The advent of personal technology in recent years and its assimilation into our daily lives in the form of emails, cell phones and computers has been greatly beneficial to us as humans.
We can now achieve more in a shorter space of time:
We can run businesses from a beach on the other side of the world with relative ease.
We can learn about anything that tickles our fancy at the click of a few buttons.
We can connect with people instantly; share with them our ideas, our thoughts, our lives, almost anywhere in the world, at any given moment.
However, this level of connectivity has come at a price…
With an increasing number of hours being spent staring at screens of different sizes, many people are finding it hard to disconnect from their ‘e- lives’ and have a compulsion to constantly check their emails, scroll through their newsfeed and Instagram their lunch.
One series of results in a survey by Accenture across 33 countries stated “78 percent of respondents agreed that technology enables them to be more flexible with their schedules.” However, “70 percent of respondents also agreed that technology brings work into their personal lives.”
There’s nothing wrong with this in moderation. In fact, constant connectivity allows many people to stay on top of their work or life in real time. The problem arises when people fail to strike a balance and find themselves checking their phone anxiously every 10 minutes or spending the majority of their time procrastinating on the Internet at the expense of doing something productive or even entertaining themselves to the point of apathy for what goes on in the world around them.
You may find yourself feeling trapped by technology as you read this now and it’s not your fault – it’s the nature of the technology, the ease of access, the comfortable disconnect. It’s just so easy to allow work and your ‘e-life’ into your personal time. You can, however, manage yourself and your user habits to manage your time better, increase your productivity and form and maintain more meaningful relationships.
Email and social media notifications are the biggest problem for most people given they arrive throughout the day and are tempting to ‘just take a peek’ at. Chances are, it’s not ‘just a peek’ and you’ll get side tracked, so set yourself certain times in the day when you will check and reply to emails.
The later in the day the better, as you can get your tasks for the day (which you set the night before) wound up with minimal side tracks thrown at you via morning emails. If most of the emails you get don’t require instant replies, then you can look at setting up an auto-responder that informs people that you check your emails in batches and that if they need you before then, they can call you.
When out to a meal, or in the company of others, leave your phone off the table for the duration of your engagement unless you’re an on-call doctor. If you’re out dining with a group of friends, you can pile everyone’s phones in the middle of the table and whoever cracks first and requires their ‘phone fix’ is picking up the bill. The conversation around the table will be more engaging and of better quality as people will be more focused on the present and each other.
I would also recommend taking a ‘connectivity free’ day every now and then. You can go for a hike or just spend the day baking pizza from scratch, painting or catching up with friends you haven’t seen in a while – any of the things you would have done 10 years ago before the machines took over.
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