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"24/7 is the new 9-to-5. But is your boss chaining you to your desk\u2026or are you doing it to yourself?Each day at 6 a.m., Nazia Bandukwala, MD, arrives at Detroit Medical Center to prep her patients for surgery. A fifth-year medical resident working toward a urology fellowship, Dr. Bandukwala's days are packed with clinic days, cystoscopies, kidney-stone surgeries, and even trauma patients who arrive with gunshot wounds. \"When you work so hard, you want to do it for a reason, and it's nice to see people be thankful for the work you do,\" Dr. Bandukwala says. The 30-year-old, originally from Rome, Georgia, loves her chosen field, but after logging repeated 13-hour days and weekends, she's pretty burned out. And her career has just begun. \n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nKellee Khalil, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of the wedding search engine Lover.ly, admits to sleeping with her computer open and waking to check site traffic in the middle of the night. Since the site launched on Valentine's Day 2012, it has demanded round-the-clock devotion\u2014Khalil's days commence as early as 4:30 a.m. with e-mail, then a full roster of meetings with investors, partners, and her sales team, then nightly networking events. \"I choose work,\" she says. \"That's my life right now.\"\n\nCaitlin Meyer hates to think what might have happened had she not checked her e-mail on a recent holiday. The 32-year-old senior publicist at an independent book publisher in Boston scored a coveted spot on The Daily Show for an author she represented after months of pitching. \"If I hadn't been checking, even though our offices were closed, I wouldn't have found out in time. Those are the big things you can lose if you're not on,\" she says.Whether you work out of a corner office, an ER, or your own couch, being constantly on\u2014and when not on, on call\u2014is the new 9-to-5. Call it the 24-hour job: earlier mornings, longer hours, and work pausing only long enough to pick your clothes off the floor or call your mom. Nearly every woman interviewed for this story starts her day scouring e-mails from bed, beneath the covers, and ends the day there too, with a final scroll before snatching some sleep. All the while, the modern company expects more work from employees in a fraction of the time and with fewer resources to help them get it done.How did this happen? Blame technology, in part. Nine out of 10 adults wield cell phones (more than half of them smartphones), making it easier than ever for your boss and coworkers to reach you. The average person checks her phone every 15 minutes\u2014the days of pretending to miss an e-mail are gone. And we're increasingly taking work home with us: Nearly 40 percent of employees log off-site hours, a recent Gallup poll found. Dr. Bandukwala is grateful she can prescribe medications and place patient orders from her smartphone, but that often means more work at home. Adrienne Elrod, chief of staff for Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), says she responds to calls at later hours than she did before she had a BlackBerry. \"My friends understand when I have to duck out to take a call,\" she says. \"Most of them are in politics, and they do it too.\"But the problem is not only that we are slaves to our smartphones. Career experts say some aspects of the constant job are self-imposed, particularly among young, ambitious women gunning to make an impression. \"It has as much to do with the individual as it does the constraints of the job. Women often stick around the office or take on extra projects they don't have time for out of fear,\" says Joanna Barsh, McKinsey director emeritus and author of How Remarkable Women Lead. \"We feel insecure that we're not good enough or smart enough, so we put in more time than is necessarily required. You can turn any job into a 24-hour job.\" It's true: no one wants to be the first one to pack up for the day. But the end result can be staying late just to be seen. \"It's a very female pattern,\" says Barsh, who says she sees the behavior in a friend of her daughter, an Ivy League student who worked at a financial firm last summer. \"As she works later and later, she loses efficiency. If she went home to sleep and returned fresh, she could get the work done in less time.\" Meyer, the publicist, fields e-mails and calls from authors at all hours, although her supervisors don't require it. \"The pressure to be on constantly just happens when your job is responding to people,\" she says. Barsh warns that putting in more face time (or e-face time) doesn't necessarily result in getting ahead and can fuel exhaustion. The world's best athletes toggle between high performance and recovery, because it prevents burnout. She advises workers to mimic this regimen. \"Give yourself permission to be in recovery,\" Barsh recommends. That includes getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep most nights and taking 10- to 15-minute breaks during the workday, alternating between active breaks, like walking outside, and passive ones, like resting on a bench. It might seem obvious, but having a routine\u2014and a dialogue with colleagues about what that routine is\u2014can help you finesse that balance between high performance and recovery. \n\tAdvertisement - Continue Reading Below\n\t\n\nBarsh advises not to make the same mistake she did. \"I worked seven days a week for the first seven years of my career,\" she says. \"I didn't know it was reasonable to have dinner with somebody. Talk to others in your office to figure out if the work is real or in your head and what the culture really requires, not what you think it requires.\" Respectfully question practices that eat up time with few results. Are late-night e-mails or weekend calls truly necessary? Is this the way everyone wants or needs to work in order to move forward? You can't know unless you ask.Recording more hours can seem like the faster path up the ladder, but many employees can lose sight of whether they're filling those hours with substantive work or empty calories like endless e-mailing, tweeting, and internet searches. It's deceptively easy to spend hours, even days, doing work that feels super productive but that ultimately won't accomplish your career objectives or company goals, says Kathryn Minshew, cofounder of TheMuse.com, a career-advice website. She advises making a list of your goals and lasering in on whether your daily tasks are allowing you to meet them\u2014be they small, like the completion of a team project, or large, like the management experience you'll need for your dream job. If a task takes a lot of your time but doesn't connect to a company or personal goal, Minshew says, ask yourself if you can lose it.\n\nIf you're in a high-pressure job, your boss may be in an even higher-pressure one and not focused on your long hours. It pays to manage up. \"Your boss is not Superman. Often, she doesn't necessarily know what's on your plate,\" says Minshew, who recommends simply telling her and asking her which tasks to prioritize. It's also important to manage expectations about your availability. MacKenzie Bishop, an assistant district attorney in Racine, Wisconsin, received frantic e-mails from colleagues when she was home nursing one of her kids. Bishop loves her advocacy work, helping extract kids from dangerous homes, but she says as a part-time employee, she often works double the hours she's paid for and fields frequent calls on days off. \"It's an interruption of my family time,\" she says. \"What's supposed to be five minutes can turn into two hours.\"Minshew believes it's possible to train your employer to be more respectful of your personal time. You might inform your manager in advance that she might not be able to reach you from, say, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays. If you've set aside that time, she won't panic when you don't answer her calls. \"Some women tend to overexplain,\" Minshew says. \"It's stronger to say, 'I'm committed on Tuesday nights.' If you tell your boss exactly what you're doing, you're inviting her to make a value judgment. It's ultimately your business what you are doing outside work.\" Sometimes the best way to soften the burden of work is to leave the office and do something you really love. As a head staffer in a wilderness-therapy program for kids, Valerie Wanamaker literally lives at work, spending eight days at a time in the North Carolina forest. She loves her job but says it can be nearly impossible to detach. To recharge, she sculpts, paints, and gardens on her off days. Elrod competes in triathlons to destress, and when she goes for morning runs, she leaves her BlackBerry behind\u2026although she knows plenty of Capitol Hill staffers who wouldn't dare.As a live-in direct-care worker in Pennsylvania, Cathy Merritt assists a 93-year-old Alzheimer's patient. Merritt works weekends and hardly has time alone. And she misses her own children, whom she rarely sees because of work. \"You have to love caregiving,\" she says. \"We have no benefits really.\" Next time, she says she \"would have everything in writing. I'd like my weekends off.\" The National Domestic Workers Alliance is pushing for a federal law to guarantee overtime pay and time off for domestic workers. And anyone considering a new job can ask about these benefits\u2014and then commit to actually using them.Despite your best efforts, there will likely be times in your career when your hours are not your own. Your social life may revolve around your job. That's okay, as long as that's your choice. Kahlil, for one, says she's made a decision to sacrifice her personal life now for professional payoff later. She recognizes the irony of giving up dating to build a company catering to brides. But she also knows her 24-hour job won't last a lifetime. \"It could be that I meet the love of my life tomorrow and I'm married next year,\" she says. \"It's hard for women; we want to know the plan. At some point, I'll slow down, but I'm not there yet.\"Photo Credit: Gallerystock"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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