Going on a media fast
We live in a world full of conveniences. We literally have access to all the knowledge accrued throughout all of human history-- art, history, maths, sciences -- and its accessible through a small pocket sized mobile iDevice.
.... and we use that device to look at photos of cats.
Ironically, the device that was designed in order to save us time instead becomes our greatest time waster. The smart devices we use to schedule our day ends up scheduling us. Our lives revolve around our smart devices rather than the other way around
The separation anxiety we have when we are apart from our phones is a real, documented phenomena. The phantom leg vibrations and the irresistible urge to check our phone when we hear a notification is nothing short of Pavlovian.
If you can't bear to part with your Instagram feed, your Facebook wall, and all your re-tweets, then you can keep them. You don't have to delete anything if you don't want to. The intent of this article is not encourage anyone to go cold turkey. If you're working in an office or if you're an entrepreneur, its impossible to not check emails and texts. Furthermore, just as it is with many fad diets, most people simply will go back to their usual habits and nothing will have been gained by going "off the grid" for a few days. A good plan that you follow will always be better than the perfect plan that you give up on after 6 weeks.
Instead of trying to go cold turkey, I present this:
The seldom-used do-not-disturb function on your iphone is a godsend. Its the crescent shaped icon on your control center. You can access this function by swiping up on the iPhone screen. You know that its working if you see that same half moon crescent icon on the top of your iPhone screen near the battery icon.
For friends using Android, I believe its called "priority mode" which does essentially the same function. With it, you can silence calls, alerts, and notifications that you get while your device is locked. You can also schedule a time or choose who you'll allow calls from.
This is better than turning on airplane mode or turning the phone off, because you can still check all your messages, texts, and emails. The only difference now is that you're doing it on your own time and not whenever someone likes the picture you took of the ham sandwich you had during lunch.
With just this simple function, the desire to constantly dote on your phone will slowly subside, and you'll be checking your phone less and less.
.... and we use that device to look at photos of cats.
Ironically, the device that was designed in order to save us time instead becomes our greatest time waster. The smart devices we use to schedule our day ends up scheduling us. Our lives revolve around our smart devices rather than the other way around
The separation anxiety we have when we are apart from our phones is a real, documented phenomena. The phantom leg vibrations and the irresistible urge to check our phone when we hear a notification is nothing short of Pavlovian.
Taking Control of Your Phone
Its impossible to go back to a world without emails, voice mails and texts. Even the social networking applications like the oft-mentioned Facebook or Twitter can still have some utility. And if not, if I told you that you should just delete all your social networking accounts, that's something that you already know -- I wouldn't be offering you any new information.If you can't bear to part with your Instagram feed, your Facebook wall, and all your re-tweets, then you can keep them. You don't have to delete anything if you don't want to. The intent of this article is not encourage anyone to go cold turkey. If you're working in an office or if you're an entrepreneur, its impossible to not check emails and texts. Furthermore, just as it is with many fad diets, most people simply will go back to their usual habits and nothing will have been gained by going "off the grid" for a few days. A good plan that you follow will always be better than the perfect plan that you give up on after 6 weeks.
Instead of trying to go cold turkey, I present this:
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| from Apple.com |
The seldom-used do-not-disturb function on your iphone is a godsend. Its the crescent shaped icon on your control center. You can access this function by swiping up on the iPhone screen. You know that its working if you see that same half moon crescent icon on the top of your iPhone screen near the battery icon.
For friends using Android, I believe its called "priority mode" which does essentially the same function. With it, you can silence calls, alerts, and notifications that you get while your device is locked. You can also schedule a time or choose who you'll allow calls from.
 |
| from Apple.com |
This is better than turning on airplane mode or turning the phone off, because you can still check all your messages, texts, and emails. The only difference now is that you're doing it on your own time and not whenever someone likes the picture you took of the ham sandwich you had during lunch.
With just this simple function, the desire to constantly dote on your phone will slowly subside, and you'll be checking your phone less and less.
Controlling Your Email Inbox
I just checked my email inbox and it has amassed a good 20,000+ emails since 2010. Out of all of those emails, I'd say probably 100 or so were urgent enough for me to have to respond within the hour. The rest? Either junk or not urgent. This means that there is no need to check your email constantly. Make it a habit to limit your email-checking to maybe twice or three times a day-- once when you get to work, perhaps once in the afternoon sometime before the end of the business day, and then once in the evening when you're checking your personal emails. You can spend a little bit of extra time responding to anything if its particularly important. But for probably 99% of those emails, its probably junk and isn't worth your time.Keeping Up On Current Events (or not)
Lastly, like most things in the media today, the news is also mostly fluff. Take for example a news event like the Superbowl. The entirety of the Superbowl itself is a 4 hour sporting event. However, news outlets will drone on and on for days and weeks at a time. That's the job of the writers and the journalists. If they didn't try to fluff out their pieces and stretch them over over days and weeks, they'd be quickly out of the job.
Instead, you could choose to skip everything and just watch the Superbowl itself and not miss out on anything important. Even better, you could probably just spend 15 minutes reading about it the next day in the newspaper and still not miss out on anything important.
Whether you're a sports fan or not, the point to take from this is that the coverage of most "newsworthy" events-- whether it be the Superbowl, whatever the Israeli prime minister is up to, or what gas prices are going to do -- is mainly fluff. Moreover, most current events in the world don't have much of a bearing on your own life anyways. And if they do, most of the times its not something you have any real control over anyway, so why spend so much time reading or worrying about it?
Despite my rant on this, I still do think that it is important to keep up with at least the major current events. For example if a storm is coming to your town, that'd probably be a good thing to know. For the most part, you can get everything you need by reading up on the news for about an hour once a week. After a while, you'll realize that even when you limit yourself to reading the news once a week, its still mostly fluff.
By making the effort to filter out and reduce the amount of information out there in the world, it counter-intuitively makes you a smarter and more productive human being. You'll find yourself with hours of extra time to enjoy doing things you actually want to do, as opposed to having all that time slowly leak away with endless likes, pokes, and notifications. Take the control of your life back from your phone!
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