At UCL, we have been researching how people cope with work-life balance issues and the expectation of being always online. Our findings show that technology should be designed to be more in line with our values and make us stop and think when this is not the case. But it’s not all down to technology…
We are back with a new and improved version of our interventions around work-life balance strategies. This time we have focused on individuals, and specifically academics, to trial an online course that can teach faculty at UCL how to manage their time, communication channels, notifications, and expectations, as well as how they can be more…
Read more iDWELL – Individualised strategies for Digital Wellbeing
Building on the work-life balance workshops we developed, we teamed up with the Medical School at UCL to develop a new series of workshops aimed at junior doctors who struggle with issues of work-life balance and burnout. This work is funded by UCL Grand Challenges and is led by Prof Anna Cox and Dr Antonia…
Read more iWARDs – Digital Wellbeing & Resilience for Doctors
Email is far from dead; in fact, the volume of messages exchanged daily, the number of accounts per user, and the number of devices on which email is accessed have been constantly growing. Being able to access email across multiple devices brings numerous benefits such as flexible working practices. However, it can also have negative stressful…
Users have access to a growing ecosystem of devices (desktop, mobile and wearable) that can deliver notifications and help people to stay in contact. Due to the pervasive use of smartphones, it is becoming increasingly likely for people to also be interrupted, regardless of their locational contexts or preferences. We have carried out research that looks into…
Between December 2016 and January 2017, about 20 knowledge workers from inside and outside academia came along to our hands-on workshops on how to take control of work-life balance. Five identical workshops, funded by the EPSRC’s Balance Network, were held at UCL and led by Marta E. Cecchinato. The first session covered some brainstorming activities to explore and…
This activity was led by Dr Rowanne Fleck (University of Birmingham). ‘Wife Swap’ was a popular UK reality TV show in the 2000s which saw the wife/mother of one family swap places with the wife/mother of another and attempt to take on their roles and responsibilities. The subsequent weeks gave both the wives and their…