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“ALWAYS ON” — DEALING WITH A CONSTANT AVAILABILITY
SELF-STEERING COMPETENCE
Especially the necessity for self-steering competence in this context could
be seen in the following process flow diagram. It shows the array of micro¬
decisions to be made permanently as described by Mazmanian et al.’® These
decisions are infinitesimal and made hardly knowingly, many of them are made
automatically. Recently a study of about 60,000 German smart phone users
showed that by average they checked their smart phones 88 times per day
for new messages or time of day and subsequently unlocked them 53 times
for using an app." That means the average user being awake uses his device
and interrupts every other activity (or tries to combine it with driving, going
staircases etc.) about every 20 minutes. This shows that there are plenty of these
micro-decisions to be made every day, and this permanent decision making
occupies our brains as well as it is distracting, even if it is perceived in a positive
way by the acting individual feeling self-efficient.
15 Melissa Mazmanian — Joanne Yates — Wanda Orlikowski, Ubiquitous email: Individual
experiences and organisational consequences of Blackberry use, Proceedings of the 65th
Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, St. Louis MO, The Academy of Management,
2006, adopted by Walpuski, Always on.
1° Alexander Markowetz, Digitaler Burnout: Warum unsere permanente Smartphone-Nutzung
gefährlich ist, München, Droemer, 2015.
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