![]() ![]() As you build back to a healthy digital balance in your life, your e-day will grow - but it shouldn’t expand right back to where it was. One way to do this is by being vigilant about your e-day - the time you spend online each day, from when your digital use starts to when it ends.ĭuring detox, the length of your e-day should be basically zero. The point of the diet is not to eliminate gadgets from your life but to assign them their proper place. Revisit these questions constantly throughout your digital diet. Over the detox weekend, get a regular old-school notebook and jot down your answers to the following questions: How are your face-to-face relationships with people close to you? How would you describe your reliance on the technology in the box? Are you terrified at the thought of disconnecting? Pull out the musical instrument that has been gathering dust in the basement. You can exercise more, or engage in a conversation with someone face to face. You can pick up a book rather than your laptop. You might enjoy checking the weather by stepping outside and looking up rather than tapping a smartphone icon. For one weekend, downsize the communications technology in your life. You can check your e-mail, but just once each day, maybe in the evening. Third, set a message on your cellphone saying you won’t be available to check in for a couple of days (let callers assume you’re on a remote vacation). Second, and this is scary, give someone you trust the passwords to your social networking accounts (never for your bank or credit card accounts, of course), so they can change them to remove any temptation to log on. If you’re due for a detox, it’s best done over a weekend.įirst, take your digital devices and assorted tech temptations - anything needing a charger - and put them in a box (yes, an actual box it can be a shoebox or a dresser drawer). No wonder Microsoft’s ad campaign for its new Windows 7 mobile devices features the tag line “A phone to save us from our phones.” That’s not to mention everything we’ve sacrificed in terms of privacy, personal identity and sleep. Our brains are, as Washington neurologist Richard Restak put it to me, being “sculpted” by digital forces. This unfocused state often results in irrational decision-making. A study published in the journal Science in April 2010 found that performing multiple simultaneous tasks leaves the brain somewhat baffled (the phrase “jack of all trades and master of none” comes to mind), while a 2009 Stanford University study found that massive multitaskers are easily distracted and have a hard time sorting out irrelevant information. What do you have to show for it? What else could you have accomplished in that time?Įven multitasking - the preferred excuse of the gadget-obsessed - isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of a year, that adds up to roughly 30 days - an entire month vanished in the ether. Say you spend a total of two hours each day posting on Facebook or Twitter, mindlessly surfing the Web, sculpting your online image, or all of the above, in ways that don’t relate explicitly to your job. We need a strategy that that puts us back in control, rather than letting technology overwhelm us. To the contrary, I say it is time to make peace with all our gadgets and fold them into our lives more effectively. But I’m not advocating an all-out war against technology. ![]() There are plenty of anti-technology manifestos out there these days - Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget,” Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” among them - and many instances of people trying to pull the plug on connectedness altogether. I rediscovered why I love technology so much - but now it plays a more manageable role in my life, improving it rather than cluttering it up. So I spent one year untangling my wires and streamlining my digital life, including checking out of social networks for eight months. I was so immersed in technology and work that I’d neglected several important life events: my father getting remarried, a good friend’s pregnancy, my stepbrother getting divorced. I was more distracted and, ironically, more disconnected than ever before. I’ve covered technology for several television networks over the past decade, but while working at CBS News in late 2009, I realized that technology had gotten the best of me. Trust me, I’ve been there (and on some days, I still am). If you answered yes to at least a couple of these questions, you’re among the millions of Americans being overrun by technology. ![]()
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