Sherlock Holmes was famous for his ability to ascertain a great deal about a person's life before they'd actually spoken – a clever trick which the fictional character inherited from an Edinburgh medic called Dr Joseph Bell, who taught Arthur Conan Doyle when he was a student.

Neither Sherlock, nor the brilliant Dr Bell, could do their trick today. Bell, for instance, would look at calluses on his patient's hands as soon as they walked in to the surgery and determine what kind of work they were in – imagine trying to do that now with the 10 million folk who slave in front of computer screens.

From physical appearance alone you wouldn't be able to discern the difference between an insurance adjuster and a ship's captain. Try, in a line-up, pointing to a journalist and then, say, to a hospital administrator – and identification through visual clues alone would be impossible. This has changed in my working lifetime. I've been approached this week by some people who are interested in hearing more about changing times journalism – and their enquiries have got me thinking about when I started out in my career 38 years ago.

I was fascinated by Dr Bell and Holmes and read everything about them that I could – because keen observation is a core value of good journalism and acute scrutiny should determine everything we write. So, as a young cub reporter on a local weekly Westcountry newspaper many years ago, I could indeed have identified… Well, let's say – a cub reporter.

The first clue would have been black smudges on their thumbs and index fingers. The inexperienced hack had to feed their typewriter with not one, but three, separate sheets of messy carbon paper between four sheets of copy paper. One copy was for the print works, one for the proof-reader, one the sub-editor, and one for the "spike" which was an up-turned steel nail that would now be banned in the interests of health and safety.

There'd be other clues, like a certain hunch of the shoulders caused by endless hard hitting of sluggish typewriter keys and also the act of making notes while standing up with nothing to support the notebook other than one's non-writing hand. Try it – you'll soon see how hunched you become. Today I type on computer keys which need little in the way of punching, the machine can email as many copies as required at the press of a button – and the interviewer's hunch has gone thanks to small digital recording devices that can be held without the need to bring hands together in a sort of intense praying position…

The world of work has become less physical – even for people like farmers and trawlermen. Yes, they're out manhandling stuff some of the time – but have you seen the inside of a new tractor cab or the bridge of a modern trawler? More computer screens…

I'm not bemoaning the loss of the individual idiosyncrasies that used to be inherent in the world of work – on the contrary, I applaud new technology that allows us to be more efficient, productive and creative with less effort. But does less effort mean we work less hard? No. Not according to several new reports that show most of us lucky enough to be in work are slaving away harder than ever.

This is bound to happen when economies shrink and people start losing jobs – those left in the work trenches fight ever harder to survive when they see folk around them being picked off on the redundancy parapet. However, I do wonder if some future academic studying the history of labour won't look back and pity a world that had yet to discover how to fine-tune the life-work balance.

There will be answers. Maybe we'll adopt job-sharing in a much bigger way, perhaps there will be stricter limits on work-hours…Whatever the solution, we do need to find it fast, and I'll tell you why. I have discovered the second most common regret people have on their deathbeds is that they worked too hard during their lives and didn't spend enough time with family or friends, or doing things they loved.

If the brilliant Dr Bell were alive today his genius would have been wasted on prescribing rest-cures to one patient after another, no matter what their trade.