How the latest technology lets you take charge of your working life

When David Cameron jumps on a bandwagon, you can be sure the Conservative Research Department has been working round the clock to ensure that it's heading down the right track. "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money," he said in a speech to the Google Zeitgeist conference last year. "It's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - general well-being."

According to a new report released by The Future Laboratory and Microsoft Windows Mobile, the UK's working population agrees with the Conservative leader. The report's findings suggest that the "happiness economy" is booming: today's workers are turning away from the traditional work-life balance towards work-life "blending", with almost half of us (46.8 per cent, to be exact) throwing off the chains that bind us to our desks and taking jobs that involve working away from the office, on our own terms.

"The phrase 'work-life balance' implies that there is a balance between the two, whereby one goes up and the other goes down, but that suggests that work isn't part of life, which it is," says Alex Reeve, director of the mobile business group at Microsoft UK. "People increasingly want to blur work and life. Employers are going to have to come to terms with that. There is going to be more and more demand from employees to spend time at home or on the road. People want work to be more flexible and technology is enabling a cultural change to take place."

The technology driving this cultural shift is all around us, and has given the new generation of workers far greater control over their working practices. Wi-Fi is in the air, with "hot spots" soon to outnumber "cold spots" in Britain, and the hardware with which to use it is on the streets: forget 12-inch laptops; hand-held mobile devices like BlackBerries are now an essential part of the white-collar worker's tool-belt, meaning that people have access to their e-mails, documents, even sat-nav, when they are away from their desks.

"The UK is at the forefront of this trend," Reeve explains, "because it is geographically dense, with much of the population crammed into the bottom right-hand corner of the country. People want a less congested life, less traffic, lower property prices. They want to cut down on their carbon emissions. Now people can work from home more easily; if you want to have a meeting nowadays, what you need is their knowledge and expertise, not their physical presence."

Reeve's outfit provides operating systems for the more sophisticated mobile phones and devices on the UK market, which allow such meetings to take place remotely; they expect to shift a million of the products in 2007. Networking employees from Hastings to the Hebrides is a growing necessity; around 155,000 workers are quitting the capital every year.

"These days," says Reeve, "there are more 'portfolio workers', both young and old. You might find that someone who was a contractor three days a week was working on his novel or his blog for the other two."

The trend to work-life blending has been led by people in the creative industries, whose work has always involved them being somewhat nomadic, and by the upper-management class, who have both the money and the portfolios to make use of cutting-edge gadgetry.

But Reeve is confident that new practices will soon trickle down through major companies and into the general workplace. The Future Laboratory's report found 40 per cent of workers saying that control over their working day was the main benefit of mobile working; 77 per cent felt new technology had already had a positive effect on their productivity.

The report identifies the different breeds of worker generated by the work-life blending revolution. The jargon is almost as innovative as the technology. There are the "trans-corporate workers", permanently plugged into their laptops despite their globetrotting: the report claims they will number 5.5 million by 2012; there are the "data jockeys", young people who live and breathe technology and will soon translate that into work; "digital artisans"; and "urban unitaskers".

As long ago as 2004, the think-tank Demos produced a pamphlet identifying one of these groups, the "pro-ams", or professional amateurs: people who use their amateur expertise to professional standards to have a second or parallel career based on passion rather than financial necessity.

"The pro-ams are knowledgeable, educated, committed and networked by new technology," goes Demos' argument in The Pro-Am Revolution. "The 20th century was shaped by large hierarchical organisations with professionals at the top... pro-ams are the new driving force, creating new streams of knowledge, new kinds of organisations, new sources of authority."

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