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More Managers Allow Workers to Multitask As Job and Home Blur

In the months leading up to her wedding last July, Anne Crum Ross says the line between her work and personal life dissolved. "For every five work calls I made at the office, I made one wedding-planning call," she says.

By Carol Hymowitz- The Wall St Journal

With just three months to go before the ceremony, she changed jobs in real estate and became director of corporate training at Sussex & Reilly in Chicago. She took the wedding-guest and catering files she had stored on her Palm to her new office. "As long as I was doing my work, my bosses didn’t have a problem with me doing wedding planning," she says. "It’s all about knowing how to multitask."

The 10-hour work day now typical at many companies increasingly means having to blend professional and personal tasks. Between meetings and memo writing, employees and their bosses log onto the Internet to pay bills, manage their 401(k) accounts, shop for birthday gifts and plan vacations. While attending their children’s school events, they use their BlackBerrys to answer colleagues’ questions, proof letters and make appointments with clients.

For managers, this overlap between work and life presents several new challenges. Many recognize that since they now expect employees to be accessible 24/7 on e-mail and cellphone, they also must give them the freedom to handle personal chores during regular office hours. But should they also set limits? What overlap is productive? How should managers handle employees who abuse the new flexibility?

Steven Centrillo, executive vice president of advertiser Grey Worldwide, expects his employees "will use the computers and other tools we give them to manage their work to also manage their personal lives." Doing so can boost workplace productivity, he believes.

"If employees can access their bank accounts on the Internet while sitting at their desks, they’re saving hour-long trips to the bank," he says.

The same goes for them getting their work done at home. "All I care about is if they are getting their job done on time, and well — not where they are doing it from or what else they are doing at the same time." says Mr. Centrillo.

He himself relies on five computers, two cellphones, a BlackBerry, a Palm and a pager to get work done for his Atlanta and New York offices while seeing to his family duties. "With my pager, I can be at my son’s high-school football game on Friday afternoon and be available if a client needs me — and I don’t have to choose between them," he says. "The pager helps me handle my job and my life better, and if that’s the case for me, I can’t deny that to others."

Luke Visconti, partner and co-founder of DiversityInc, a New Brunswick, N.J., publisher and consultant on diversity issues, assures his employees that some personal business is permissible during work. He tells them: "Don’t cover your computer screen when I walk by and you’re checking a personal travel reservation."

But he won’t allow employees to multitask through lunch by eating at their desks. "I don’t want smelly food around, and I think it’s healthier for people to get out for an hour," he says.

Mr. Visconti also forbade one employee to log onto an online game at the office. The employee "became so engrossed in the game for a while that even though he didn’t play it a lot during work hours, he was distracted, and then he’d stay very late at night to finish his work," says Mr. Visconti. "I had to explain that even though he finished his assignments, he was disconnected from the flow of everyone else’s work."

Some managers establish guidelines through their own example. Terry Wachalter, director of global operations at Euro RSCG Life, an advertising and marketing company, arrives at her New York office at 7 a.m. to pay her credit-card bills online and do other personal chores. By 8:30 a.m., she focuses exclusively on work. She rarely takes a break for lunch so she can leave by about 6 p.m. and have time in the evening for her husband and 13-year-old son. "This works for me," says Ms. Wachalter, who has helped other employees create different schedules, such as working from home a few days each week.

More companies are offering equipment and services to help keep employees at work longer with fewer interruptions. They include ATMs, health and beauty aids, photo-developing stores, dry cleaning services and fitness centers.

Google offers the 800 employees at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., free lunches and dinners cooked by a gourmet chef. The dinner is popular with Google’s young engineers, who tend to be single and work late. Google also offers dry-cleaning services, washers and dryers for those who want to do their laundry during work, yoga and other fitness classes, and massages.

Managers who blend work and life easily may also do better at weathering life crises. When Marcia Firestone was battling breast cancer two years ago, she scheduled chemotherapy treatments on Thursday afternoons to least disrupt her office routine, and she continued to work at home through the weekend. "Work gave me focus and kept me going," says Ms. Firestone, president of the Women Presidents’ Organization, a New York nonprofit group of women heads of companies.

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ABOUT CAROL HYMOWITZ

Carol Hymowitz writes about leadership challenges and conflicts three Tuesdays a month in In The Lead. Carol conceived the column partly out of her experiences as a manager at the Journal, as bureau chief in Pittsburgh and now as a senior editor in New York, where she supervises a group of reporters in several cities. In her 20 years with the Journal as a reporter and editor, she has covered many industries — including steel, retail, banking, and manufacturing — as well as management and workplace issues.

"Given the technological and global complexity of business today, managers must make decisions at an ever faster pace while motivating others in new ways," she says. "Yet management and leadership remain an art rather than a science, dependent as ever on relationships among people. I try to illustrate that through the experiences of myself and others."

Carol says she sees the column as a conversation with readers. To contribute your perceptions and opinions, e-mail Carol at

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