It was the last working day of the week and people were planning about how to spend the upcoming annual vacations and what places to visit during the time. It was time for them to go for shopping, buy tickets to travel, make bookings at hotels in different cities of the country, and so on.
But for Muhammad Azhar, 44, these vacations were not an opportunity to unwind but to do more work; this time from home. Employed as an accountant at an export-oriented garments stitching unit, he was under immense pressure to maintain account books and make all the required entries as soon as possible. Ideally, he was supposed to show the updated record to his boss before the vacations started but somehow he could skip this deadline without being noticed.
So, while others were busy preparing for the vacations, he was copying office files to the external hard disk that he would always carry and stuffing papers and files in his bag that was already full. He had no plans to go anywhere and all he wanted to do was to finish work during the vacations.
Azhar’s is just one example of how complex life has become for the working class that always has work on its mind. Azhar is not lazy as one might think. In fact, he has to do a lot of tasks that are not mentioned in his TORs. This leaves him with little time to do his original work. So, the only option left with him is to take that work home.
Over the years, taking unfinished work home by workers has become a common practice and many believe this affects productivity. Different studies on work-related stress point out that long working hours at the office, originally meant for the family, recreation, etc, affect life and office productivity.
The magnitude of this imbalance has increased manifold, especially due to the ever-connected world, courtesy the advanced information communication technology (ICT). Now people can stay connected to each other 24/7, regardless of their location over the globe and work full-time or part-time from home.
It is advised by doctors that people must keep work away from their personal lives. Kashif Ali is a software developer who is supposed to stay online all the time and keep his both cell phones on. His boss expects him to be ever alert to answer his queries that he may send from anywhere in the world while meeting his potential clients. It is quite often that he gets a query about the cost of a project and the time required to finish it right in the middle of the night. The timing is often odd as the queries keep on pouring from different time zones.
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One major reason behind this phenomenon, according to Mujahid Musa, a career-counselor based in Lahore, is that "people want to secure their jobs and become a blue-eyed of the employers by showing them they are at their disposal round the clock. But this does more harm than good as such employees get exhausted soon and their tired brain does not support them much," he says.
Musa says the option for workers to carry work home makes them unproductive at office because they keep on procrastinating and planning to finish work once they reach home. But, he says, "once they reach home they are tired and unable to concentrate." He advises people to go for efficient time management and forget office once they stand up to leave for home.