( CNN ) -- Tonight , as my husband stands in our bedroom , fingers whirling across his smartphone and eyes glued to its tiny screen , I have no idea `` where '' he is . Is he checking the score of his beloved home team , or dealing with a rant from an indefatigable boss overseas ? Is he working or home-ing , or both ? This melding of work and home , of course , is an old story . In 1999 , I wrote an article about three generations of a Baltimore family and their work-life balance . Shattering my romantic views on what it was like to live a few easy steps from work -- literally over the store -- the family 's elderly patriarch told me that his parents could n't wait to move to the suburbs and put some distance between family and work . Their hardware business had shadowed their evenings and weekends , stealing peace . Decades later , the patriarch 's restless , cell phone-toting , entrepreneurial son blamed the portability of work for his recent divorce . How smartphones make us superhuman . In the digital age , we blend home and work , not because we are tied to a store or farm or job , but because the fetters of time and space seem shattered . We can physically circuit the globe in hours , and our thoughts can move across the planet in seconds . Time seems putty in our hands . Our lives are increasingly shorn of context . My early days in the mobile revolution . Does it matter much whether it 's night or day , spring or fall , home or the office ? We are empowered , yet disturbed by this free-for-all . Two recent reports underscore the tensions within these shifts . While more companies are allowing employees to work when and where they want to , they increasingly are limiting people 's ability to take a leave or work part-time , the Families and Work Institute found in its 2012 National Study of Employers . Flex-time is up , but career breaks have fallen steeply . More than half of executives get business information at all hours , according to a survey released earlier this year by Forbes Insights and an advertising firm . As many executives reported feeling enabled as irritated by an `` @ Work State of Mind . '' Nearly a third of those executives who feel `` in control '' of their always-on lives also describe themselves as resigned to the situation . Is overwork the trouble ? Yes and no . In a blended world , work does tend to win out over other parts of life . Studies over the past decade show that people who work at home or outside the office tend to work longer hours , contrary to employers ' initial fears . According to a recent survey , 54 % of American smartphone owners check their phones in bed -- sometimes in the middle of the night . And at a Chicago marketers ' networking luncheon where I recently spoke on a panel , a majority of the crowd of 150 reported , in a show of hands , that they sleep with a smartphone within reach . Even if work is our passion , as it is mine , we 're pitching ourselves headlong and unthinkingly into a world without boundaries -- a world without rest . But overwork is perhaps the least of the challenges when we blend work and home . The blending itself changes how we work , as well as how long we work . In frantically integrating work and home , we stray perilously close to diluting both . This is a matter of attention , intention , and depth . In courting the always-on livelihood , we 're turning our backs on rich moments of full focus and absorption , in favor of darting restlessly back and forth between two or more complex streams of life . The integrity of a moment is lost when we unthinkingly blend different parts of our life . I 'm writing this on a Sunday . My teen is sleeping in and my husband is away . The silence of the morning provides a perfect context for writing . But when my groggy teen wakes up , I 'll put aside my work , and we 'll share toast and tea and a plan of the day . Because if I tried to skate through breakfast with one eye on my daughter and one eye on the clock or smartphone , a fleeting moment of togetherness would be diluted . The silken threads of mutual presence would be thinned to the point of fraying . As much as we try to believe otherwise , it matters where we are . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Maggie Jackson .
Maggie Jackson : We blend home and work because we all use smartphones . Jackson : We are empowered , yet disturbed by this free-for-all . She says that in a mobile world , work tends to win out over other parts of life . Jackson : As much as we try to believe otherwise , it matters what we do , where we are .