BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Chris Sutcliffe — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:37:54 GMT

You can also set when you receive e mail on the Blackberry (by altering auto on/off time).

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Alex Taylor — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:54:00 GMT

Yeah but Jason, do you ever find, like I do, that your WM device decides to connect at the weekends, even when its offpeak? Our WM6 smartphones at work (Vodafone v1415's) are doing it also. Saturday and Sundays are not checked, yet come 8am, they connect up, do 1 sync, then don't bother for the rest of the day!

Plus we also find there are times when the "off peak schedule" changes back to "As items arrive" when we specifically set them all to Manual. Many a frantic phone call down to us asking why it's been connecting at 3am...

Frustrating, but still couldn't live without them!

Are you going to TechEd in November?

Alex

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

jasonlan — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:46:04 GMT

Chris - sure but is that granular enough to switch off just email?

Alex - hmmm that's strange - I've never seen that one!

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Alex Taylor — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:11:42 GMT

Really? It's happened on I'd say 95% of our 100 odd devices at some stage. They are all Vodafone devices, and they're fixes and AKU's, well, lets just say that they don't exist...

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Fai — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:19:42 GMT

The blackberries do have a setting to stop email delivery while keeping the phone and web working. The article said they don't which is incorrect

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

jasonlan — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:22:40 GMT

Fai - interesting I've not seen that on the Blackberry devices I've used - do you know which one it is that has this (or a version of Software?)

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Serge Gevaerts — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:41:31 GMT

Yes it will infect your personal life, but it's just how much of a problem you're gonna make it yourself. As above posts suggest you can turnoff sync at the weekends. But then again trends show a mixed between work and social life getting stronger. And that's quite logical when you think in networking terms. The way you network isn't that different, or at least shouldn't be, in your personal life compared to your business life. When you look at it that way, there should be a mix work/life 24/7.

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Willem Ditters — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:59:26 GMT

Hey Jason,

It is true what Fai says. My corporate BB 8800 (alas, my company does not support WM yet) does offer the possibility to connect to voice only, but it is a manual process at best, and not as sophisticated as the WM native or even Onebridge scheduling possibilities.

I recently ran a BB 8800 EUE blog for Vodafone NL, and after the VF sim expired at the end of the loan period, I had to switch the device to GSM only.

Cheers,

Willem

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

irblinx — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:14:27 GMT

I find that in actual fact using my wm device with corporate push actually helps both work and home life. I don't come in on Monday morning to a stack of emails in my inbox (even worse coming back in off a holiday) and I spend a maximum of about 10 mins responding to urgent emails out of work hours a day but mostly just give them a quick glance and decide if I need to respond immediately.

So how does that help my home life? Well I'm far less stressed in work as on my journey to work in the morning I'm already thinking over my emails and mentally organising my day and therefore I don't have stress leaking over into my home life! Admittedly some people at work do struggle with that balance but that isn't because of their device, these same people would be phoning in to make sure jobs are done at night even without a smartphone.

As for the the problem that Alex mentions, we have only ever seen that sort of behaviour when (for example) the SSL certificate has expired on the server. In that type of situation where the server actively refuses a connection rather than a connection not being available the devices seem to reset all the sync settings to default.

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

Fai — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:17:17 GMT

On my blackberry 8800 its under email - options - email settings - send email to handheld (choose no). This will stop email delivery and everything else will still work.

re: BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance?

jasonlan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 18:13:57 GMT

Fai - thanks for confirming