James Governor recently said of RIM and its ubiquitous BlackBerry: “And who has done more than RIM to change the boundaries of work and play, personal and business communications in this era called 2.0? RIM is the most important company in Office and Enterprise 2.0 in terms of behavioural change, worklife balance and so on. RIM manages you 24 hours a day.” Nick Carr replied with a very insightful comment on the effect of this: “Enterprise 2.0, when seen through the hypnotizing screen of the BlackBerry, does not amount to the liberation of corporate systems by personal systems but rather the colonization of personal systems by corporate systems. Society becomes a social network. My pocket vibrates, therefore I am.”

I’m not sure René Descartes would like this. Why? Because after reading this on a Friday, I was out to dinner the following Saturday night, and directly witnessed the effect of tethering people with BlackBerries. While we were out for dinner, a couple sat down at the table next to us, obviously on a second (or maybe third) date. Throught the next hour, they both proceeded to check their BlackBerries about every 5-10 minutes. On a Saturday night. On a Date. WTF? There were multiple times when one or the other would reach for their BlackBerry while in mid conversation, and just start spining the scroll wheel while the other was still talking.

I shudder to think what might have happened later if the couple decided the date went well and went somewhere “a little quieter” – if you get my drift. In fact, that would be a great Saturday Night Live style spoof TV commercial: imagine a rooftop bar on a starry night, a couple romantically gazing in each other’s eyes…about to kiss…BZZZZZ! “Hang on, I have to check my messages.”

The root of the problem, in my opinion, is that BlackBerries are being used in the wrong way: they are an obvious solution – a band-aid – to deal with the ever-increasing flow of email, but they don’t address the root of the problem and instead quietly encroach on ever more personal time – as evidenced by that couple that couldn’t break away even while on a saturday night date.

If organizations want more productivity from employees, how about making work time more efficient, enabling greater “time on task”, and using a tool that removes a lot of the time-intensive emailing, dealing with attachments, going to meetings, etc. and lets people get right to the real work as quickly as possible? Instead of letting work spill over into personal time, organizations should retool (pun intended!) work time with a wiki so that employees can get real work done, not just appear like they’re working. Then, a BlackBerry could become a notification tool for people to keep up to date on the progress of projects & content on the wiki.