Technology is making it easier to juggle work and home – and it's blurring the gap between our public and private lives
How she explained the background drone of the hairdryers is anyone's guess, but the woman next to me at the hairdresser the other week was clearly not there to be pampered. Phone jammed to her ear, laptop open on her knee, she was blithely conducting a conference call while wearing highlighter foils.
Welcome to the world of the work-life merge, the term recently coined by Facebook executive Emily White to describe a life in which work and free time are no longer neatly compartmentalised but seamlessly jumbled up together. It's a world in which it's no big deal to take two hours out of the working day for something personal, but also routine to spend the same time answering emails on a Sunday: where even executives can leave at 5.30pm to have tea with the children (as Facebook's CEO Sheryl Sandberg famously does) but be back on the laptop by 9pm.
It's different from the old idea of seeking a balance, which tends to treat work and life as two conflicting opposites – one all hard grind, the other all pleasure – because practitioners of the "merge" tend to be driven people who love their jobs. They want to customise the conventional corporate day to suit them.
As Katie Bickerstaffe, the British CEO of Dixons, recently put it: "I love what I do, but I also love my family. I don't think there's any reason you can't do both. You just have to make sure you marshal your resources and yourself." Which for Bickerstaffe means a four-day week, taking Fridays out with her young daughters – but they're long days, often involving overnight trips, and she's in constant contact with the office even on Fridays.
The advantages for working parents of this kind of merged lifestyle are obvious, of course: but what's new is that, with the government proposing to extend the right to request flexible working patterns to everyone from 2014, it's likely to spread.
And what really makes the merge timely is that it taps into two important trends in British working life. The first is a tough new economic reality, which means those torn between work and home life often can't afford to reduce their hours: so the emphasis is on reinventing the time we have. And the second trend is the seamless blurring of private and public life, made possible by technology.
Home broadband and Wi-Fi on the move have already liberated us physically from our desks, but the real game-changer is the platforms we use, because that's what has finally dissolved the boundaries between work and play. When I first started on Fleet Street, back in 1996, sitting down at a keyboard simply spelled work: there was nothing much else to do online. Email had yet to catch on, Google was still a twinkle in student eyes and social media didn't exist.
Now, work messages jostle with private ones in every inbox, professional contacts become indistinguishable from friends on Facebook, and every work-related search brings up endless other clickbait. Is surfing Twitter work, if you're ostensibly checking for breaking news – or play, given you inevitably become sucked into conversation?
The downside of this permanently "switched-on" life, of course, is that there's nowhere to hide. Everyone's permanently checking in, which means the working day has become both longer and more fast-moving: the decision cycle is massively speeded up, as nothing has to wait until people get back to the office tomorrow. Snap judgments in the middle of the night, critical conversations taken on the hoof, are the new norm. (I remember being briefed on a significant change in Treasury policy by someone simultaneously trying to supervise two small children in a playground: the conversation was punctuated by despairing shouts of: "NO, NOT IN THE FLOWERBEDS!")
But then perhaps a decade ago, that Treasury aide would have been stuck in the office all day taking calls, not in the park with his children. With the pressure comes a certain magical freedom to be in two places at once.
Merged life can be frantic, messy, and short on sleep: one businesswoman I interviewed recently told me she often knocks off for the school run, but pays for it by getting up at 5am to work before the children are up. But she enjoys the feeling of being able to switch back and forth between school-gate mum and professional across the course of a working day: it's not just about reconciling different demands on her time, but bringing together both facets of her identity, although the mental gear-change required each time isn't easy.
Working like this also suits the rhythms of life with small children, where time to yourself in the evenings is no longer so prized – who has the energy to go out, anyway? – but the daylight hours, when the children are awake, are suddenly worth clawing back. A night spent slaving over a hot laptop can be a price worth paying for teatime with the kids.
And while this multitasking lifestyle has been pioneered by working women, the merge may be surprisingly well-suited to many working fathers, too. Surveys suggest working from home, a classic way of blending professional and domestic life, appeals particularly strongly to men: even David Cameron has described how living over the Downing Street shop makes family life in some ways easier as prime minister than it was in opposition, since he can nip up to see the children during the day.
Merged living isn't a panacea, of course. It's not easy for anyone whose job requires fixed physical presence, from binman to brain surgeon. And mingling work and play can be downright miserable for anyone who hates their job, and lives for the moment they can leave it all behind.
But at least the occasional chaos of the merge feels more achievable than the smug triumphalism of "having it all" – and far less retrograde than throwing in the towel. Better merged than submerged, perhaps, drowned beneath the weight of guilt and impossible expectations.
