Real time communication over large distances has been around for millennia, if you count smoke signals and bonfire beacons; but it’s really taken off in the 19th century after the arrival of Morse’s Electric Telegraph in 1844. Suddenly it was possible to freely send text across the nation, and the new invention spread as fast as new wires could be strung up. Isn’t progress great?

The transformation this brought to all aspects of life was sweeping, and is described in Tom Standage’s fascinating book “The Victorian Internet“. My favorite part of this book is the quote from a speech made in 1868 by New York businessman E. W. Dodge. As he put it, “there are doubts whether the telegraph has been so good a friend to the merchant as many have supposed”.

Before Morse, businessmen would ship goods a few times a year, then sit back for a few months to await news of their safe arrival (or not; just check out Antonio in The Merchant of Venice). Contrast this with Dodge’s evocative vignette:

“The merchant goes home after a day of hard work and excitement to a late dinner, trying amid the family circle to forget business, when he is interrupted by a telegram from London, directing, perhaps, the purchase in San Francisco of 20,000 barrels of flour, and the poor man must dispatch his dinner as hurriedly as possible in order to send off his message to California.”

Sounds familiar, oh you BlackBerry owners?

The result, Dodge continues, is that the modern businessman is

“kept in continual excitement, without time for quiet and rest… [he] must be continually on the jump”.

Maybe this won’t be entirely foreign to your own lifestyle, either? Though of course we should be so lucky as to have to handle only a handful of telegrams a day; telegraphy cost money, so the traffic was minimal next to today’s digital deluge.

But most sadly, Mr. Dodge points out that

“The poor merchant has no other way in which to work to secure a living for his family. He must use the telegraph”.

And there, at least, we today have a glimmer of hope. Sure, we all have to work to feed our families, and we certainly must use email; but we can adopt strategies, tools and best practices that will allow us to have a family dinner in peace, and to balance our life without sacrificing success at work. It isn’t easy, but if you make up your mind, it is doable. Helping people do it has been a large chunk of my work these past 15 years…