Are you suffering from 'FOBO'?

Have you ever checked your work emails when you were supposed to be on holiday? How about responded to ‘just a quick WhatsApp’ from your boss after working hours? Or updated your Slack status to ‘away’, even though you’re just popping out for 10 minutes to grab a sandwich for lunch?

I’m prepared to bet that most people will have answered ‘yes’ to at least one of these questions. In the modern working world, it can feel impossible to take a break—whether it’s for five minutes or a week—without some associated guilt. I can’t be the only one who, when crafting an ‘out of office’ message, nearly always add the caveat “if it’s urgent…”, followed by my personal phone number. “Thank you for your patience!” is my preferred sign-off, though there are many times when those who want to get hold of me have been anything but.

I was glad (if somewhat unsurprised) to hear that my habit has a name: ‘FOBO’, or a fear of being offline. From having a quick glance at your inbox after dinner to leaving Slack open on your phone while at the gym ‘just in case anything comes in’, we are becoming a workforce that’s chronically online, unable to switch off both physically and metaphorically.

“It’s a culture that’s developed over time—we’re more and more impatient and we want everything done straight away, from food delivery to work,” says Caroline Green, founder of career support programme The Talent Cycle. “It’s been a hard few years with the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, and more is being asked of employees than ever before—they’re worried that if they switch off, even for a moment, they’ll miss something.”

FOBO has the pandemic to thank in more ways than one: as well as making employees feel as if they have to work harder than ever in a squeezed jobs market, it opened up our capacity for home working. While this can obviously be a great thing, offering more flexibility in terms of hours and location, new technologies have not only facilitated, but encouraged, our ability to work from anywhere (and everywhere). When your whole job can be contained on your smartphone—the same smartphone that you keep in your pocket all day, and by your bed at night—it’s no wonder we feel pressure to be available 24/7.
While someone who’s always contactable might sound like an employer’s dream, FOBO doesn’t lead to a happy, productive workforce. “We live in a world where we’re afraid to take time off, as we think it will look like weakness,” explains Green. “This puts us in a perpetual state of high anxiety. Always saying ‘I'll just check this email’ means we're never taking a break. Our adrenalin is always pumping, we produce too much cortisol, and this affects our ability to deal with stress. We can’t think straight, we don’t have mental clarity, and we can’t do ‘deep work’.” In other words, being constantly connected can end up resulting in the very thing you’re trying to avoid: worse performance at work.

If you think you’re suffering from FOBO, there are things you—and your employer—can do to help. Companies need to create cultures in which it’s both accepted and actively recommended that employees have down-time, both in terms of holiday and during the working day. “Rather than strict hours or routines, it’s about having sensible conversations with employees to help manage expectations of workload, which is where this stems from,” Green advises. There are steps you can take as an individual, too, from apps to limit social-media use, to silencing your email notifications from your phone. If you work from home, have a dedicated workspace and leave it at the end of the day—without taking work with you.

“If you find yourself starting a sentence with ‘I’ll just quickly…’ then ask yourself, ‘Can it wait until tomorrow?’” Green says. Most of the time, you’ll find that it can—and you’ll serve both yourself and your employer by taking heed.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar.com/uk March 2024

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