Communications and Work-Life Balance

And when it comes down to it.... spiritual balance

This image is from the 2013 article “Chaos out of Order”, which was published in the Costa Rican Times. The writer, Martin LeFevre, is a contemplative, philosopher and writer in northern California, who writes about social, cultural, and political issues and experiences through a contemplative perspective.

Today, I finally found the time to examine a new feature at my college: a Microsoft Teams analysis of my communication patterns.

I have just learned after studying the analysis page that over the past four weeks, I sent 61 emails and read 151 emails. And this is only an analysis of my use of the college's email and committee communications. No data on student papers, home assignments, family communications, social media relating, texts, phone calls, or personal interactions.

This is not a virtue signal about how committed I am to "doing good in the world". Just a quantitative measurement of just how impossible it is for all of us to maintain work-life balance and to maintain relationships with people we truly care about.

I'm feeling a bit more centered now than I felt in the fall when I was experiencing serious cognitive overload (leading to confusion sometimes). But, it's clear that reducing communications is a necessary step for work-life balance.

Some might even call this aim to be about spiritual balance.

This is a screenshot of one of the features of the Microsoft Teams platform that is used by the college I teach at. It shows the activity of my use of the platform. While it captures the communications and activities I engage in through this platform, it does not track the phone calls, texts, Gmail exchanges with student Google Docs (which we use during the drafting phase of their papers) or outside communications and conferences that relate to my professional duties. Clearly, quantitative analysis in any one digital environment is not complete enough to represent the full picture.