another’s. If a fire started in your sector, your
partner could put it out.
 “When you try and tackle this head-on, people get scared,” she says of
changing workplace culture. “But if you take it one step at a time, it can have
a profound impact.”
Those steps add up. People start to experience the benefits of that on-
and-off rhythm. And that creates a powerful motivation to keep it going, at
home and at work.
__
Adapted from articles on FastCompany.com, 2013.
 INSIDE THE DETOX SPA: A WEEK WITH HYPERACHIEVING,
HYPERSTRESSED-OUT EXECS ON THE MEND
By Chuck Salter
On a glorious Sunday afternoon, two dozen strangers enter an exotic paradise.
They’re an intriguing lot: a Manhattan obstetrician, a Nashville millionaire, a
jaded documentary filmmaker, and a devout executive couple from Atlanta,
among others. They’ve paid a small fortune to plumb their souls, to wrestle
with their private pain, to rethink—and perhaps to redesign—their fast-lane,
high-stress lives.
They’ve come to Canyon Ranch Health Resort, an oasis in the cactus-
studded foothills outside of Tucson, Arizona. Here, they will spend a week
confronting difficult questions that they rarely ask—let alone answer—
throughout the rest of the year: If I’m so wealthy, why don’t I feel happier? If
I’m so successful, why don’t I feel more satisfied? If I’m so busy, why do I
spend so much time on things that seem so unimportant? It’s all too easy,
amid the daily blitz of staff meetings, business trips, and Little League games,
to brush off such vexing questions.
The more these people achieve, though, the heavier those questions
weigh on their minds. The tensions in their lives (the tensions between their
ambitions at work, their financial goals, their family commitments, and their
personal health) become even more urgent—until they almost have no choice
but to visit Canyon Ranch.
Make no mistake: For many guests, the ranch is just another high-priced
fat farm. Its luxurious spa caters to jet-setters like Julia Roberts and Barbra
Streisand, as well as to Wall Street titans and corporate kingpins. The business
elite and the cultural elite meet here to shed pounds, to nosh on edamame, and
to indulge in all the aerobics, yoga, and massage that their bodies can take.
The price for single occupancy: $3,480 or more per week during peak season
(October to mid-June), plus an 18% service charge.
But Canyon Ranch is more than just a pricey escape: There’s meat
tucked into all that tofu. Its Life Enhancement Center, a sort of spa within the
spa, offers a weeklong program that’s designed to help overachieving
professionals search for answers to some of the defining personal questions in
the world of work: When so many life goals seem attainable, what kind of life
is desirable? In an age of more, more, more—more travel, more sales, more
stock options, more challenges, more dreams—when does the pursuit of less
make sense? How much is enough? Guests at the ranch attend seminars, as
well as one-on-one consultations with therapists, physicians, nutritionists, and
physiologists. All of that professional attention won’t reinvent anyone’s life in
just a week.
But the ultimate goal is nothing less than helping guests to turn their
lives around. Dan Baker, the center’s clinical director and spiritual helmsman,
leads the search for “enoughness.” A tall man with broad shoulders and wire-
rimmed glasses, he exudes the intensity and enthusiasm of a professor eager
to connect with his students. (In fact, for many years, he taught psychology at
the University of Nebraska, and today he is an adjunct professor at the
University of Arizona College of Medicine.)
Baker, 52, is too grounded to call himself a guru. He credits others,
including M. Scott Peck and Viktor Frankl, with coining many of the insights
that he espouses. Yet, over the years, CEOs, celebrities, and entrepreneurs
have sought Baker’s ministrations. “We’ve tried to create a goal-oriented
environment that has a transformational element,” says Baker. “By the end of
their week here, people often have a different perspective on life. They go
home committed to taking the next step.”
Barry Baker, 46, president and chief operating officer of USA Networks,
has taken many such steps. “Dan helped me get beyond the idea that my
business defined me,” says Baker (no relation to Dan). Some guests continue
their relationship with Dan Baker by phone—or fly him to their office to meet
with him in person.
Baker has a real knack for helping people redesign their lives. But he
doesn’t promise a quick fix. Nor does he demand a radical makeover. Baker
favors simple, practical strategies: Commit to a few challenging but doable
changes and turn new behaviors into solid habits. “This program is all about
change,” says Baker. “And the changes that matter most, the ones that really
make a difference, are the ones that create the habits of a lifetime. Change is a
matter of mind over body. The pursuit of balance is a lifelong journey.”

To Change Your Life, Reckon With Your Death

How do so many intelligent and insightful people allow their lives to get so
far out of whack? By failing to ask themselves the kinds of questions that they
routinely ask their colleagues and companions: Why do you work? What
gives you pleasure? Most people, Baker says, are open and honest about life
—until they need to be open and honest with themselves. Introspection takes
too much effort and too much courage.
That’s why he asks his visitors to engage in what sounds like a grim
exercise: Think about your life as if you were on your deathbed. People on
their deathbeds look back on life with a special perspective, Baker argues.
They discard trivia and focus on what matters most: on relationships and on
what Baker calls “defining moments”—those critical choices that lead us
down one path or another. “It’s hard to take time in the middle of a busy life
just to think about what we have done and what we want to achieve,” he says.
“We have to find new ways to impose timeouts.”
The need for a time-out is what brought Jaynie Studenmund to Canyon
Ranch. Studenmund, now 45, who lives in La Canada, California, has worked
for three financial companies in the past five years—most recently, for H.F.
Ahmanson, a big California S&L. One after another, each company was
acquired—one of them in a hostile takeover. “Three mergers in three years,”
she says, as if she still can hardly believe it.
At each institution, Studenmund served as the executive vice president of
retail banking and as a member of the company’s management committee.
Those three years amounted to the most stressful time in her entire career, and
while she relished the challenges that came her way, she also recognized the
compromises that she had to make. After all, she wasn’t just a high-powered
bank officer—she was also a wife and a mother. After putting her two young
children to bed, she would work late into the night. She got by on four or five
hours of sleep. She exercised, but she often skipped meals. In the middle of
one merger, she worked 10 consecutive 18-hour days. When her son learned
about the third takeover, he sighed, “Oh, no, Mommy, not again.”
Colleagues had urged her to take time off, but she had always been too
driven to let herself do so—until now. She’s on sabbatical to recuperate, to
reassess her life, and to map out her next move. At Canyon Ranch,
Studenmund listens to a doctor describe the physiological effects of her recent
lifestyle—how, for example, depriving the body of eight hours of sleep
adversely affects mood and memory. She hears a fitness trainer explain that
running—a longtime habit of hers—isn’t a well-rounded form of exercise.
And she gets the results of a comprehensive blood test: Her cholesterol level
is on the high side.
All of this comes as a real eye-opener. While serving the needs of both
work and home, she has neglected herself. “I’m a very driven person, so you
have to hit me over the head with a two-by-four to get my attention,” she
says. “They do that here, but in a nurturing way. I know that the pattern I was
living before wasn’t sustainable, although it worked pretty well for a while.”
Thanks to the golden parachutes that came with all of those mergers, she
doesn’t have to work. Still, she’d like to get back into the game of business—
on her terms. “I want to do something that I can feel passionate about,
something that will let me make a major contribution,” she says. “But having
time for my family is vital. I want to work for people for whom that is also
important.”
Early in the week, Baker asks his guests, “What’s your vision? What are
your goals?” Many of them don’t even know what their goals are. Some get
swept up in a lucrative career and never pause to find true north on their inner
compass. Others simply adopt someone else’s vision. Still others have
achieved one set of goals and are at a loss as to what to do next. Many
successful people, says Baker, set career goals in their twenties and thirties,
and when they reach those goals in their forties or fifties—or, these days,
even sooner—they’re disappointed by the view from the top.
Baker calls this the Peggy Lee Syndrome: “Is That All There Is?” When
a successful career feels empty, it’s often because the price of success has
been too high. Instead of having a rich family life and a supportive circle of
friends, successful people have only colleagues and clients. “Work becomes
your habit,” Baker says.
“You don’t develop outside interests, so you don’t have anywhere else to
go. You get all of your accolades, and you do all of your socializing in that
venue.” That’s an alluring trap, because the extra effort can pay off in the
form of raises and promotions—which only reinforce the grind.
While some people neglect their own needs because they’re too busy
pleasing their boss or colleagues, others act as self-centered as an infant. They
operate at the center of their own universe, oblivious to their place in the
world around them. Baker tells the story of an executive who, when he came
to Canyon Ranch, insisted that his work had to be his top priority—that it was
a matter of life or death.
He left Tucson with a homework assignment: Spend two days
volunteering at a pediatric-oncology ward. Baker made the necessary
arrangements. “I could have talked about life and death until I was blue in the
face, but he had to gain that perspective for himself. He called me two months
later and said, ‘Now I understand. I have some serious issues involving work.’
” The man began to spend more time with his wife, and eventually he started
to pursue other interests outside the office as well.
Most people don’t realize how out of kilter their lives have become until
they face a crisis—a divorce, a death in the family, perhaps a heart attack.
Chris Newell doesn’t want to wait for that sort of wake-up call. His doctor
told him that if he doesn’t lose weight and get his blood pressure under
control, he’ll have to go on medication, and he doesn’t want that.
Newell, 48, is about to start a demanding new job that requires more
travel than he is accustomed to. After running the Lotus Institute, an
innovation lab associated with Lotus Development Corp., he is looking
forward to assuming a more hands-on role as chief knowledge officer at
Viant, an e-commerce consulting group. But he is also apprehensive. He has
to do a better job of managing both his work and his health. “I’m about to
enter a more stressful environment, and I need a better me—mentally,
emotionally, and physically,” he says. “Before, I was running out of energy.”
Before, when he saw himself in the mirror each morning, he almost
didn’t recognize his own body. The guy who wrestled at 140 pounds in high
school, who played on the tennis team in college, who at one point could
bicycle 100 miles a day—that guy had somehow ballooned to 250 pounds. If
only he had taken his health as seriously as his career, he thought. “In the
past, I rationalized things,” Newell says. “This time, I knew that if I didn’t
take my health seriously, I might take years off my life.”
Newell wants both a challenging career and good health. He wants to
help change the way companies share knowledge—but he also wants to be
around long enough to enjoy his new house on Cape Cod, along with his wife,
their daughter, and his 10 siblings. So at Canyon Ranch, he meets with a
physiologist, he attends classes on nutrition and takes a cooking class; he
plays tennis for the first time in 20 years. The experience is exhilarating and
inspiring. “It’s like recapturing the old spirit, the old sense of energy,” Newell
says.

Balance Takes Discipline, Not Willpower

“There isn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything I need to get
done.” Baker, who hears that complaint every week, says that it misses the
point. Balance, he argues, is not a math problem: It’s not a matter of shifting a
few hours each week from one activity to another. If it were that easy,
everyone would look as serene as the Dalai Lama. Balance is a design
problem—a matter of coming to terms with your values and priorities, of
reckoning with the trade-offs that they require. Balance is not about
willpower, Baker insists. If you depend only on willpower, you’re likely to
cave in whenever you feel pressured, tired, or unhappy. Balance is about
discipline: It’s about deciding what’s important and then creating a structure
that defines how you spend your time.
All of that may sound self-evident. But when you lead the kind of pedal-
to-the-metal schedule that many of Baker’s guests lead, you don’t stop to
ruminate about time and values. And, if you do stop, you’re likely to see huge
gaps between what you say is important and what you actually spend your
time doing.
On Tuesday night, Baker leads a session on balance and values. He
hands out a list of values: spirituality, financial growth, relationships, control,
adventure. Circle any that are important to you, he tells the group, or add
others to the list. Now narrow that list down to your three core values, and ask
yourself, “Is there a gap between what I say that I value and how I behave?”
Bridging that gap is essential to achieving “enoughness,” because living with
that gap means that you’re living in conflict with yourself.
In a well-designed life, behavior reflects values—and values drive
action. So what should you do if your behavior is out of sync with your
values? Write down specific actions that reflect your core values. Then do one
of those actions this week, and do other actions on the list in the weeks that
follow.
If there is one question that’s guaranteed to inspire a sense of purpose
and discipline, it is this: What do you want your legacy to be? Baker suggests
that his guests actually write their own obituary. At first, the exercise seems
corny—even grisly. But soon the guests become deeply absorbed in
completing a simple fill-in-the-blank form: “At the time of death, principal
endeavor was …” So far, so easy. “Will be honored for …” A little tougher.
“Will be remembered by …” Hmmm. “Because of …” Hmmmmm. “Made
contributions in the area of …” “Always hoped to …” “Was most proud of
…” How do you feel about your obituary? Baker asks his guests later. Having
read it, could you rest in peace?

Understanding and Managing Stress

By midweek, a real change has come over the guests at the Life Enhancement
Center. They’re relaxed. They’re hopeful. They also sound like converts. It’s
amazing what a few days of exercise, healthy food, meditation, and plenty of
sleep can do to wretches who are accustomed to driving themselves off a cliff.
What guests first notice about Canyon Ranch is its mountainous desert
terrain. But what sets the therapeutic mood is the quiet, the absolute stillness
of the place: You’ve never heard so much silence in your life. The ranch is
nearly devoid of beepers, cell phones, pets, children under 14, and standard
forms of nightlife. (Evening activities include classes on astronomy, among
other subjects.) At 10 p.m., the complex begins to wind down. And, since this
is a health resort, no alcohol is served.
At 7 a.m., the day begins with a group speed walk along the resort’s
serpentine roads. Then it’s off to an omelet bar (egg whites only) and a full
day of classes. Along with the Life Enhancement offerings, there are sessions
on low-fat grilling, family conflict, sexuality, memory—you name it. There
are also more than 40 fitness classes, including sessions devoted to
kickboxing, yoga, and water aerobics in a heated pool. What does all of this
have to do with finding out how much is enough? Well, everything, says
Baker. The goal is not only to balance career, relationships, and health, but
also to balance the elements within each of those areas: Eat a well-balanced
diet, but also follow a well-balanced fitness routine. Lift weights to build
muscle, but also be sure to include stretching and cardiovascular activity in
your daily regimen.
At 5 p.m. each afternoon, the stress-management seminar begins. Even if
you act in concert with your values, stress can undermine your pursuit of
balance, like termites attacking the foundation of a house. The physical,
emotional, and psychological consequences can be profound: overeating,
inactivity, anxiety, depression, anger, poor sleep, heart problems, and
increased mortality. Learn to manage stress, Baker says, and you can
drastically improve your quality of life.
It’s important to know what stress is, says Dr. Philip Eichling, medical
director at Canyon Ranch, who offers this definition: “the mind’s
interpretation of an event in a way that causes characteristic physical effects.”
The key word is “interpretation.” “You cannot control outside stressors, but
you can control how you perceive and react to those stressors,” Eichling says.
In other words, take a moment to calm down. Take several deep breaths. “I
concentrate on slowing down my heart rate and envisioning a good moment. I
think of the look on my son’s face when he’s sleeping. That feels good.”
If you’re self-aware, you can tell when you’re wound too tightly to
concentrate. “You want to find an optimal level of performance—a balance
between tension and relaxation,” Baker says. “Whenever you feel panic, just
close the door, turn off the phone, turn out the lights, and take five minutes to
practice meditation or deep breathing.” Make such moments a regular part of
your day, like a morning staff meeting. One minute here, five minutes there,
and soon those moments of relief will begin to add up.
The point is, you cannot avoid stress altogether. But you can minimize
its effect by becoming more resilient. Control what you can. Instead of letting
others determine your life, draw boundaries and learn to say no when
necessary. For high achievers, who typically hesitate to delegate or to turn
down a request, that’s not an easy task. But try saying no just once, Baker
advises his guests, and see what happens.
Rob Hallam, 41, director of internal communication at the Atlanta
headquarters of Home Depot, has come to Canyon Ranch to get a grip on
stress. When you work for a fast-growth company like Home Depot, stress is
so endemic that trying to avoid it is like trying to ignore gravity. Every 72
hours, another Home Depot store opens in the United States or abroad. In 10
years, the company grew from 90 stores with 12,000 associates to more than
800 stores with 175,000 associates.
“Rapid growth brings change, and change is inherently stressful,” says
Hallam, who routinely logs 60 to 70 hours on the job, Monday through
Saturday. But lately he hasn’t felt as productive or as energetic as he used to.
“Bottom line, I want to feel better about myself,” he says. “I feel that I’ve
been working too many hours and not getting enough out of it.”
Hallam isn’t the first stressed-out Home Depot manager to show up at
the Life Enhancement Center. Colleagues of his, some of whom visit the
ranch twice a year, told him how beneficial the program can be. So he and his
wife, Jeannine, 33, executive administrator for the Atlanta chapter of the
American Society for Training and Development, decided to see if the
center’s offerings could help them enhance their life together. Married for
three years, they sometimes find it hard to enjoy their professional
opportunities, which require them to spend less time together than they would
like to. Their relationship isn’t anywhere near crisis yet, but they hear warning
bells. Both devout Christians, they pray together daily—yet work often seems
to throw them off course.
Rob doesn’t blame “the Depot,” as he refers to the company. Promoting
balance and health is part of its corporate philosophy. (Employees at
headquarters have exercise facilities, for example.) Instead, he blames
himself. He’s easily seduced by all of the projects that come across his desk.
Getting up-to-date information on 50,000 products into the hands of Home
Depot associates, developing a series of Home Depot home-repair books—
such challenges get his juices going, and he wants to make the most of that.
But if he takes on too much, he creates more stress both at work and at
home. “You get caught up in rapid growth, because growth is exciting,” he
says. “And you can get buried in that excitement.” Achieving profound self-
awareness is difficult enough. Actually changing behavior—well, that’s even
tougher. We can come to grips with destructive lifestyle patterns, we can
acknowledge that tension or conflict is unhealthy—but doing something about
it? That’s where many of us get stuck, Baker says. We cling to old patterns
and bad habits, because changing them means breaking away from what’s
comfortable.

A Redesign Rather Than an Overhaul

To achieve lasting change, you need to make an emotional connection to your

new habits and to the benefits that you’ll reap over time. Mel Zuckerman, the
founder of Canyon Ranch, calls that connection an “epiphany of spirit.” It
goes beyond an intellectual understanding of the reasons for change; it’s
something that you experience at a deeper, more personal level.
Dan Baker knows from personal experience that reaching that point isn’t
easy. He recalls a Sunday morning many years ago, when his 11-year-old son
looked at him over breakfast and said, “Gee, I haven’t seen you since last
Sunday.” Baker was floored by the irony: At the time, he was a psychologist
at the National Center for Preventive and Stress Medicine, and he regularly
talked with patients about how important their families should be to them—
yet he wasn’t making enough time for his own family. “I did some soul-
searching after that,” he says. “I asked, ‘Why am I so driven? Why do I go to
the hospital so early and stay until 10 at night?’ I was successful, but I had
tripled my caseload. I finally realized, ‘I’m afraid of being a father.’ I’d spent
years training people about relationships, but I was afraid of having
relationships.” Despite that realization, he says, he needed another three years
to change his life—to cut back at work and to begin scheduling time with his
family as if they were his most important client.
When people consider changing their lives, they often view the process
as being so dramatic, so earth-shattering, that the mere prospect of change
becomes overwhelming. And so they do nothing. Baker suggests that people
think of change not as a major overhaul but rather as a gradual redesign: “It’s
all about continual improvement through small, incremental, seemingly
insignificant steps. Let’s say you’re working 80 hours a week. How about
cutting back by five hours a week? Now let’s figure out how to spend those
five hours on your health or on your relationships.”
Toward the end of the week, Baker and his staff ask their guests, “What
are you going to do during the other 51 weeks of the year?” On index cards,
participants list three agenda items that they will pursue when they get home:
nothing too ambitious—just small, doable changes, first steps that can lead to
bigger steps. At a final celebration on Saturday, the guests toast one another’s
progress, clinking flutes of sparkling cider. They exchange phone numbers
and email addresses; they talk about holding a one-year reunion. Then they
fly home and start putting their plans into action.
Back in Boston, Chris Newell calls a tennis pro to a schedule a lesson.
He plans to play twice a week, as long as he’s not on the road. He’d also like
to teach his 13-year-old daughter, Stephanie, how to play so that they can
spend more time together. He says he’s going to watch less television and to
go to bed earlier so that he can get up at 5:30 a.m. and run or bike before
work. He’ll concentrate on eating well-balanced meals and snacks instead of
relying on a quick-fix diet. “On the plane home, I was looking over some of
the low-fat recipes that I picked up,” Newell says. “I’m going to the store
tonight.” As he sees it, he not only has a new job; he also has a new
responsibility to his body.
The day after she arrives home, Jaynie Studenmund buys a set of
dumbbells. (She’s adding an upper-body strength program to her regular
running routine.) She also sends her nanny to a health-food store with a
grocery list that includes baked chips and apple butter, and she purges the
kitchen of greasy snacks. “I’m never eating margarine again,” she vows. She
adds a few health books to her reading list and a note to her to-do list: Buy
new music, something soothing to listen to in the car. She also plans to get
more than four hours of sleep a night. She’ll continue to push herself, of
course, but she’s no longer going to run on fumes.
Rob and Jeannine Hallam plan to take back their weekends. That will
require Rob to be more productive during the week and to start saying no, or
at least “not now,” to all of the great ideas that people pitch to him. Come
Saturday morning, the couple plans to visit a farmers’ market and stock up on
fresh fruit and vegetables: Healthier lunches and snacks will help Rob keep
his energy level up at work. And by giving up caffeine and alcohol, they hope
to improve the quality of their sleep. Rob plans to start taking breathing
breaks to manage stress at work. “I want to use self-focus to calm my system
down,” he says. He and Jeannine are confident that these changes will last.
Because they attended Canyon Ranch together, they can help each other
reinforce their new habits.
These Canyon Ranch graduates understand that change—even
incremental change—won’t be easy. There will be missteps and backsliding
along the way, and their progress will be modest. But, as Dan Baker would
say, they have made a good start on their change journey. And, in a year or
two, they will be ready to recommit to change—or, perhaps, to change course
again. Even the best plans have a limited shelf life.
When in doubt, Baker advises his acolytes, take a step back and
remember the goal that you’re pursuing. The journey may be grueling, but the
destination remains relatively clear-cut. “At the end of your life,” he says,
“you want to be able to look back with few regrets and to feel good about the
choices you made. That way, you can go in peace, knowing that you’ve
invested your life and your life’s energy wisely.”
__
Fast Company, July/August 1999
 CHAPTER 3
SURVIVING—AND STICKING WITH—DETOX
 RESISTING THE TEMPTATION TO TWEET, TAG, LIKE,
FAVORITE, POST …
By Jessica Hullinger
Whether your digital detox lasts a day, a week, or even longer, at some point you
will hear the siren call of your beloved devices. The smartphone that you
carry everywhere, the dozens of apps you’ve come to rely on, the web itself
will beckon you back online with the promise of endless information, social
connectivity, and whimsical distractions. You must be prepared for these
moments. And you must resist.
Here are some of most common temptations you’ll encounter and how
various web experts and executives get around them:

1. BOREDOM

Start journaling:
“Use a pencil and a pad, and write what you’re feeling,”
suggests Kimberly Young, founder and director at the Center for Internet
Addiction Recovery. “Take a moment to be introspective. Why is this a
problem? What’s really happening? Do you feel a loss of connection?”
Get a hobby (or a pet): “Commit to something outside the office, away from
digital responsibilities,” says Grace Bonney, founder of Design*Sponge. “I
haven’t had a hobby outside of my job for nearly 10 years. So I took a few
drastic measures. First, I got a dog, which I’ve always wanted. But I knew it
would force me to get outside, walk, and unplug. Second, I joined my
coworker, Amy Azzarito, in signing up for adventurous classes like Aerial
Silks and skateboarding. It’s hard to work your iPhone when you’re dangling
from the air.”
“I usually hike, read a book, talk with friends,” says Jonathan D. Becher,
chief marketing officer at SAP. “One day recharges me and feels like a two-
week vacation.”
For Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit, the solution is “reading
nonfiction books. Even if I’m not captivated by the story, I’m still learning
something.”
 Dom Sagolla, cocreator of Twitter and chief community officer at
Chaotic Moon, suggests: “Develop a habit of doodling instead of tapping or
typing.”

2. THE ONLINE WORLD WON’T LEAVE YOU ALONE

Make it impossible to plug in. “I pack up my computer, phone, and iPad and
charge them in my bedroom so I’m not tempted to use them,” says
Design*Sponge’s Bonney.
“Intentionally seek places without Wi-Fi reception or even electricity so
you are not tempted to plug in,” says Yuli Ziv, founder and CEO of Style
Coalition.
Eliminate interruptions. Start by turning off the automatic sync on your cell
phone. You can live without notifications from ESPN, Boing Boing, and
Mafia Wars for a few days—or even a couple of weeks!
Delay your emails. “I use Boomerang to delay the sending of emails,” says
Bonney, “so I can ensure I won’t get a response at a time that will force me to
jump back into work.”
“I’ve made it a policy not to reply to work emails outside of business
hours,” says Brian Voll, director of product development at Avant Garde
Information Systems. “People are generally pretty annoyed at first, but they
get over it. If it’s an emergency, they learn to call, and apparently nothing is
an emergency once you have to bother yourself with a phone call.”
“Support the 24-hour email response rule—for your own mental health
and the health of your colleagues, clients, and friends,” says Ziv of Style
Coalition.

3. YOU MISS SHARING

So share with the people around you. “Whenever I get the urge to do something
online, I find its counterpart in real life and do it,” says projects analyst
Alanoud Al Madhi. “It’s all about the emotion and feeling you get from being
‘plugged.’ For example, if I feel like I need to post a photo on Instagram, I
show it to my colleagues and friends. If I want to share info (personal or
general knowledge), I call a friend or share it with colleagues. And so forth.
Mainly, I find something around me that would give me a similar feeling and
emotion to the one I get from the digital life or interactions.”
The more you resist these temptations and others, the better you’ll get at
it. Much like the urge to check Facebook repeatedly (hourly?!), this new
behavior will become a habit—one you’ll want to keep practicing.
__
FastCompany.com, June 2013
 HOW TO UNPLUG ON VACATION
By Lydia Dishman
When Carson Tate tells clients to follow their bliss, she’s not invoking some new-
age hooey. Instead, the managing partner of Working Simply believes that
BLISS—that is, “behavioral learning and integration support systems”—can
help improve corporate agility, employee engagement, productivity, and
effectiveness. And who doesn’t want to work smarter, not harder?
One key to increasing productivity, she says, is taking time off—real
time off, not a vacation spent with one thumb on the iPhone at all times. “In
the workplace, I think we are just assaulted by information, commitments,
timelines, deadlines, and what happens is our thinking is scattered and
disconnected,” she observes. “Think about when you have your eureka
moments. Some of the best ideas come when you are in the shower with
bubbles in your hair.”
Vacations not only offer a respite from the daily grind, but the downtime
offers opportunities to allow new concepts and strategies to marinate. “When
you come back, you are rested, you are able to innovate, and your passion is
back,” Tate says. Even now, as more companies offer employees “unlimited
vacation,” engaged and productive workers are scarce, she says. Citing a
Gallup Daily survey that found 71% of American workers are “not engaged”
or are “actively disengaged,” Tate says people are just burned out.
Here are some tips for making your next vacation a break from work.

Get Over Yourself, and Prioritize Time Off.

For those who find it difficult to close the office door and swap work for
R&R, Brian Miller, COO and president of AdviCoach and The Entrepreneur’s
Source, says the first step is to put vacation, time reserved for the family or
partner, and quiet time on the calendar. If you are part of the 57% of
American workers who still have vacation days unused because you think the
world will collapse without you, Miller has three words: “Get over it.” He
says even small business owners who wear many hats can and should unplug.
“I have found that when entrepreneurs empower their staff, they are more
productive when [their boss] is gone.”
Think “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?”

For executives in more high-stakes workplaces, Tate suggests making a list of

all the things that could possibly go wrong when they are not there. One
client, a senior leader in an organization, dutifully wrote down such disastrous
occurrences as a hostile takeover and an employee crisis. “As we looked at
each of those scenarios on paper, I asked him: ‘Is it true? Is it real? Can you
handle it?’ ” Tate says, which helped him prepare and communicate
expectations to his staff.
Do you have FOMO (fear of missing out)? You’re not alone. Nearly
two-thirds of people (62%) are afraid of missing something (a competitor’s
tweet, cat video, relationship status change, etc.) if they don’t keep an eye on
their social networks, according to the State of Social Media study by
MyLife.com. But once you’re out of the office, Tate says, the next step is to
unplug the technology and enjoy. “Ask yourself what you are missing by
engaging [in social media] and not being by yourself or in a hobby you are
passionate about,” she says.

Call Me Virtually, Maybe

Mike Masin, owner of @Stuff, LLC, says he finds it helpful to schedule

projects that he can’t complete at least two weeks before he hits the road—
which he will then start upon his return. That way, he says, “I can disconnect
without worrying about open projects. My desk is clear when I start a
vacation.” Though he hasn’t traveled without devices himself, Masin offers,
“I would arrange for a trusted person to check my inboxes just so they can
respond to urgent messages and advise people that I’m not available.”
Depending on needs and budget, a virtual receptionist such as CallRuby.com
is an easy way to do this professionally, he says.

And now, advice from Fast Company readers:

Instagramming photos of sunrise at the summit, delicious restaurant meals, or

umbrella drinks notwithstanding, we turned to our readers to get their best tips
for unplugging and making the most of vacation. Other than the obvious
solution of leaving the laptop home and hiding the mobile phone in the
bottom of your suitcase (ringer off, naturally), we got some pretty inspired
responses.
Here’s a sampling:
Before disconnecting, go on a binge of your favorite websites; the satisfaction
will carry you through. —Mauricio Godoy (@mauricioswg)
Leave the phone at home. Alternately, go to a place with no Internet access or
cell service. They still exist! —Alex Howard (@digiphile)
Airplane Mode is your friend. It’s not cold turkey. You save battery while
you’re away from plugs, and you can still use GPS. —Anthony J. Garcia
(@anthony_garcia)
Travel to a place where absence of wireless reception and Wi-Fi makes it
impossible to connect. Life miraculously continues. —Elena Sirpolaidis
(@elenasirpo)
I turn off phone, mail, push notifications, play a sport: You can’t use gadgets
when you are sweaty and running. —Seth (@ThisAddLife)
Deactivate Facebook during vacation and set a rule to shop locally. —Blair
Knobel (@lbknobel)
__
FastCompany.com, July 2012
 CHAPTER 4
PLUGGING BACK IN AND RECLAIMING YOUR DIGITAL LIFE
By Jessica Hullinger
If you’ve done a digital detox and you’re ready to turn off your “out of office”
message and reconnect, here are a few tips on how to reintegrate while still
maintaining some of the benefits of an Internet-free life:

Cut the digital fat.

Consider leaving some of your addiction-enabling digital activities behind for

good. “Do not get notifications on your smartphone from social sites such as
Facebook, emails, etc.,” suggests Levi Felix, founder of Digital Detox, a
company that offers tech-free retreats. “Choose when you want to check your
messages and be intentional about it; don’t let them choose you.”

Set boundaries.

When you rejoin the digital world, try to structure your online time, says
Kimberly Young, founder and director at the Center for Internet Addiction
Recovery. “For one hour you get to do what you really want do on the
Internet. The next day two hours, then three.”
Kord Campbell, who recently participated in a digital detox hosted by
Camp Grounded, found limiting his online time post-detox made him far
more productive. “I try to focus on what it is I need to get done today. I know
I only have X amount of time, so I need to get it all done before bedtime rolls
around.”

Take inventory of activities you want to avoid.

Young also suggests keeping a log of warning signs that suggest you’re
slipping into dangerous, Internet-addiction territory. “What was it that got you
to that point in the first place?” she asks. Knowing these triggers can help you
avoid them.

Make a list of things you want to do more often.

Felix tells unpluggers to make note of the moments they felt the most happy
during their detox and commit to working those things into daily life. For
example, if you loved waking up without your phone, leave it outside the
bedroom twice a week.

Set aside “you” time.

For Campbell, one of the hardest parts of reconnecting to his digital life was
“realizing it feels much better without it and having to accept you have to
come back and use it.” To help ease this pain, Felix recommends setting aside
designated time for yourself. “We advise people to continue to ‘handle you’
before you handle the rest of the world,” says Felix.
__
FastCompany.com, June 2013
 CHAPTER 5
THE CASE FOR LONG-TERM CHANGE
 THE COMPANY BUILT FOR BALANCE
By Charles Fishman
“In Norway, the standard of living is the highest that it’s ever been. But
now we’re seeing some paradoxes. People have very nice homes. But
no one is at home during the day. Offices and homes are being
underutilized. But we also have traffic and pollution. We have money
and material goods, but no time for ourselves.”
—Ragnhild Sohlberg, Norsk Hydro executive
On the surface, Norway seems to be a moderate place. The climate can be
intemperate, but the people and the lifestyle are just the opposite—the picture
of restraint and judiciousness. Oh, there are some unassuming little oddities:
Norwegians eat fish for breakfast, and often for lunch and for dinner. Caviar
is so common that it comes in tubes, just like toothpaste. Very few people are
overweight.
All of which seems charmingly unusual—but hardly alien.
The workplace, too, seems familiar: computers, cubicles, bullet point
slides. Familiar, that is, until you look more closely. Every weekday at 6:10
a.m., Morten Lingelem boards a train at Sandefjord for the 90-minute ride to
his job in Oslo. Lingelem, 42, a process-technology manager, has a standing
reservation in the train’s “office car,” where he can power up his laptop and
work in quiet comfort. That office car serves a purpose that’s exactly the
opposite of what it would be in the United States: It enables Lingelem to hold
down a demanding engineering-management job, to spend more than three
hours a day commuting, and still be home by 6 p.m.
Atle Tærum, a colleague of Lingelem’s, lives on a farm 90 minutes west
of Oslo. And, two days a week, that’s where he is, taking care of his 10-
month-old daughter. Tærum is never without his cell phone. On those days,
customers—perhaps calling from Africa or from the Middle East—often
reach him while he’s plowing his fields or chaperoning his son’s kindergarten
class.
Norway is, in fact, a sort of alternative universe of work. The
inhabitants, the setting, the language, and the profit imperative all seem
familiar. But Norwegians have a very different attitude toward work—and a
singular view of what work can become. That vision is rooted in the notion
that balance is healthy. The argument: Work can be redesigned to promote
balance. More than that, balance can become a source of corporate and
national competitive advantage. Working less can, in fact, mean working
better.
Norsk Hydro, the company that employs both Lingelem and Tærum, is
one of Norway’s dominant institutions. It’s the world’s second-largest
producer of oil from the Norwegian North Sea, and the single largest salmon
farmer. Hydro fertilizer feeds Florida tomatoes and Arizona golf courses.
Hydro metals toughen Cadillac Seville bumpers and Nokia cell phones.
Hydro operates in 70 countries and employs 39,000 people, many of
whom live and work outside of Norway. But it remains emphatically
Norwegian—an organization not easily understood in American terms. As
excess defines American culture, so balance shapes life for Norwegians, who
long ago discovered sane responses to the tension between work and family.
Norway is a place, after all, where people typically leave work between 4
p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Working women get at least 38 weeks of paid maternity
leave; men get as many as four weeks of paid leave. Norway’s answer to
“How much is enough?” is found in the way the nation operates. Balance is
the place where conversations about work and life begin.
In its 94 years of operation, “Hydro has created and nurtured industry in
Norway,” says Roald Nomme, a consultant and former manager at Hydro.
“What is deep in the culture of Hydro is to think in the long term, to think
more holistically—to think about the connections between employees, the
company, and society.” Now Hydro is reexamining these connections. In a
series of experiments across the company, it is testing a much more ambitious
vision of balance. The two-year-old project, known as Hydroflex, has given
hundreds of employees varying combinations of flexible hours, home offices,
new technology, and redesigned office space.
What has Hydro learned? Hydro believes that it can help employees find
a better balance by redesigning physical work spaces—and by redesigning
work itself. It can free people from old restrictions on where and when they
work. That flexibility makes workers more productive and jobs more
appealing, and more appealing jobs attract more talented people.
 Linked to the push for flexibility are new notions of diversity. Hydro
believes that diversity goes beyond race or gender. Diversity has to do with
perspective—and it exists within individuals: Each of us is many different
people at different times in our lives. Cultivate that diversity, and greater
creativity will follow.
These workplace initiatives come at a critical time for Hydro. Because of
weak commodity and oil prices, profits dropped by 4% between 1994 and
1998, even as revenues increased by 40%. In most American companies, such
performance would be enough to end any grand experiments in work
redesign, diversity, and balance. But at Hydro, those projects persist and even
thrive—because, to Hydro, these initiatives are not indulgences. They are
critical strategic elements for survival.
Yes, Hydro must go head-to-head with competitors in the United States
—and in Germany, in Singapore, and in Mexico. As it fights these global
battles, Hydro is up against relentless freneticism. We Americans pay lip
service to sanity, but when the going gets tough, we readily abandon balance
and work even harder. Norwegians believe that such mania is not sustainable.
In the end, they say, balance will win out.

Farming Knowledge Workers

“When you’re a knowledge worker, when do you work?” asks Ragnhild

Sohlberg. Then she answers her own question: “As long as you have your
brain with you, you are working.” Sohlberg, 63, is an able guide—to Norway,
to Hydro, to an altered attitude about work. As Hydro’s vice president of
external relations and special projects, she is one level removed from Hydro’s
CEO, and so she has a free hand to push her views on work and balance
throughout the company. She is one of the first women to have reached the
level of director at a major Norwegian company. She is worldly and
reflective; her perspective has been shaped by her U.S. education, by
motherhood and grandmotherhood, and by impressive careers in both
academia and business.
Sohlberg married at 18, had two daughters, and spent a decade “quite
happily” as a housewife. Divorced at 30, with her two daughters (ages 6 and
9) in tow, she headed for the United States. She studied economics at the
University of Wisconsin and then focused on NATO manpower issues at
Rand, the famous think tank in Santa Monica, California, where she pursued a
PhD. She went on to teach at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School before
moving to the private sector. First came a stint at energy conglomerate Brown
Boveri. Then, 13 years ago, she returned to Norway and took a job at Hydro.
Today she still teaches university classes, and she also chairs the board of the
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics.
Her daughters are now married and have children of their own. “I see a
tremendous difference for them,” she says, “in the changes in the lives of
families that have dual careers, plus tremendous pressures at work. There’s a
real time squeeze. I’m very concerned about baby boomers’ early burnout. We
cannot afford the personal cost, and we cannot afford the cost to business, to
industry, and to society.”
By training and inclination, Sohlberg views the world in terms of
balance and in terms of the optimum allocation of scarce, valuable resources
—whether those resources are farmland, parents, or employees. Sohlberg’s
view is simple: Experienced farmers don’t plant, harvest, plow, and reseed
their fields season after season; they let the soil rest. Yet modern companies
think nothing of working their most talented engineers, programmers, and
managers ceaselessly.
“Look at all these consulting companies where people work 60, 70, 80
hours a week,” she says. “What happens to them? They burn out, and, a
couple of years later, they leave. And all their experience goes with them. It’s
lost. That practice is not good business.”
To compete sustainably, companies must tend to their knowledge
workers as a farmer tends to his land. Which is, as it turns out, the lesson of
Atle Tærum’s farm.

Working on Atle’s farm

Atle Tærum, 42, lives at the intersection of the old Norway and the new
Norway. He is a knowledge worker—the chief agronomist at Hydro, an expert
in the use and subtleties of fertilizer. He heads a group that provides field
support to farmers outside of Europe. Tærum is also a farmer. He and his
wife, Ragnhild Lie, own a farm—46 hectares (about 110 acres)—that his
grandfather began tilling in 1890. Tærum grew up in the farmhouse on this
land, as did his father. His three children now play in the same rooms that he
played in when he was a child.
In Norway, small farms are considered so vital to the landscape, to the
economy, and to the culture that farm owners are strongly discouraged from
selling land for development. And, traditionally, the oldest son takes over his
father’s farm. That’s just what Atle and Lie did in 1992, when they moved
from Oslo to Skotselv. The appeal of farm life is obvious. The house is solid,
the outbuildings are abundant, the landscape is soothing and invigorating, and
the work is deeply satisfying. The farm provides a rhythm to the days and the
seasons, and a connection to family and to Norway itself. But the farm cannot
support this generation of Tærums. Because of pressure on commodity prices,
it barely breaks even. So Tærum works at Hydro, and Lie does CAD-based
drafting for an architectural and furniture-design firm.
The challenge for Tærum, and therefore for Hydro, is profound: How
can he best contribute to his company—while staying true to his traditional
heritage and to the life he and his wife want for their family? His sense of
balance is admirable but also precarious: It’s dependent on his own as well as
his employer’s commitment. So how does Hydro accommodate an invaluable
employee and also get the most out of him? How does it cultivate his
potential? The answer is rooted, first, in flexibility. Since his third child,
Mathea, was born last August, Tærum has arranged to work three days a week
at Hydro’s headquarters. He gets paid 80% of his full-time salary for the work
he does on those days. The other two days of the workweek, Tærum stays at
home while Lie goes to work.
Much of Tærum’s work at Hydro involves providing support and
answering questions for Hydro fertilizer salespeople: What kind of fertilizer
works best for mangoes? For mace? For rice? When is the optimal time to
apply it? Technically, Tærum is off work on his days at home. But because his
office phone is forwarded to his mobile number, a call will often come in
from Kuala Lumpur or Cairo or Angola. As often as not, a farmer is calling.
“Sometimes I will be out plowing a field,” says Tærum, “and I will get a call.
Recently someone from Russia called, and I could say, ‘As it happens, I’m
sitting on my tractor, putting some fertilizer on my own field now.’ I can draw
on my own experience as a farmer, and people trust me more for that reason.”
 Tærum likes the arrangement. Despite changing responsibilities and
ever-shifting schedules, he says, “I feel less stressed this way. Before, I was
leaving the house early every day. I was back at 6 p.m. I was tired, I was
traveling, and, in a way, I was never happy. Now I can manage my day and
my life a bit better. I think I’m doing a better job for Hydro. I’m doing
different things five days a week, and I’m more connected to my family.”
Certainly, the arrangement is far from perfect. The mobile phone can
ring at all hours of the day or night. Tærum also travels up to 100 days a year.
On those weeks, the flexible arrangement breaks down. Meanwhile, the farm
always waits. “Some days during the summer,” says Tærum, “we work 17 or
18 hours.” Still, he says, “When you are doing one job, you are resting from
the other.” In fact, Tærum hopes to return to 100% pay—but on his terms:
three days at the office, and two days a week working at home. “With the kind
of work that I do,” Tærum says, “working at home should not be a problem. If
you can’t find a flexible solution at Hydro, you can’t find one anywhere.”

Turning Work Style Upside Down

For Ragnhild Sohlberg, Tærum exemplifies how knowledge workers work:

As long as he is conscious and has a phone, he’s on the job. His balance
between the farm and the office, she thinks, presents an appealing model.
“What he has is something that we’re all fighting for,” she says. “We’re all
desperate for time to reflect. We have a kind of Calvinist work ethic. We’re
always moving.”
That said, Skotselv, or even Oslo, is hardly midtown Manhattan. The
pace of life in those cities is decidedly more human. Indeed, Norwegian
culture—the prism through which Hydro’s efforts at balance must be viewed
—takes some fundamental American attitudes about work and turns them
upside down.
In the United States, for instance, working long hours is seen as
admirable, even heroic. At Hydro, the standard workday, even for
professionals, is seven and a half hours. If you’re still sitting at your desk at 6
p.m., people wonder why you can’t get your work done. Work in Norway is
also shaped by a tradition of cooperation between unions and management
that’s unheard of in the United States. Labor and management typically work
together to change processes and structures for greater efficiency. Unions
believe that higher productivity brings more jobs and higher pay.
Management wants higher profits—but satisfied employees aren’t bad either.
All this allows—and perhaps requires—Norwegians to consider balance
in fundamental terms. A rich life is a diverse collection of compelling
experiences, some of which involve work. Work that is all-consuming is
unhealthy—for the individual, for the organization, and for the community.
Time spent away from work is restorative. More to the point: Time spent
outside work fuels work itself. As she drives her blue Saab through the
Norwegian countryside, Sohlberg nods at the passing fields. “Here,” she says,
“my mind is at ease. I never know what I might think of.”

Designing the HydroFlex Work Space

A group of Hydro employees has gathered to describe how Hydroflex works.

Their impressions have some import: Hydro plans to build a new headquarters
near Oslo, and lessons learned from the work experiments will influence the
building’s design. How many workers must it accommodate—and how many
will work at home? Which interior designs make workers most productive?
The connection between work and design is critical. As the discussion
unfolds, however, a surprising message emerges. These experiments aren’t
just about flexibility. Nor is the new headquarters just about heightened
productivity. Underlying all of the planning is the pursuit of something more
important: diversity.
Kjerstin Skeidsvoll, 29, a consultant in the HR department. The idea of
Hydroflex is this (she flashes a vision statement on the screen): “To work
effectively, unconstrained by time or location across the organization.” You
want to become a more flexible organization. Hydroflex is about getting out
of rigid thinking. You need to concentrate more on the product you deliver
and less on how much time you work. The distinction is important for the
office building.
Erik Gudbrandsen, 29, a psychologist who works in Hydro Data, the
company’s information-technology department: With the new building, the
question is not “What should the modern office look like?” but rather “What
kind of people are working here, and what kind of work is being done?” At
Hydro Data, our starting point for Hydroflex was simple—lack of space.
From there, our goal has become something grander (he uses an overhead
projector to flash a vision statement on a screen): “We will have flexible
working conditions that enable all employees, their families, and the
organization to achieve balance in a functional and satisfying way.” But
Hydro Data is also an internal service provider for Hydro divisions. We show
people how to use technology as an organizational-development tool.
And for those customers, our goal is diversity. For example, we don’t
want to make it impossible for people to work for Hydro just because they
have small children. If we exclude one part of the work world, then we won’t
have enough people, and we won’t have enough talent. Skeidsvoll: If you can
offer this or that solution, more people will be able to work here. To attract
and keep the people you want, you need to give them flexibility and freedom.

Redefining Diversity

In offices throughout the United States, diversity is an issue that people

discuss exhaustively—but to little effect. We have built a complex apparatus
and a thriving industry for confronting human differences. The effort is
admirable, yet diversity remains an inherently self-limiting goal—a matter of
pursuing equal opportunity by coding employees according to race, gender, or
national origin.
In Norway, where only 5% of the population is non-Norwegian, diversity
has a different meaning. “Diversity doesn’t necessarily concern gender,
ethnicity, or culture,” Sohlberg says. Nor does it mean allowing for the
possibility of difference. Rather, diversity means cultivating difference and
puncturing conformity. For Hydro to compete globally, its managers must
seek out different perspectives—and make use of those perspectives. They
must understand that the measure of an organization’s creativity is directly
related to its diversity. “A company can’t be creative when it employs a group
of homogenous people,” Sohlberg says. “Creativity and innovation come
from putting unlike people together.”
But there’s something more—a proposition that’s ingenious as well as
intuitive. Diversity, Norwegians argue, is personal. “You have a lot of
diversity within yourself,” says Sohlberg. “In an organization, one has to be
conscious of that kind of diversity.” Because people aren’t one-dimensional,
they can contribute in a variety of ways at any given moment—and in a
variety of ways over time. Which leads Sohlberg to yet another modest
proposal: “What we need,” she suggests, “is career development based on
each stage of a person’s life. Atle has young children, so he should travel less.
People who are young and single or who have no children often love to travel.
And they should. You should be able to plan your career according to your
phase of life.”
That timed-release career path that Sohlberg describes does not as yet
appear in Hydro’s HR packets. But it’s under discussion—a future weapon in
the company’s competitive armory. And, ultimately, this is all about
competitiveness. “The diversity issue is so important because the world today
is more complex than ever,” Sohlberg says. Only those people who have rigid
mind-sets and narrow responsibilities are free to work every day from 8 a.m.
to 4:30 p.m.—in the same location, sitting at the same desk, without
distraction. In the global economy, the company that insists on that kind of
competence will eventually cut itself off from the talent that it needs to
survive.

Changing Work Style—and Work

Work redesign brings flexibility. Flexibility furthers diversity. Diversity, in

turn, enhances competitiveness. Therefore, improving competitiveness begins
with changing how people work. Unni Foss, 47, lives on a peninsula across
the fjord from Oslo. She commutes by ferry to her job as a graphic artist at the
Hydro Media group, which publishes Hydro’s in-house communications and
offers design services to other divisions throughout the company. In early
1998, after two years of planning, Hydro Media’s 35 employees inaugurated
their Hydroflex project. Every employee was set up with a home office
(including appropriate computer equipment and an ISDN line) and given up
to $2,000 for furniture. Staffers were urged to work at home up to two days a
week.
“I saw the possibilities immediately,” Foss says. “You work when it fits
you and your work. When I need to be in the office, I’m in the office.” ISDN
communications lines allow workers like Foss, who use data-intensive
graphics, to work from home. Foss makes corrections from her home office
and then sends her work to the Hydro print shop for delivery to the
appropriate in-house division. As the Hydroflex experiment unfolds, the
deeper challenge lies in changing people’s attitudes—about their work and
about one another. The arrangement, after all, has recast relationships between
peers as well as between staff and management. “I used to wonder, Do they
really mean that we can do this?” Foss says. “Do they trust us?”
Management not only trusts—it cares. Last winter, in the months before
her father’s death, Foss worked at home full-time. Foss was able to be with
her father and to support her mother. She kept her salary, and Hydro got good
work from a talented staffer. Where she worked didn’t matter. When she
worked didn’t matter, as long as tasks could be coordinated with her job
partner.
“We used to focus on how many hours people were in the office,” says
Ole Johan Sagafos, 43, head of Hydro Media. “Now we focus on the results.
It doesn’t really matter to me what my colleagues are doing, as long as they
deliver the results on time.”
Roald Forseth, 42, also works for Hydro, but his world of work couldn’t
be more different from Foss’s. He labors at the furnaces in the magnesium
plant at Porsgrunn, 60 miles from Oslo. There, he melts raw ore to produce
magnesium ingots. The job is demanding and dangerous, requiring him to
work with blistering-hot liquid metal for long periods of time.
For the past three years, Forseth has participated in another experiment
in work redesign. The plan emphasizes teamwork—turning foremen into
“coaches” and allowing workers more autonomy, more control. It’s just the
sort of strategy-of-the month that makes factory workers roll their eyes. At
Porsgrunn, however, teamwork has gradually taken hold.
“When the project first started,” says Forseth, “I knew only about my
own job. We hadn’t been using all of the information that was available, all
the competence in the organization. What we discovered is that we can learn
from one another freely. We’ve taken responsibility for collecting knowledge
for the team. And running the casting house is easier when everyone knows
everything.”
For Forseth, diversity is about something supremely practical: Teamwork
requires accepting diversity of opinion. “Before, if you criticized someone,
you were as likely to get a black eye as not,” Forseth says. “Now we have a
common language. We’re more open-minded. We’ve all taken responsibility
for everyone else.”
 All of which proves that muscle workers can also be knowledge workers.
Forseth and his coworkers have gained new skills, and productivity has
increased by 25%. It’s not hard to imagine the team eventually managing not
only its work but also its schedules and its training. Flexibility is not for
white-collar workers only.

Competing on Balance

“Hydro,” Sohlberg says, “is not an idyllic place where employees can come
and go as they please, and work whenever and wherever they desire.”
Flexibility, diversity, and balance, she says, all serve a business purpose.
Ultimately, they are strategies to make workplaces more effective.
Yet Hydro, like all of Norway, remains distinct from much of the rest of
the world. Balance is not a core business value elsewhere. As it grows and
globalizes, Hydro is starting to absorb that reality. “We are finding out that
our little company, here in our little country, is part of the big world,”
chuckles Hans Jørn Rønningen.
Rønningen, 53, Hydro’s senior vice president in charge of global human
resources, is a good-humored but blunt-spoken man. He is not one to put a
positive spin on negative circumstances. “Who competes with us around the
world?” Rønningen asks. The list is daunting and includes the likes of Exxon
and Royal Dutch/Shell. That, he says, is why Hydro must move faster than
ever before. Global cost competition creates severe pressure for companies
that try to take care of their employees.” Until now, we may have been naïve
about meeting challenges,” Rønningen says. Then he adds, only half-jokingly,
“Ragnhild [Sohlberg] is the dream. I am the reality.”
Yet Rønningen also acknowledges that Sohlberg’s dream isn’t so crazy.
To compete against the world’s best, Hydro must attract and keep the best
people—and not just in Norway. “So how do we keep the best people?”
Rønningen asks. “We need to offer new challenges. We need to give people
flexibility and options.” The question, then, is this: As the global marketplace
becomes a single economy, will Hydro abandon its defining Norwegian
spirit? Will it forsake balance for performance? Or will the rest of the world
meet Hydro on its terms?
Sohlberg, naturally, expects that the world will discover what Hydro is
already learning. “Hydro may be ahead of the crowd,” because of its
Norwegian heritage. “But this search for a more effective workplace and a
better society is a global issue.” If Sohlberg and Hydro are right, balance is an
economic imperative. Long-term competitiveness may require balance, just as
it requires speed, sensitivity to customers, and profits. And if competitiveness
requires balance, the 21st century will look much different from the 20th
century.
__
Fast Company, July/August 1999
 THE UPSIDE OF DOWNTIME
By George Anders
Tom DeMarco is determined to give idleness a good name. Not that he’s calling
for out-and-out shirking, mind you. But in his book, Slack: Getting Past
Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, he argues that
knowledge workers and their bosses should take advantage of periodic spans
of “dead time” to rethink jobs, tune up departments—even reinvent the
mission of entire companies. Too often, says DeMarco, a veteran high-tech
consultant in Camden, Maine, a dangerous corporate delusion prevails: the
idea that organizations are effective only to the extent that all their workers
are totally and eternally busy.
Here, DeMarco shares his views about why we need to slow down.
Why do so many productive people have a hard time accepting the idea that a little
slack is all right?

DeMarco: Social theorist Erich Fromm called it the “flight from freedom.”
There’s a certain relief in doing just what people tell you to do. If there’s a lot
of work, it can be very tiring, but at the same time, there’s less responsibility.
If you build in some slack so that you can try new things, you’re going to
be a novice at first. You aren’t going to have any mastery of the subject.
That’s why change is so upsetting to companies. We need to create a climate
that’s safe for change, and that means not criticizing people if they aren’t
100% efficient every minute of the day.
What are the smartest ways to slow down?

Team interaction is where slack is at its best. It can be a formal brainstorming

session, or it can be something much more informal. That’s how managers
redesign projects on the fly. For example, some companies create explicit
provisions so that such brainstorming can take place. But at authoritarian
companies, trust has been spoiled to the point that people are hesitant to take
advantage of such opportunities.
I often collect my thoughts while jogging. It’s a meditative time for me,
and some meditative time is good. Things often come together in a more
organic way when I’m not trying to make a formal outline.
How do we ensure that a little slack doesn’t just degenerate into a bunch of well-paid
people dawdling and swapping catty gossip at lunch?

If that’s happening at your company, you’ve got a motivation problem. At a

healthy company, people tend to have a near-religious intensity about their
work. They really want to do a good job. The best way to gauge that
commitment is for people to ask themselves whether they really care about
making others in the organization look good. It can be a coworker, a boss, or
even a subordinate. But if people have that personal commitment, they are
going to use slack to make the organization better—not to undermine each
other.
What are your own work habits?

I work about six and a half hours a day. Remember, I’m an old guy, so I can’t
work extra-long hours anyway. I usually go for a run first thing in the
morning. Then I start working at about 8:30 or 9, concentrating on my biggest
project for that week. I work until 12:30, and then I have lunch and maybe do
some gardening. Late in the afternoon, I get caught up on all of the little stuff.
I don’t allow myself to look at my email, for example, until the afternoon. I’m
almost always done by 5:30.
Who thinks that your ideas are dangerous?

I just did a talk in Los Angeles, and afterward, I got feedback forms. Most of
the people loved it. But there was one person in the audience who wrote that I
spoke “100% on the people side and 0% on the data-control documentation
issue. It was a harmful presentation.” Those were his exact words.
Some people have a vested interest in establishing rigid processes for
everything and in getting every last bit of work that they can out of each
employee. They find what I say disturbing. I call them talent-free managers.
__
Fast Company, August 2001
 HOW FIVE HIGH-FLIERS FIND (AND STRUGGLE WITH)
BALANCE
By Anne Muoio
Everyone wants it. Few achieve it. Balance: It’s the holy grail in the world of
work. But is it even something that any of us can have? We asked 10 business
leaders and thinkers to describe their journeys toward balance—and to
consider a few questions: In the face of unlimited business opportunities, how
do you create balance in your life? How do you continue to pursue your work
goals and still stay connected to the things that make you human? And finally,
once you’ve gone overboard in one direction, how do you “get a life”?
___
John Perry Barlow
Cofounder, Vice Chairman, and Cognitive Dissident
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Pinedale, Wyoming

I’m the guy who wrote the Grateful Dead song with the line “Too much of
everything is just enough.” It sounded good when I wrote it, but I don’t
believe it anymore: Too much of everything is too much. But it’s tricky to
find a balance between just enough and too much. The more you get, the less
you feel you have. The faster I go, the faster I feel I need to go.
When I was a rancher, there came a point every day when I had to stop
working—simply because my body couldn’t keep going. Work in this
economy is different. We can hammer ourselves endlessly—or so we think.
We’re living in an era of explosive abundance. The challenge is to manage
our freedom and to strike a balance in the face of endless opportunity.
I’ve realized that I must find the discipline to say no more often. It
sounds easy, but it’s not. Just when I’ve convinced myself that what I have is
more than plenty, the phone rings and someone offers me something that I
can’t resist. But then I ask an important question: How thin can I spread
myself before I’m no longer “there”?
Rahm Emanuel
Managing Partner
Wasserstein Perella
Chicago

Conventional wisdom says that you can’t work in politics and have a family.
But I worked in the White House, and, all things considered, I think it was a
family-friendly environment. It’s true that when you work for the President,
you are on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But while working, I found
time to do plenty: to get married, to go on a three-week honeymoon, to visit
Spain and France, and to start a family. On the Saturdays when I had to go to
the White House to review the President’s weekly radio address, I would
usually bring my son. And most Mondays—no matter what was going on at
work—I would eat lunch at home with my family.
There’s obviously no easy answer to the question of balance. You have
to work at it. You’ve got to be as determined in your personal life as you are
in your professional life. I’ve been in politics for 16 years, and I’ve managed
to stay in shape both mentally and physically—which, in my world, says a lot
about sustaining an even keel on this work-life sea. To me, you’re not a very
interesting person if you do only one thing.
Patti Manuel
President and COO, Long-Distance Division
Sprint Corp.
Kansas City, Missouri

I’m a boss, an employee, a friend, a mother, a daughter, and a member of my

church and community. Balance is about understanding what those roles are
and not letting any one of them become dominant. Most of the time, I’m good
at this. Other times, I’m trying to manage my way back from chaos.
I sleep five hours a night. The other 19 hours, I’m going 200 miles an
hour. But I don’t overdo it. There are people at Sprint who work from sunup
to well past sundown: They become their jobs. They might make it to middle
management, but then they can’t lift their heads above the trenches. They’re
horrible managers, because they expect the whole world to behave and work
as they do. I went through a stage like this in my early thirties. Today, as a
leader, I try to guard against that syndrome.
I try to create an environment in which people know that it’s okay not to
be a workaholic—in which they get ahead because of their contribution, not
because of the number of hours they log. I let people I work with know that I
take off Wednesday afternoons to volunteer at my son’s school. It takes a lot
of discipline to achieve balance. People who work too much have a massive
amount of discipline—but they’re not applying it in the right way.
Liz Dolan
President
Dolan St. Clair Inc.
Portland, Oregon

It’s hard to admit that your work life is out of control. I loved my job at Nike,
but it was all-consuming. I had no life. My housekeeper was spending more
time at my house than I was. I reached a point where I could not remember
the last time I had slept in my own bed. But the real indicator that my life was
out of whack came when I got a call from my brother, Brendan. He’d been
trying to reach me for several weeks. [but] I was always too “busy” to call
him back. When we finally connected, he told me that he’d had to do a Lexis-
Nexis search on me to figure out where I was that week. That really made me
stop and think.
Six months later, I took a sabbatical—to my backyard. My goal? Not to
leave the state of Oregon for two months. There were days when I didn’t even
leave my house. I hoped I could restructure my job at Nike so that I could
have a life outside of the company. But although I knew I wanted to do less, I
couldn’t pass up the interesting projects that kept coming across my desk.
I realized that a corporation as large as Nike has an “all or nothing at all”
environment. To achieve balance in my life, I needed to create more variety.
So I quit. Instead of having one big job, I now divide my work time into
thirds: business consulting, public service, and creative projects.
You don’t have to sit on top of a mountain to discover what’s right for
you. You always know in your heart what you need to do. But you do have to
ask yourself if you’re willing to make choices. Put yourself in a position
where you are making choices about your life, rather than letting other people
make those choices for you.
Melinda Brown
Vice President and General Counsel
Lotus Development Corp.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
A few months after I was promoted to general counsel, I was dashing through
the airport when I stopped to buy a book. One title caught my eye: Care of the
Soul, by Thomas Moore. I grabbed it, immediately lost my composure, and
began to cry. I’m a very self-contained person, but there I was, having a
nervous breakdown in the airport. Over time, I began to understand why: I
was depressed. I felt that I had no control over my life. I spent every day
giving—to my work and to my family. I had gotten into a cycle where I was
incapable of wringing one drop of time to nurture and sustain myself. As a
member of my company’s operating committee, I felt that I needed to be
100% accessible 100% of the time. I had created a situation where I could
never be “off.”
To me, balance is an illusion—and to have it as a goal is self-defeating.
Instead, take advantage of whatever trade-offs you can make. I don’t know
how much faster and harder we all can go. There has to be a breaking point.
Maybe then we’ll be able to slow down and accept a certain level of tedium
and repetition. We might have fewer toys, but we’d be able to simplify our
world and enjoy life.
__
Fast Company, February/March 1999
 CHAPTER 6
THE CASE AGAINST BALANCE: THE FEW, THE TIRELESS, THE
HAPPY WORKAHOLICS
By Linda Tischler
Sunday was a slightly more energetic workday than usual for John Bishop, an
investment banker on Citigroup’s global energy team. After working until 10
p.m. the previous night, the 31-year-old rose at 6 a.m. and headed to Staten
Island to run the New York City Marathon. Three hours, 49 minutes later (a
time good enough to rank him 6,363 out of 35,562 runners), he dashed over
the finish line in Central Park, then headed home to sack out for a few hours
before heading back to the office for a 6 p.m. conference call.
An important presentation to a client in Houston the next day kept him
grinding through documents until 1:30 a.m. But after misplacing some
research materials, he was back at the office copy machine by 4 a.m. before
heading to the airport for his 5:30 a.m. flight. By 9 a.m., in Texas, Bishop met
with the client, then headed back to New York, returning to his office by 7
that evening for a few more hours of work. Feeling a little weary, he decided
to knock off early. He clocked out at 10 p.m.
Sure, this was a little over the top, even by the notoriously excessive
standards of investment banking, but it wasn’t so far off the charts that it
earned Bishop any medals for heroism. “I might be a little skewed to the
workaholic, but realistically, expecting 90 to 100 hours a week is not at all
unusual,” says Bishop, wantonly pausing for a cup of coffee late one Friday
afternoon at a cafe near his office.
Time was when toiling 60 hours a week signaled that you were a
corporate warrior, willing to put work at the top of your life’s priorities. Now,
with corporate downsizing forcing staffers to shoulder the load of fallen
colleagues, and a job market still so frosty that workers know they go home
early at their peril, folks far down the corporate food chain are often logging
grueling hours, less because they’re passionate about their work than because
they’re scared not to.
 But the implacable effects of globalization, technology, and competition
have also combined to create another class of jobs for which demands have
amped up these requirements several degrees. Investment banking certainly
qualifies; management consulting, with its relentless travel, typically fits in
this league; and a whole range of jobs that require constant communication
and coordination with the Far East—from manufacturing to software
development to media—have joined these ranks.
Like daredevil athletes, the workers who gravitate toward these jobs
often thrive on the challenge. Bombarded by information, tethered to
technology that links them to global partners, vendors, and customers around
the clock, they labor extraordinary hours, log staggering numbers of air miles,
and juggle mind-boggling schedules. Their jobs are often high stress and high
risk—the corporate version of an upside-down double spin on a half-pipe.
Sure, the money’s a big part of the allure: These people don’t exactly live
paycheck to paycheck. Still, many of them are happier than a snowboarder in
a foot of fresh powder. Welcome to the world of “extreme jobs.”
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life
Policy at Columbia University, coined the term after a discussion with a
woman from Deutsche Bank in London. The banker, Hewlett says, was a fan
of Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air, in which a group of climbers brave
extreme conditions while scaling Mount Everest (albeit with disastrous
results). She thought her job was similarly high altitude and risky. “Two
elements in the word extreme spoke to her life and the activities in her
business,” says Hewlett. “One was the intensity—the feeling that you were
pushed to the limits of your intellectual and physical endurance—not in a
brutal, but in an exhilarating way. The other was that it’s alluring. She told
me, “I’m profoundly turned on by my life.’ ”
In the realm of extreme sports, Chuck Carothers is a champ. One of the
world’s leading motocross riders, he has broken 21 bones in his career. Yet he
keeps competing, describing the rush he gets from sailing through the air on a
motorbike as a “complete addiction.” In a weird way, Irene Tse, the 34-year-
old head of the government bond-trading desk at Goldman Sachs—Jon
Corzine’s old job—understands Carothers’s passion. “I’ve done this for 10
years,” she says. “And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of
days in my career when I didn’t want to come to work. Every day I wake up
and I can’t wait to get here.”
 The bond market hasn’t exactly been a lot of laughs during that decade.
And overseeing a desk that trades billions of dollars daily, with profits and
losses in the millions—Wall Street’s equivalent of Carothers’s famous flying
barrel roll—can be hair-raising. “There are days when you make a lot, and
other days where you lose so much you’re just stunned by what you’ve done,”
Tse admits. But the exhilaration of her work, and the challenge of figuring out
what forces are likely to roil the markets next, has kept her motivated through
a decade of 80-hour weeks.
Indeed, there’s an addictive quality to her work that has rewired her
body. There are no broken bones, but Tse says she hasn’t slept through the
night in years, typically getting up two or three times to check on global
market activity. “Through time, your body clock just wakes up when London
opens,” she says.
Three thousand miles away, on a nasty, gray winter night in Amsterdam, Tony
Kurz is pounding his smartphone and watching golf on TV, trying desperately
to chill out from a 15-day odyssey. Kurz, 33, a managing director at Capital
Alliance Partners, raises funds for high-end fractional real-estate investments.
He travels the world, talking with equity investors and prospective clients,
skipping from luxury resort properties in Costa Rica to Hawaii and back to
the company’s headquarters in London. His job is often, literally, a day at the
beach. But before you can frolic on the sands of Hualalai, he says, there’s a
lot of schlepping between Newark and Houston. And this most recent voyage
evidently tripped some internal switch that threw his body’s hard drive into a
spin.
“For the first time, for the past three nights, I’ve only been able to sleep
three hours a night,” he says. Normally, gonzo travel doesn’t affect him much.
He does, after all, log more than 300,000 miles a year, and has learned to
sleep on planes and deal with jet lag. But the trip that took him from
Amsterdam to New York to Houston to Costa Rica, back to Houston to San
Francisco to New York to Houston and then home to Amsterdam—in the
space of two weeks—was, even by his standards, “a doozy.”
To further complicate things, Kurz’s girlfriend, Avery Baker, has a
similarly manic schedule. Baker, 33, the senior vice president of marketing at
Tommy Hilfiger, Europe, logs about 400,000 miles a year, mostly within
Europe but also to New York and L.A. While the couple’s move to the
Netherlands was designed to help them spend more time together, it hasn’t
always worked out that way. Before Christmas, Kurz says, there was a six-
week period when they saw each other for a total of five nights in four cities
—and twice in airports for coffee. They’ve since pledged to limit the length of
their trips, even if it means taking a red-eye to get home. “It’s not easy to
maintain a relationship like this,” Kurz says.
Baker agrees that two weeks is probably the longest time it’s healthy to
be apart. “After that, you get into independent mode,” she says late one
Sunday night after seeing Kurz off to London.
From the road, Kurz fires off his own secret for sustaining a long-
distance romance: phone sex. (His monthly cell-phone bill: $1,500.)
The percentage of people—let alone couples—who inhabit this strange
world of extreme jobs is still small. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says
that only about 17% of managerial workers worked more than 60 hours a
week in 2004, and the bureau doesn’t even track data at the upper fringes of
the curve. But anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that it’s a trend on the
rise. “The 40-hour workweek is a bit of a myth now,” says Allan Schweyer,
executive director of the Human Capital Institute. “The 50- to 60-hour
workweek is now the norm.” Recent data from the Families and Work
Institute indicate that women’s reported workweek has risen to 44 hours from
39 in 1977, while men report spending 49.9 hours on the job, up from 47.1
hours. And that’s just the rank and file.
James Waldroop, who codeveloped CareerLeader, the interactive career-
assessment program used by more than 240 MBA programs and corporations,
says work-hours inflation is growing, not just in the United States but
globally. Last summer, he says, the newspapers in Madrid were ablaze with
reports of the demise of the siesta as Spanish workers scrambled to keep up
with their European Union counterparts. In Germany, workers at Siemens
grudgingly agreed to an extension of their workweek to 40 hours. The French
government is contemplating lengthening the 35-hour workweek established
in 1998. In Japan, in fiscal 2002, there were 160 official cases of karoshi, or
“death from overwork,” and another 43 people committed suicide because of
overwork.
Extreme jobs are a problem when they’re staffed by workers who aren’t
necessarily stoked by the spine-tingling thrill of a shift in interest rates or
jazzed by the chance to restructure a call center in Omaha. In the United
States, both consulting firms and investment banks lose a significant number
of their young associates—particularly women—to the unrelenting toil of the
job. The career website Vault.com says that 55% of consultants and 30% of
investment bankers quit after five years. “The sheer demands of the job burn
people out,” Bishop says. “Or they leave when there’s been a shock to the
system—a new baby comes along or they want to devote time to a
relationship.”
While there are still reports that long hours are part of a hazing ritual
(one young analyst at Merrill Lynch recalls a supervisor saying, “When we
ask you to work on Christmas Day, it’s not that we’re being mean. It’s just
building character”), most firms deny an attempt to wash out the less
committed. “Sure, there’s a natural selection process,” says Melanie Karbe, a
partner at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in San Francisco. “But I
don’t think it’s a Darwinistic approach to see who survives. People will
understand whether they really enjoy this and want to do this. We do not say,
‘Let’s be as brutal as we can, especially at the associate level.’ ”
Still, some experts think business-service firms in particular are caught
in a predicament of their own creation. “When you’re charging huge amounts
of money, companies want you to dance to their tune, not yours,” says
Waldroop, whose own firm, Peregrine Partners, works with Fortune 50
corporations. “Frankly, consulting firms and I-banks have built up these
expectations. In the 1950s, they didn’t operate like this.”
Stewart Friedman, who runs the Work/Life Integration Project at the
Wharton School, says he’s seeing more students and workers who are looking
for career tracks that don’t require such sacrifices. “The problem is that there
are certain unquestioned assumptions about what’s required to be successful,”
he says. “And for every one of those people telling you ‘I gotta do the 24-7-
365-BlackBerry-travel-around-the-world deal,’ I’m willing to bet a lot of
money I could help them figure out ways of creating boundaries that could
reduce some of that demand.”
But even Friedman concedes that among the folks who live to work—the
ones he calls “happy workaholics”—such strategies are irrelevant. And don’t
try telling them that long hours and high stress will ultimately make them
sick. “There are studies that look at the impact of weekly work hours on
health, and two that link it to heart disease,” says Paul Spector, professor of
industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida.
“But here’s the kicker: In order to pay the price, it has to be a job where
you’re forced to work hours that you don’t want to.” In other words, if you
like what you’re doing, there’s no physical risk. “The data suggest that people
who are doing it because they want to are perfectly fine,” says Spector.
David Clark has one of those glamour jobs that make people say, “Where do I
sign up?” As VP of global marketing partnerships for MTV, he travels
constantly, following the music scene around the planet. In late January in his
Times Square office, he was frenetically working to turn the MTV Asia
Awards in Bangkok into a tsunami relief event and mapping the launch of the
network’s 100th channel, in Africa, in the spring. Clark, 35, knows he’s lucky.
He also knows how easily his job can suck the hours out of his week, a
realization that’s become more acute since the birth of his baby, Nicholas, 18
months ago. “Since our son’s been born, it’s become more difficult,” he says.
“I’m still figuring it out.”
Because Clark is “the global guy” at MTV, there are few hours in his day
when some part of the world is not clamoring for attention. He wakes up at
6:30 a.m. to the alarm on his BlackBerry and spends half an hour answering
the 30 to 40 messages that have piled up, before he even gets out of bed. His
little son can already mimic Daddy’s BlackBerry thumb dance. After a few
calls to clients in far-flung time zones, he heads to the office where the
barrage doesn’t die down until late afternoon, when there’s a brief pause as
Asia goes to bed and Europe goes home to dinner. Still, by 4 p.m. one day, he
had 578 unread messages clogging his inbox, and Latin America was
desperately trying to get his attention by phone.
In the evenings, he says, he tries to get home for an hour with his son,
and then it’s back on the phone and email until he collapses into bed at
midnight. That’s when he’s not in Singapore or Rio. Curiously, instead of
reducing the need for travel, all this connectivity has actually increased it, he
says: “My theory is that there comes a time in any project where you just need
to be face-to-face.”
Clark logs about 200,000 miles a year. But while he loves the travel and
the challenge of doing global deals, he worries about the effect it will have on
his nonwork life. “Some of the older managers have warned me that if you’re
not careful, these all-consuming jobs can ruin your family,” he says. Still,
“there are plenty of people who would love to have this job. They’re
knocking on the door all the time. So that’s motivating.”
At least Clark has a family. Until recently, John Bishop—tall, smart,
good-looking, and making an enviable salary—had trouble finding time for
even a date. “I had a huge network of friends at Wharton. That’s shrunk,” he
says, ruefully. “My friends say I’m much more difficult to reach now. I pull
out of things at the last minute; I’ve canceled vacations, family time, dates.
When you’re single and trying to start a relationship, nobody understands
that.”
Bishop tries to lay the groundwork up front, warning women that his job
is unpredictable and unlikely to get better. “Somebody with a 9-to-5 job and a
needy personality would never work for me,” he says. Fortunately, he has
recently reconnected with a former girlfriend who’s now a medical resident in
Boston with equally ridiculous hours.
But it’s the next step—having a family—that seems to be the point at
which extreme jobs often become unsustainable. “I don’t have any concept of
how I could do this if I were a parent,” says Baker, the Hilfiger exec. “That’s
why it’s enjoyable for us to have such an extreme life now, because we both
know it won’t always be this way.”
Even workers who think they can handle the demands often find that the
trade-offs aren’t worth the price. After trying to handle her job at consulting
firm DiamondCluster International for two years following the birth of her
son, Andrea Kampine, 35, recently left for a company that required less
travel. “In the end, I decided I needed to see my family every day,” she says.
“Life doesn’t get easier the more senior you get in consulting. I looked out on
the horizon and didn’t see a point where constant travel would be okay for
me.”
Some organizations are taking steps to keep workers like Kampine.
Karbe says Booz Allen has put a lot of effort into retention and making jobs
less onerous. “The industry has begun to evolve,” she says. “There’s a
recognition that you’re not necessarily just losing the underperformers; you’re
losing your good people.” Now, she says, managers are evaluated based
partially on their ability to create work-life balance on their teams. “You
cannot burn teams,” Karbe says. “We do not tolerate it. That didn’t exist 10
years ago.”
The Human Capital Institute’s Schweyer thinks more companies will
have to find a way to reconcile draconian work demands with real-life needs.
“The unsustainability is what companies have to prepare for,” he says.
“They’ve been able to put it off because the economy and the labor market
have been weak for the past five years. But what happens if we get back to the
point like in the late ’90s, when the job seeker was in control? There will be a
retention crisis.”
But Bishop, who recruits for Citigroup at Wharton, isn’t convinced.
“Even if people leave, there’s so much demand for people wanting to get into
the system, it doesn’t really matter. They can always find more.” And Tse
says the question is beside the point. Periodically, she says, she toys with the
idea of giving it all up to study music at a conservatory in Florence. But she
can’t quite bring herself to step away. “If you’re doing something you love,
and you’re great at it, life can’t be better.”
__
Fast Company, April 2005
 CHAPTER 7
THE LAST UNPLUGGED GENERATION
By Miles Korhman
I was born in 1990, on the cusp of the digital age. For the better part of my
childhood, I grew up in a house with no cable television, Internet, or cell
phones. On the weekends, my family might rent a movie (VHS, mind you), or
I’d read a book or listen to the Red Sox game on the radio.
By the time I arrived at high school in 2004, the world as I knew it was
turned on its head. My classmates were running around with iPods (soon to be
iPhones), and if you didn’t have your own computer and AIM account, you
were as good as dead. In college some of us would have Facebook profiles,
but that wouldn’t last, we thought—the cool kids were already on Myspace.
My generation was in a unique position. We experienced the transition
into the digital world as members of the last unplugged American generation
—something that has shaped my outlook on life, and yours, if you’re around
my age or older.
I think we take that for granted. Future generations will certainly hear
about our nostalgia for the past, but they will never understand its value.
Things were simpler—okay, maybe not simpler—but we didn’t rely on a
digital crutch.
We grew up in a world of boredom. As children, we couldn’t stare at an
iPad for hours of entertainment; we instead used our own imagination as an
antidote. If we wanted something, we did it ourselves, not with the computer.
We made plans with friends that we had to keep, sometimes weeks down the
line, when we would engage in real social interaction. There was no texting,
Facebook, and certainly no tweeting.
Now, even TV, the holy grail of every ’90s kid, seems to be on the way
out. There is no more asking your parents to watch TV, you simply download
an app on your iPhone and you’re there.
Often, I catch myself overindulging or behaving badly in my digital
engagements. I’ll realize that I’ve spent all day at work staring at a screen,
only to rush home and do exactly the same thing. My internal alarm will
trigger: “Miles, it’s time to go for a bike ride or play with the cat.” To pre-
digital generations, technology was introduced as a luxury—a complement to
everyday life. Our unplugged experiences established boundaries in our
digital lives. That’s no longer the case.
It’s strange, and worrying, that everyone college-aged and up has
experienced unplugged life, but those born after my generation have not.
Their lives aren’t shaped by the same interactions that we’ve all lived through
—the digital world isn’t an accessory; it’s life.
Every generation could, hypothetically, argue this point. Most of us have
heard a grandparent quip, “when I was your age,” followed by a few words
lamenting the cost of gasoline or our constant use of phones.
But our shift was different. Drastically different. It wasn’t a small dent in
the way we lived or a natural changing of the guard; it was a complete tilt of
the world as we knew it—not just technologically, but socially and
emotionally. Unlike today, we had to interact with other people face-to-face,
because we couldn’t interact with them any other way.
Now, it’s possible to go through life with minimal human interaction.
Besides leaving your house for food (actually, you could have it delivered),
there’s nothing stopping a person from living a completely “normal” life
behind society’s digital curtain. And this is troubling to me. Even though I
only experienced a short period of my life unplugged, it still feels real—much
more real than many of my interactions do today.
I don’t want to sound like an old man, but I feel there’s something to be
said about the way things were. It’s undeniable that we of the pre-digital
experience apply those things we learned and experienced (like playing in the
woods or making a phone call instead of sending an email) to our now-digital
lives. The danger is, I suppose, to those who come after us, who don’t—
rather, can’t—have those forced experiences of genuine human interaction
that shaped so many of us individuals.
Even now, here I am, writing this on a typewriter (a Royal Fiesta from
the 1960s). Every keystroke must be intentional. I can try to cover it up, but
the fact remains that you’ll know I’ve messed up. So I’m always thinking
about it. Since there’s no room for error, I’m much more deliberate about
what I’m writing. There’s something to be said for the thought process behind
the mechanics.
 In the digital age, almost everything is dealt with in haste. If I’m writing
an email, I burn through it. Boom. Done.
That’s not to say that modern technology hasn’t changed the world in
amazing ways. It’s saved millions of lives, connected people, and taken every
aspect of society to places we couldn’t imagine. I’m not calling for the
destruction of all computers and the reinstatement of typewriters, perhaps just
the acknowledgment that some things are worth saving.
I recently spoke with an older relative, a teacher at a public middle
school. He has students who can’t sign their names. They’ve never learned
how to write their own signatures, because, as he puts it, they’ve never had to.
Technology has replaced its function. And while signatures may be
completely replaced one day by the tap of a credit card or touch of a cell
phone, think of the ramifications for the identity of those children.
Do you remember practicing your signature? It was the first real
statement of an identity that was truly yours.
It’s a good idea to try and hold on to some of these things, I think, not
because they’re more efficient or technologically better, but because they
keep us human. As soon as I adapted to my surroundings as a young adult,
everything I knew was thrown into flux. Perhaps that’s the reason I’m often
called an old man by my peers. I’ll opt out of technology if it feels
superfluous and favor objects and customs that I grew up with.
At my home in New York City, I wander around the city on weekends,
without the aid of a phone. If I have a question about a building or a
landmark, or I want to learn more about a neighborhood, I’ll ask someone. I
favor vinyl records instead of downloads because they force me to listen to an
entire album, as it was meant to be heard. I use a typewriter or notebook when
I’m having trouble writing something to improve my concentration.
My friends may poke fun at me, but it’s done in good humor—they’ve
experienced the world before the Internet and understand the value of doing
things the old-fashioned way. But future generations that haven’t—that were
born with Google Maps, Spotify, and spellcheck at the ready, won’t know the
benefit of these exercises. They literally don’t have to step outside or talk with
other people if they don’t want to. And honestly, if they aren’t told otherwise,
why would they?
__
FastCompany.com, June 2013
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

George Anders is a contributing writer at Forbes and the former West Coast
bureau chief for Fast Company. Prior to that, he was a national correspondent
at The Wall Street Journal. His latest book is Becoming a Rare Find,
published in 2012.
Drake Baer lives in Brooklyn and writes about the way people work. He’s
written for Fast Company, The Daily Beast, and The Week. His first book,
Everything Connects, will be published in February 2014.
Lydia Dishman is a regular contributor to Fast Company, covering
innovation, entrepreneurship and style. She has also written for CBS
Moneywatch, Entrepreneur, and The New York Times, among others.
Charles Fishman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Big Thirst,
about our relationship with water, and The Wal-Mart Effect. A contributing
writer at Fast Company, he was one of the magazine’s first staffers and is a
three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism.
Jessica Hullinger is assistant news editor for Fast Company digital.
Previously, she served as audience development manager for TheWeek.com.
Her writing has been featured in Mental Floss, The New York Post, and
elsewhere.
Miles Kohrman is an editorial intern at Fast Company and a recent graduate
of The New School, where he was editor-in-chief of The New School Free
Press.
Anna Muoio is a specialist leader at The Monitor Institute, a unit of Deloitte.
She’s a former principal at Continuum and former senior writer at Fast
Company.
Chuck Salter is a senior writer at Fast Company. His work has also appeared
on This American Life and in the New York Times Magazine and Sports
Illustrated.
Baratunde Thurston is a columnist at Fast Company, the New York Times
best-selling author of How to Be Black, and the CEO and cofounder of
Cultivated Wit. Previously, he was the director of digital for The Onion.
 ABOUT FAST COMPANY

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