Charts: How Work Email Has Taken Over Our Personal Lives

And what smart CEOs can do about it.

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It’s dinnertime, and you know it’s just wrong to be checking your email. Your spouse and kids are giving you the stink-eye. But it’ll just take a minute. One minute. Seriously. There’s just this super-quick thing from the boss that you’ve gotta deal with.

American workers, especially white-collar workers, are becoming an army of smartphone addicts, and we beat ourselves up even as we indulge in the rudest of modern habits. But we’re not entirely to blame for our weakness, as Clive Thompson reports in the latest issue of Mother Jones. Much of the encroachment of technology into our lives is driven by work, and workplace demands are escalating as a direct result of the so-called convenience that Steve Jobs has placed in our pockets. As Thompson notes in his must-read essay, “You could view off-hours email as one of the growing labor issues of our time.” So here are a few stats that outline the issue, and one that suggests how smart companies might help address it.

Image: check work email
Image: grand canyon
Image: email icons
Image: cell phones earth
image: 75 thousand salary
image: take home work
Image: clocks
Image: sunset

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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