Growing up, my parents and I had a weekly ritual which felt sacred. On Friday evenings, once school and work were behind us, we would pack our bags, load up the car, and head north to our cabin in Wisconsin.
The moment we merged onto the highway out of St. Paul, something began to shift. With the streetlights receding behind us, a soft hush seemed to settle over our lives. For those two hours on the road, time seemed to slow. I would sit in the backseat, staring at the trees rushing by while National Public Radio’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! played from the speaker. My mother dozed against the passenger window while my father’s shoulders eased with each passing mile.
When we reached our destination, turning onto the gravel driveway of the cabin felt like crossing a hidden threshold. The land seemed to recognize us from all our past visits and welcomed us home in a quiet embrace. In those years it was easy to go off the grid without conscious effort. With only a landline phone and spotty cell reception, digital connection was typically an afterthought. For two days each week, my father, who owned a small business and usually worked long into the night, had the freedom to step away from the pressures of work. He replaced his late-night computer work with family games of Sequence and Trivial Pursuit. My mother, typically juggling board meetings and errands, found relaxation in cooking wonderful meals. I lost myself in hours of imagination: playing, reading, or simply wandering through the woods, letting my imagination run wild.
Digital connectivity began to invade our quiet cabin with each year that passed as technology, like the Sirens call, lured us with the promise of greater convenience. First came broadband internet. Then, PalmPilots, BlackBerries, and iPhones. Over time, our once-secluded hideout became washed in a wave of digitization. Like the changing of the tide, the rhythms of the cabin shifted in return. Mornings which once started with the sizzle of Norwegian pancakes and the smell of coffee began instead with the metallic pings of text messages and the glow of a laptop screen. Scrolling newsfeeds and checking work email replaced evenings once spent playing games and telling stories near the bonfire. What was meant to be a break became merely a change of scenery with the same demands, same distractions, and same frenetic pace we came there to escape.
In the years that followed, we still made the two-hour drive most weekends, but the sense of sacred escape gradually faded. The cabin no longer felt like a separate world, but rather an extension of the one we left behind. Each opportunity technology presented also came with a cost.
In this chapter, we’ll explore how this tension plays out in the modern workplace—specifically, how an “always-on” culture impacts screen-bound workers and their employers. Let’s begin by examining the organizational norms which equate an employee’s digital availability with productivity, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Connectivity Conflation: When Availability Becomes a Proxy for Productivity
Like my family’s experience at the cabin, while technology provided more opportunities to work from anywhere, it became harder to find digital balance or maintain appropriate boundaries.
Because of our ability to “work from anywhere,” it became expected and implied that employees respond to work communications on nights, weekends, and holidays because, frankly, they have no excuse not to. Accordingly, employees began to carry work with them at all hours and started to feel a unique form of stress. Provided the opportunity to be connected all the time, a pang of guilt overcame them when they weren’t. Their online connectivity became a proxy for genuine productivity.
Consider this experience told through the story of my friend Claire, a thirty-four-year-old senior consultant at a large consulting firm. Like many, she transitioned to fully remote work in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 pandemic. As of 2025, she was still struggling to find a sense of balance: “When we shifted to a fully remote set up in March of 2020, I’ll admit, I was excited. As a consultant expected to be in the office or on site at the client’s location, a day or two of working from home was quite the luxury.” She said, her face alight in the excitement that once accompanied the rosy notion of working from home, “So, when I was told everyday would be work from home, I couldn’t believe it.”
Claire was enticed by the idea that greater convenience might translate to greater efficiencies, but she soon realized it only led to more time on screen.
“That excitement wore off pretty quick,” she said. “I found that the natural boundaries that used to separate my personal and professional lives began to disappear. Instead of getting ready each morning for my commute downtown, I got out of bed and jumped directly onto a Zoom meeting to start my day. Looking back, my days became entirely lived through my screen… countless virtual calls, hundreds of emails per week, even virtual happy hours.”
Claire described feeling burned out and overwhelmed by too much time on screen:
“In all, I’d say I work twelve to fourteen hours each day on my computer, but of course that’s not twelve to fourteen hours of optimum work. Four or five of them are productive (on a good day). The rest is just responding to messages, or worse—mindlessly monitoring whether or not I have new messages to respond to. Frankly, this just adds to my stress,” she shared.
Ironically, her stress often led her to personal screen time as she scrolled through social media for a quick burst of dopamine.
“My way of coping with the stress is by using TikTok. I probably average two hours a day on just TikTok alone. I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel a bit better in the moment, but after realizing how much time I spend I usually end up feeling worse and more overwhelmed. Plus, I feel guilty not optimizing my time as well as I might otherwise. I could end my workday two hours early if I didn’t use TikTok and still get the same amount done, but in a weird way, if I optimized my time and finished earlier, I wouldn’t be seen as hard of a worker.”
Asked whether she missed any element of working entirely in-person, she reflected:
“There’s a part of me that doesn’t miss working in-person. In theory, I save time on my commute and can squeeze in time to put away dishes and clean my apartment when I have a few minutes free. But I feel like I no longer have a natural stopping cue. My workday is never really over. It’s as if I’m in a daily game of King of the Hill, where the last team member to close out their ‘available’ icon on Slack, or the one who sends an email last at night is seen as being the hardest worker. Could it be that they, like me, are less productive than they might otherwise be if we had healthy boundaries and stopping cues?”
She thought pensively, reflecting on her own experience, “How is it that productivity is even measured nowadays, anyway?”
