With my wife’s grandmother’s death this past week, I was out of the office for a few days. As my  luck runs, a relatively serious issue came up at work that required my professional attention. So in the midst of grieving with my family, I was furiously thumbing my iPhone for updates. As one co-worker put it, “It’s the paradox of being ‘always’ connected – makes it hard to feel like you can disconnect.” And she was exactly right.

Simultaneously disconnected and connected.

You know what I’m talking about. You leave the office armed with the auto out-of-the-office reply, maybe on vacation, maybe to your kid’s T-ball game, and suddenly you feel the slightest vibration in your pocket. Officially, you’re disconnected…but you check the message anyway.

And then you’re stuck in a paradox: to your family, you’re supposed to be disconnected present with them and for them, but now you’re also connected back to work, absent (at least momentarily) from your family.

Since our brains are not very good at focusing on more than one thing at a time, we learn to switch back and forth very quickly. So fast sometimes that it’s hard to know in any one moment who we’re really connected to—our jobs or our families.

It’s a problem that’s been around for a while, and it’s not going away.

In fact, it will only get worse

As time goes on, I suspect that the importance of being always connected will increase. Consider the fact that the sum of our business and social connections never sleep.

More than that, the ebb and flow of information online is unforgiving to anyone who unplugs, even for a moment. A few months ago, I maintained a very minimal online presence for about a month. For the first time my follower count on Twitter started to drop. My blog traffic decreased 94%. When I got back, I suggested that social presence has to be all-out, all-the-time for businesses.

Your customers are working on their time schedule, not yours. The importance of being present and connected has never been greater.

When your family expects you to be disconnected…

As more people spend time connected to their social networks, either for work or personal use (according to Nielson, the total minutes spent on blogs and social sites is increasing 82%), they will, out of sheer mathematical necessity, spend less time doing other things.

Those three minutes you spent answering texts are three minutes you didn’t spend with your family.

Think about it, if you shared Thanksgiving with some non-networking friends or relatives, you probably got some sideways looks when you pulled out your phone to check your tweet stream/email/texts/etc. That’s because they perceive that when you’re checking your device, it is more important than them.

Jason Markow recently suggested that we rethink how we measure our work/family balance:

… if you are worried that you are not spending enough time with family, stop counting hours and make sure that the time you do spend is (you guessed it) quality time.

But in order for “quality” time to exist, sometimes we have to admit to ourselves that the distraction of being connected is too great. When we’re stuck in the paradox, it’s tough to serve our business (because we’re worried about our personal life) and it’s tough to serve our families (because we’re worried about our business).

So what’s one to do?

I’m not sure. I think the first step is to talk about it with one another. This is by no means a novel problem, but as our online participation increases exponentially, the connection paradox will continue to grow just as fast.

I believe that the solution to the challenge is deeply personal, and would never fit into a “5 tips to beat the connection paradox” sort of post. But I also think that if we share our strategies for wrangling the paradox, we stand to learn a lot from one another.

For me, knowing and trusting my team at work is essential.  As my co-worker also wrote,

“Please know that the team here is working hard to help, and that we all recognize that your first priority is your calling as a husband.”

For me, relying on smart and understanding people back at the office always helps me deal with the connected/disconnected whirl.

Another thing I do is over-communicate work activities to my family. When I announce “I’m checking my email for X update because _____________” they tend to be more understanding because they know I’m not just playing with my phone.

What about for you?

How do you deal with the constant connection paradox?

Maybe if we share, we can learn from one another, and ultimately serve our business and our families better.

-Andrew

[Special thanks to Dr. B. G. Kintz, the Rev. McCain, Joe, Gretchen, Jeremy, Steve, Tony, Kim, Tammy, Mark, Jeff, Jim, Marcia, Mike, Sharon, David, and Linda for being such a great support during this really tough time.

Special thanks also to Jason Markow for juicing up some of the ideas for this entry with the work/family balance pot mentioned above; be sure to add a comment to Jason's blog about how you plan quality time]

Image Credit: Igor Kasalovic (kasko on Stock Exchange); original here

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