Too much technology diminishes work relationships, author says

Tim Sanders has spent his career promoting the use of technology, and it's in this quest that he experienced his darkest of moments.

Sanders, the chief solutions officer at Yahoo!, said his career was thriving in the mid-1990s, yet he began to feel increasingly empty. He noticed colleagues sending him instant messages from 5 feet away. He watched brilliant engineers slowly replace face-to-face relationships with lower-risk contact online.

"I saw a paradox," he said, "a world of community with loneliness."

Sanders came to define the condition as "New Economy Depression Syndrome," a state of work-related stress brought on by information overload, constant interruption by technology (think e-mail, instant messaging and cell phones) and the increasing personal isolation that technology affords us.

Sanders will speak about his theory today at the Bellevue Hyatt in a lecture titled "Conquering New Economy Depression Syndrome." The event is sponsored by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network.

In Sanders' case, the syndrome meant restlessness at night and never seeming to be emotionally present at home. He began to have relationship difficulties at work because he used e-mail, at one point, to communicate everything to his employees, be it good or bad.

"When you're good with a hammer, you treat everything like a nail," he said of his bluntness via e-mail. "All of sudden, I forgot my manners."

Major shift for workers

To be sure, U.S. workers in the past decade have been forced to adapt to an amazing rate of change in communication technology, from desktop computers and personal digital assistants to cell phones and the Internet.

In an even shorter period of time, workers have become increasingly dependent on technology to conduct business. In research sponsored by storage-software company Veritas, a third of chief information officers and information-technology managers said a week without a working corporate e-mail system would be more traumatic than a car accident or getting a divorce.

"We're now being asked to adapt to so much change so quickly," said Donald Hantula, a professor of organizational psychology at Temple University. "That's where I think the stress, the strain, the issues people bring up, all come from."

David Shenk, author of "Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut," first noticed the notion of information overload a decade ago. He had signed up for the Federal News Service, a wire service that provided transcripts to key political and cultural events via the fax machine.

In addition to wire reports, Shenk was reading three newspapers, periodicals and listening to talk radio. After one month, he pulled the plug on the wire service.

Shenk said he had come to rely on technology to the extent that he wasn't placing enough confidence in his own faculties. Life was a series of trade-offs and he had chosen technology without understanding the implications on other areas of his life.

"We have all sorts of new choices, but certain resources don't change," he said. "There's still exactly 24 hours in the day. We still need to sleep the same amount. One of the keys is that we make the choices — we don't let technologies make the choices for us."

Computer-limit benefits

New research suggests that limiting our use of technology might be good for your health. A study by Chiba University in Tokyo found that spending five hours or more in front of a computer increased a person's risk of depression, insomnia and other mental-health-related diseases.

The study, which monitored the mental-health changes of 25,000 Japanese high-tech workers over three years, found that employees who worked five hours or more in front of a computer were more prone to depression and anxiety. The results were published late last year in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

So is too much technology bad for us?

Yahoo's Sanders has spent the past year collecting anecdotal evidence. After writing the book "Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends," he received thousands of e-mails from hospitals, health-care professionals and organizations that provided anecdotal evidence of how technology adversely affects people.

After one speech in particular, he received e-mail reports about small groups of engineers within a company that had become completely electronic, including how they communicated with colleagues.

"The turnover rate was astronomical," Sanders said of those groups. "They were the worst people to work with. They took nerd and created monster or troll. These were very lonely, depressed, negative, anti-social, brilliant people."

Theory to be tested

Because most of his examples are anecdotal, Sanders has teamed with Heart Math, a research, training and consulting company, to scientifically test his theory.

Heart Math, which advises Fortune 500 companies on reducing stress and enhancing employee performance, administered a digital lifestyle survey, the results of which are expected to be released Labor Day weekend.

Dr. Terry Real, a national best-selling author on male depression, will conduct follow-up interviews with survey respondents. Sanders said the goal is to create a clinical analysis and come up with specific treatments. "(Dr. Real's) trying to figure out how to identify medically sound solutions," he said.

Sanders said he's learned to balance his use of technology with stronger relationships at work. He turns off his computer monitor, for example, when someone comes into his office. He sits down more with colleagues and makes eye contact.

"I realized the relationships were my resiliency — that the friends and the colleagues that I had during the day made all the difference because the weekends and evenings weren't cutting it," he said. "It wasn't enough to recharge me. That evaporated in traffic the next morning."

Monica Soto: 206-515-5632 or msoto@seattletimes.com