One of the things most bemoaned as we become always-on and always connected is that the line between work and private life are being blurred into non-existence. The nine-to-five job’s been dead for years, and if you’re working for a company that offers “flex time” or is “results driven” with no set hours, it only compounds the problem. People are quick to point fingers. Some point to the enabling influence of technology: the smartphone, high-speed Internet, e-mail. Others point to companies that leverage those technologies to impose themselves on workers without paying them more. These are not mutually exclusive, and these are not the only answer.

As someone who works in the high-pressure world of a technology startup, and in a social media community role—the sort that’s “always on”—I only went in with the plan that I would establish hard boundaries to keep my personal life and personal work separated from my job. I don’t know if I’ve fully succeeded, but I do believe I’m in a better position than I would be had I allowed myself to be at the beck and call of the job from the start. That separation began on day one, when I got setup with my work computer.

I insisted outright on having a separate machine at work, and fortunately there was an iMac that a former employee had bee using. By not bringing my primary machine, a laptop, to work every day (or indeed, ever), I immediately established one strong bulwark between “work” work and personal work. I know that when I travel to the office and sit down at my desk in front of the vast expanse of a 27" iMac, I am at work. Nowhere was this reinforced more then after Hurricane Sandy here in New York, when I was the only person who actually came to the office after the subways started running. For two days, everyone else worked from home, while I held down the fort in person. While I’ve occasionally used my home machine for work when I couldn’t otherwise get into the office, it’s an exception and never a rule.

The second hard barrier is email and other communication. As I work for a small company, we typically don’t use the phone for much, except in emergencies, so I know that if I get a call from one of the bosses and I’m not in, it’s legitimately urgent. Instead, a large amount of our communication occurs through email and chat. When I’m away from work, I log out of our intra-office chat application, on both my work machine, and my phone, and so it stays until the next morning. If someone tries to get ahold of me in the chat, I get an email notification when I check my work email, which I typically do with Mailbox.

Mailbox is, without a doubt, the best thing to happen to email. If I get a work-related message, and I’m off my self-defined clock, I can defer it until tomorrow morning with just a swipe and a tap. I don’t even have to think about it. I’ve even given thought to actually taking the work email off of my phone entirely, but it’s come in handy to fire off quick status updates and share work-related intelligence I get from my off-time reading. Of course, it almost goes without saying that I’ve turned off all push notifications and automatic email checking. [1] If it’s that urgent, a phone call or text message will do.

For various online services, there is some overlap. I keep our Google Apps calendar subscribed on my iOS devices and laptop, so I can keep track of important events. I keep a Work notebook in my Evernote, and my OmniFocus database contains an @Office context, and a folder of work-specific projects and actions. As I mentioned above, I keep the chat application we use in the office on my iPhone—on the first screen, no less—and I also installed an app so I can check in to our bug and task tracking app. The Google Drive app on my iPad is tied explicitly with my work’s Google Apps account, and I have HootSuite installed for work-related social network stuff. It’s the only social stream app I keep on my iPad.

This is all fine, because I know where the lines are. Things are clearly delineated. In fact, the second home screen on my iPad is set aside just for work-related apps, all eight of them—and that’s stretching the term “work-related”. I know the barriers I’ve set up between my work life and my personal life, and my co-workers know them too. Only I know the openings (for now), and I suspect it will stay that way. The porousness of certain barriers will never be fully closed, I expect, but as long as our work lives are going to defy being defined by a clock, we will find ways to deal with that porousness on our own terms.

[T]he risk of disengagement is significant. And once Google allows third-party developers to provide applications, it loses control over the ways in which these will be used. Sebastian Thrun, who was in charge of Google’s experimental projects when Glass was conceived, told me that while he was on the project, he insisted that Glass provide only limited e-mail functionality, not a full e-mail system. Well, now that outside developers have their hands on it, guess what one of the first things they did with it was? Yup, full e-mail.

— Don Norman on Wearable Devices

This piece in the MIT Technology Review expresses a lot of the same misgivings I have about wearable technology, only far better than I can. There are valid use cases for some of us to have omni-present data in out field of vision—even peripheral vision—but none of us need it there at all times. Prosthetic distraction has the potential to be our undoing, but I think there’s enough people expressing legitimate skepticism of Google Glass, and wearable tech in general, that we can avoid many of the potential excesses and dangers.

An article by Evgeny Morozov for Slate on how “lifehacking is just another way to make us work more” has been making the rounds. It caught my attention as I’ve been, if not an adherent of lifehacking, at least an occasional visitor to its church. [1] I also picked up on Morozov’s reference to the book Autopilot by Andrew Smart, which is on the to-read list of my friend Patrick Rhone—a pretty winning endorsement. Finally, it reminded me of a piece of my own, on “The Un-Quantified Self” and the limits of what the QS movement can do. There’s plenty of overlap between Quantified Self-ers, and lifehackers for this to make sense.

Morozov notes early on that “[t]he original thinking behind ‘lifehacking’ was intriguing. Why not use technology to get things done more effectively and have more time for oneself?” If that was how it ended up working out, however, we wouldn’t have this article, of course. Case in point:

As “lifehacking” becomes an industry with its own blogs and book-length guides, a good chunk of the freed-up time often goes to fix, upgrade, or replace the very tools and programs that make lifehacking possible. Is there anything more self-defeating than using technology to free up your time—so that you can learn how to do an even better job at it?

First off, it’s not becoming an industry—it’s been one, which is part of why Merlin gave up most of the productivity crap five years ago, and (part of) why he quit the Inbox Zero book. [2] Lifehacking and related areas are big among nerds who already suffer a host of various issues resulting from being a-neurotypical—myself included. Any potential solution is going to be latched onto by us slightly broken weirdos if we think it’ll help us function like normal human beings, and the crazy thing is that for many of us, a lot of this stuff actually works. The parts that do work vary from person to person, but we can’t just throw out the baby with the bathwater here.

Second, and more importantly, if you’re using all your free time from your lifehacking to get better at lifehacking, you’re missing the entire point. [3] Thankfully, it seems Morozov and I agree on this. “What we want, to paraphrase Marx, is to ‘lifehack in the morning—in order to nap in the afternoon and criticize after dinner.’ What we get right now—to ‘“’lifehack the morning—in order to skip naps in the afternoon and work after dinner’—is a raw deal.” I just don’t think that a polarizing polemic against lifehacking as a practice or concept is the right way to get the point across.

I haven’t read Autopilot yet, so I’ll save any potential criticisms of that for when I have some. From Patrick and Evgeny’s descriptions of it, I don’t think I’ll have many. I’ve also not read 24/7, the other book Morozov talks about in the article, but I don’t know if the critique of “sleep hacking” holds water here. As someone who sleeps quite poorly, I’d happily trade my eight hours of crap sleep (including the hour or so I spend tossing around in bed) for six hours of quality sleep if I knew how to get it. I don’t know how well Morozov sleeps, but knowing people who’ve suffered with sleeping difficulties that put mine to shame, if something offered you a guarantee of x good hours of rest, you’d take it too. There’s nothing Taylorist about it.

Ultimately, though, Morozov and I are on the same page, though different sides of it. If you’re lifehacking because out of a genuine desire to improve your life: have more free time, sleep better, improve your health and your happiness, you’re fine. If you’re lifehacking because you are an over-achiever who wants to constantly live at your maximum potential, you may be making things worse for yourself in the long run. Like any tool, the applications of our lifehacks, and our use of the data from all our crazy Quantified Self are all in how we apply them. Even if we can’t quantify the effects, we know if we’re really happy. That’s the only measurement that matters.

We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

— Desperate times call for desperate measures

I’ve been using The Old Reader for my work-related RSS stuff, until their sudden downtime last week. It’s a great product, and a labor of love, but it seems they just couldn’t keep up with the influx of refugees from Google. The database issues, though unrelated, clearly didn’t help with this decision. I wish them luck, and hope they can make a go of The Old Reader with their small, private network. In the meantime, I’ve pulled my work RSS feeds, and have been making a go of it with Digg Reader, which is reliable, but that’s the most I can say for it.

The official Sanspoint is back. Support my long-winded ramblings by purchasing this top quality Sanspoint t-shirt. Only $19 American, and all proceeds go to keeping me in beer and/or whiskey.