CON TEXT: WEISURE:What's that when it's at home?

Weisure is working at home, or working during your leisure time.

Who would work on their day off?

You’d be surprised. In this high-tech, always-connected society, the boundaries between working hours and leisure time have become blurred. More people are using their leisure time to log on and “catch up on a bit of work”, and many people in high-pressure jobs are unable to leave the workplace behind at the weekend, but are always picking up messages from the office, or bringing work home in order to keep up with their colleagues.

So leisure time has become weisure time.

Exactly. In the past, the boundaries between work and play were clearly set out, and it was easier to maintain a healthy work/life balance. You kissed your wife goodbye, took the train into the office, worked till 5pm, then took the train home, and that was it – no more work until the next morning, just sitting in front of the telly with your pipe and slippers. The only work you did was maybe helping the children with their homework or holding your wife’s wool while she knitted you a sweater.

Ah, those were the days.

You could do your nine-to-five and still be able to afford a mortgage, and to send your kids to college. These days, though, if you want to keep your house and get your kids an education, you have to do some overtime, and more people are choosing to do their overtime at home, in front of the computer.

Well, these are tough times.

Even during boom times, people have had to set aside some weisure time. Indeed, the boom was probably fuelled by the Trojan work of people who decided not to get a life, but to get a laptop instead.

But aren’t all these high-tech things supposed to make work easier?

Ah, that’s the paradox. With technology allowing us to perform tasks much faster, we thought we’d all be finishing work by 11am and going off to play golf for the rest of the day. Instead, we’ve ended up with more tasks to do – the workload has increased to fill up the time available. And, thanks to e-mail and mobile technology, people are available 24/7.

So, when did all this weisure time start?

According to American sociologist Dalton Conley, work and leisure have been drifting together like tectonic plates since the baby boom years of the 1950s. In his book, Elsewhere USA, Conley claims that changes in the economy, the family and technology since the 1950s have given rise to “intraviduals”, a new breed of professionals who are not only juggling multiple demands on their attention from all kinds of outside stimuli, but are also juggling multiple selves, thanks to the number of roles they have to play in their lives.

Sounds like a lot of hard work.

It is. Conley asserts that work has now become central to our lives, so that we no longer have leisure time – every waking moment is taken up with work-related issues. Our parents worked to live – we live to work. Even our social lives tend to revolve around work colleagues. And no one is immune – the new US president has been reluctant to give up his BlackBerry, so a special BarackBerry has been created for him, with added encryption to stop terrorists peeking at his e-mails.

Try at home:"Tell you what, Dad, you help me with my maths assignment, and I'll show you how to use that BlackBerry."

Try at work:"Sorry the report is late, boss, I spilled sangria on my keyboard and dropped my mobile phone in the swimming pool."