Time to turn off, tune out
Business owners set limits as devices bring work home
New York — Three years into being a business owner, Becky Davis knew she needed to break the hold technology had on her.
Davis, a marketing and management consultant to other small business owners, was so immersed in emails, texts and social media that she was getting only four or five hours of sleep a night and her husband said he felt invisible. It also hurt her productivity — she’d get distracted reading people’s posts and realize she’d lost two hours of work time.
“If you don’t set some rules, guidelines and put some technology boundaries in place on using your phone, tablet or computer, they will run your life and can very well ruin your life,” said Davis, who’s based in Douglasville, Ga.
Many small business owners in tech overload are putting limits on how much time they spend on ever-growing modes of communication. For some, the antidote is more technology, such as apps or programs that filter emails. Others go low-tech, simply turning their devices off. Some tell clients they’re just not available to answer emails and texts at night and on weekends.
Davis now schedules time for social media posting and leaves her computer in another room at night. When she’s out to dinner with her husband, she doesn’t check email.
For small business owners passionate about their companies, their dedication makes it hard to say no to the email or text that arrives at 10 p.m. The tipping point for many has been the explosion of social media sites that have some owners reading hundreds of posts each day, said Patricia Greene, an entrepreneurship professor at Babson College.
“There are so many streams to manage,” she said.
Overload during work hours can also be a problem, Greene said. Owners who get bogged down answering emails and social media posts rather than spending time on strategy can see their work days lengthen.
Justine Pattantyus has turned off most notifications, including email and Facebook alerts. The constant interruptions prevented her from focusing on doing work for the clients of her management consulting business.
“How much time I was losing to responding constantly to those outside influences!” said Pattantyus, owner of Spark Life International.
Pattantyus sets other limits. She lives in Lisbon, Portugal, but her clients are five to eight hours behind her in the United States. If she has clients on Pacific time, they’re in the early part of their work day as Pattantyus nears the end of hers. She shuts her computer down at 7 p.m. her time. Clients know that’s the rule when they sign on with her.
Kelley Weaver’s company, Melrose Public Relations, is in Santa Monica, Calif., but she’s in Chapel Hill, N.C., where her husband is in graduate school. Her employees start their days three hours after hers begins, raising the possibility of an extended string of texts and emails encroaching on her evening.
Weaver uses the Slack messaging system with her staff for group and individual conversations that eliminate the stop-and-start rhythm of emails and texts. She also strives to go off-duty technologically at the day’s end; she silences her phone and tries not to look at it.
“When we go to dinner, I’ll leave it home,” Weaver said. But it’s not always easy: “Part of it is second nature and breaking habits,” she said.
Aaron Norris said he’s slowly gotten rid of his laptop at home for work after finding he was reading emails at 5:30 a.m. and spending time in the evening sorting through emails that he estimates were 80% spam. Norris, a vice president at his family’s Riverside, Calif.based real estate business, The Norris Group, has also cut back on time spent on email at work and no longer tries to read every social media channel.
“There has to be some peace or I just feel frayed by the end of the day,” he said.
Josh Nolan began putting a boundary between work and personal life — his own and his staffers’ — about three years after his website design company, Bold Array, was founded. He was working over 100 hours a week as he and his staff of five tried to keep up with clients’ questions, requests, emails and texts.
“Things were getting a little difficult to manage,” said Nolan, whose company is based in Costa Mesa, Calif.
His solution: Clients are told Nolan will answer emails, phone calls and have meetings between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. He’ll answer texts and emails after 10 p.m. or the next day, keeping evenings clear. Weekend work is billed at a higher rate.
“Once we started setting those limits and communicating expectations, it helped with company morale and not just going insane with the amount of work,” he said. professor at the University of Southern California.
That feature, however, quickly associated the company with “sexting,” the sharing of sexually explicit photos through cellphone messaging. Had Snapchat done nothing else, it might well have faded quickly itself, as such fads often do.
Instead, Snapchat showed a knack for evolving as its users did. It’s now a full-featured messaging service popular with millennials and big brands alike. It even rebranded as Snap Inc. and now calls itself “a camera company.”
Now it’s hoping to make itself into a big winner on Wall Street as well. According to news reports, Snap is readying for a public stock offering that could value the company at $20 billion to $25 billion. Snap declined to comment.
Refusing to disappear
The company has worked hard to roll out new features so users don’t get bored.
“Stories” allows individuals and brands to create a narrative from messages, videos and photos from the past 24 hours. It’s so popular that Facebook’s Instagram now has a version of it, and Instagram just rolled out disappearing photos, too. A “Discover” section serves as a wide-ranging news section, featuring material tailored for millennials by a select group of publishers. “Lenses” lets people add different animated overlays to photos and videos; the feature has proven to be popular both with young adults and advertisers.
“Snapchat has steadily introduced new features … and in terms of user engagement it seems like users are spending quite a bit of time in each,” said eMarketer analyst Catherine Boyle.
Amanda Peters, 22, a dance instructor in Fairfax, Va., wasn’t sure how much she would use Snapchat when she got it as a college freshman in 2012. But she’s grown to like it more with Lenses.
“I like the goofy filters,” she said. “They’re always changing in growing its membership at the rate investors want. It recently laid off 9% of its workforce. As part of belt tightening, Twitter also killed its Vine video app, which was wildly popular with teens but didn’t have a reliable way to make revenue.
It’s clearly a fate Snap — with a similar youthful audience — wants to avoid.
For now, though, Snap is managing to remain hip and even has an unconventional distribution strategy for Spectacles, $130 sunglasses that take video for sharing on Snapchat. You can’t just order one online — yet. Rather, they have to find a vending machine or temporary store popping up with just 24 hours’ notice. So far, vending machines have showed up near the company’s headquarters in the Venice Beach section of Los Angeles, as well as in Big Sur, Calif., and New York.
Lines in New York stretched for hours when the machines first appeared.
Geoff Golberg, who works in marketing in New York, waited three hours in line. An active livestreamer, he livestreamed himself on Periscope as he bought the Spectacles.
“It was a spectacle,” Golberg said in a phone interview. “Inside everyone is taking video, posting content to Instagram and taking Snaps. They created so much buzz around this product by limiting supplies.”
Even so, Blau said Spectacles are a niche product that likely won’t be a major growth driver. And Snap needs growth — as well as even more ways to evolve to keep its existing users engaged.
Savannah Russell, 16, a student in Minneapolis, is a devoted Snapchat user, building up “streaks” of daily Snaps with her friends. She said that without Snapchat, she “would show up to school on Monday and be very out of the loop.”
But she said she doesn’t know how long she’ll stick with it.
“The happiness comes from being able to interact with my friends,” not the app, she said. “If something that comes up that’s better I could see myself switching to that.”