'Work and Leisure Used to be Separate. Now it's Just 24/7 Anxiety'

Is the idea of 'work-life balance' just a dream to you? You're not alone. Forty per cent of us say our jobs are taking over"I wouldn't say I have a work-life balance," a junior doctor recently told me. "I have a work-life imbalance. I often work 12 days straight, which means I work one week and the weekend and then the following week too. On average I work 48 hours a week, but some weeks it's more like 70."
Junior doctors, of course, have long been the paradigm of overworked, underpaid, overstressed, under-appreciated Britons. What many more workers are experiencing now, though, is a grisly new order, a working day that is never done, because phones and emails enable bosses to pester staff at all hours. As a result, one third of us feel unhappy about the time we devote to work and 40% of us are neglecting other parts of our lives because of work demands - which is likely to increase mental health problems. "I think of work as an overbearing fascist country that's invading its nice neighbour to establish more lebensraum," says an economist who declines to be named or even reveal his or her gender ("It would be career death," he or she says). "Work and leisure used to have a border, and the Republic of Leisure used to be so peaceful. Now it's just 24/7 anxiety. You never know when you're going to get a text or an email commissioning you to do some work. Or just have your line manager on the phone wanting to discuss something that, in the past, could have waited until the following morning." "Many's the time I've been nodding off in bed, then I get a text from a commissioning editor, " says one staff journalist. "It's like a midnight call from Stalin or something. Next thing I know I'm sitting at my computer in my pyjamas working." Having compared his boss to the Soviet Union's leading tyrant, he, perhaps understandably, also asks for his name to be kept secret. What is happening is not just a technological shift that enables bosses to contact you outside working hours. "I think there's been a shift in the mentality of working Britons because of the insecurity of employment since the economic downturn of 2008," argues Jenny, a freelance radio journalist. "If you don't do the work in what was once your leisure time, you risk your job. A few years ago when I was on staff, I'd happily tell a boss to get stuffed if they asked me to do some work on a day I wasn't on the rota. The ethos changed round about 2008/9: I didn't feel as though I could say no because there were compulsory redundancies. When I went self-employed I thought that anxiety would go away; I thought I'd be able to ringfence my personal time from work time. But in reality it's not like that: nowadays I never turn my phone off and I'm always checking my emails and texts just in case I get commissioned to do a piece of work. I know some people say you shouldn't check your emails after 6pm or something, but that's just crazy - I'd have missed so much paid work if I'd done that." Increasingly, then, there is no such thing as work-life separation "I think everybody else in the world is catching up with the way farmers have worked historically," says Somerset dairy farmer Trevor. "I never have time when I'm not thinking about work. I often dream about cows. Then at 4am, I get up and milk them. Later in the day I milk them again. I finish work on the farm about 7.30pm, I'm often in bed by 8.30pm and when I lie in bed I'm often worrying about the working day ahead - what the weather's going to be like, the price of milk. I love my job, wouldn't swap it for anything, but the idea of a work-life balance is a joke to me. Work and leisure have always blurred into each other if you're a farmer." There's a name for this blurring, an ugly neologism coined by US sociologist Dalton Conley - weisure. It typifies an age in which work can be just as readily done from Starbucks or bed as from an office, at least for some creative white-collar types. But is weisure necessarily a bad thing? There is evidence to suggest that we like the smudged lines between work and leisure, particularly if we're younger: in a survey of US workers, for instance, 71% of so-called millennials (those born after 1980) said they want their co-workers to be a second family. They want to work with people they care about. It used not to be that way. And if weisure is increasingly the norm, perhaps we are right to value it. After all, many of us get more fulfilment from work than leisure, especially if that leisure consists of staring gormlessly at the telly. My colleague Oliver Burkeman talks of "peisure" - a half-focused, barely enjoyable state of passivity that is how many of us spend at least some of our non-work hours. Perhaps, then, it is leisure, which was the time we'd earned through work to do nothing very much, that is the problem. I can hear sceptical eyebrows being raised across the nation over that last sentence. Here, then, are a few tips for those of you who want to oust the boorish Dictatorship of Work from the lovely Republic of Leisure. Or at least establish a better work-life balance.Just a few more work emails to send ... Photograph: Getty Images