Demanding Balance by Rejecting the Blackberry?

For 3 years the New York State Bar Association's Special Committee on Balanced Lives in the Law has been holding forums and collecting data on their members' work lives, expectations, and quality of life - essentially their ability to be anywhere but the office on the weekends. As noted on the front page of the New York Law Journal, the resulting report makes some interesting observations:

• Attorneys feel they have less time for volunteer and pro bono work than earlier generations
• Increased demands of child rearing compound the strain put on families with no primary care giver
• Female attorneys have expressed their expectations of maintaining personal commitments outside the office to a greater extent than men have - those who don't work towards greater flexibility in traditionally demanding work environments opt for practice areas with greater leeway
• Flex-time is offered as a reward to the most desirable associates to increase retention
• New communications technologies have increased pressure on attorneys' personal time
• Collegiality within the profession and between lawyers and their clients is on the wane

The report also outlines best practices for implementing more flexible time requirements and recommends that law schools engage students in discussions about work-life so that their expectations for their workplace commitments are realistic and so that they can career plan accordingly.

Of all these observations the one I've been thinking about all day is that new telecommunications technologies (i.e. Blackberries) have exacerbated the imbalance between legal career and personal life. Constant vigilance of a Blackberry inherently disrupts every conversation and activity because you are interrupted not just with urgent emails but with every email - the automatically generated ones, the ones that can wait until Monday, the ones on which you were just cc'ed and to which no response will ever be required.

I was with a couple friends this weekend who kept their blackberries out throughout our time together - if a partner or client needed them they wanted to be sure not to miss the email. Makes sense to me. Only for all the checking of the Blackberries none of these folks ever had to leave or cut short our time together to work. Still they were constantly distracted by the continual flow of info to their PDAs.

Another friend has refused her Blackberry - she figures if it's that important then someone will call her.