Business's new task: turning off

It's not unusual for Don DePalma to sit down to dinner with his wife and two teens and get the work call from Taipei that he's been awaiting all day. He also exasperates his family by interrupting vacations with his prowls for Wi-Fi hotspots. DePalma, an international consultant from Chelmsford, can't escape work in the digital age.

``Your time is gone," says DePalma, president of Common Sense Advisory Inc. ``It's not your own."

Not too long ago, we rued the blurring of the boundaries between home and work. Now, those boundaries largely are gone, mostly due to technology's power to transform work into a 24/7 global operation. We have the freedom to work anywhere and anytime, yet struggle with finding respite. The ``off" button on a gadget doesn't exempt you from living in an always-on world.

``The norm is being accessible," says Noelle Chesley , an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is researching the effects of technology on work and family life.

In a recent study, Chesley found that cellphone use in working couples and families is linked to more spillover of work worries into home life, which leads to more distress and dissatisfaction with family life. Cellphones helped bring work home, causing more stresses on family togetherness. Her findings, published in December in the Journal of Marriage and Family, were based on a two-year study of 1,367 people in upstate New York, two-thirds of whom had at least one child.

Signs of the always-on workplace are everywhere, from the classic ad of the mom on her laptop at the beach to the increasingly common sight of folks Blackberrying at a ball game, a romantic dinner out, even while driving. One in three employees are in contact with work after hours at least weekly, according to a 2004 study by the Families and Work Institute. Accessibility, in turn, is linked to feeling overworked, the institute found.

Dallas-based lawyer Cordell Parvin found it easier to carve out time for family life in the past. Although lawyers often worked nights and weekends, they weren't on-call night and day, he says. It's harder now to ``be in the moment," says Parvin, who also coaches lawyers and firms on development and career issues. Recently, his 27-year-old daughter, Jill Sandoval , chided him for answering e-mail during one of their ritual Saturday lunches together.

``I told him to cut it out," says Sandoval, a special education teacher who partly chose her career to avoid the grueling hours her dad worked. ``I told him that there are certain times when your daughter is trying to tell you something or having a special conversation when she needs your advice or help."

Family members can ``keep you honest," says Maryella Gockel , an Ernst & Young executive who was recently chastised by her teenage daughter for trying to work while they were watching a movie at home together. But employers have to help by clarifying expectations, says Gockel, the firm's flexibility strategy leader. Ernst & Young set a freedom-from-e-mail-and-voicemail policy on weekends and vacations several years ago.

Leading client service firms long have needed to innovate in order to attract and keep talent in a brutally demanding field. Since 2004, PricewaterhouseCoopers has shut down nationwide for extra July and end-of-year holidays. In June, employees began getting a pop-up message -- ``It's the weekend," it begins -- when they would send weekend e-mail, advising them solemnly to reconsider the necessity of doing so.

``It does make people pause and think," says Eric Pugh , human resources leader for the Boston office. He was startled by the warning while trying to answer e-mail on a recent Saturday morning, but refrained from punching the send button. And to his relief, he is getting 90 percent fewer e-mails than he used to on weekends. ``It does relieve stress," says Pugh, a father of two.

The anywhere, anytime world is empowering. Punch a button and you get an answer, your mom's voice, a new pair of shoes. But turning off the spigots of work and all else is difficult, and our employers can only do so much to stem the tide. We need to be willing to be fully in the moment for our family, friends, or our work. Sometimes, I wonder if we have the will, patience, and grit to make these tough choices. It's easier, after all, just to turn away and answer that beep or ping.

Next Balance column: The home-to-work spillover and how it can lead to an extended second shift for women. Balancing Acts appears every other week. Maggie Jackson can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net.