What Does a Healthy Relationship With Technology Look Like?
The problem, and some steps to take toward fixing it.
I have become increasingly convinced that the way I use technology is having a significant negative impact on the quality of my life. Here, I want to briefly describe the problem and some of the steps I can take toward changing it.
I have been having more conversations about this topic with the people around me and many of them share a similar sentiment. Frankly, I think this is a societal issue that we are all facing to some degree.
I’d welcome the opportunity to hear your thoughts about your experience using technology, possible solutions to the problems it has created for you, etc. Please feel free to reach out in the comments, by email (stockthoughts81@gmail.com), or on Twitter (@stockthoughts81).
The Problem
I recently listened to Nicholas Carr on the Intersections podcast with Hitendra Wadwha (link). Carr wrote the 2011 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain. Summarily, my main takeaway is that the way that we use technology is having all sorts of negative impacts on us. This is both in terms of our productivity (shortening attention spans) and our social/emotional well-being (we are never fully present as long as our phone is in close proximity).
Carr writes in his book, “Smartphones have become so tied up in our lives that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check a phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. (230)”
I really enjoyed Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work, which talks more about the causes of this. Part of what he discusses is the idea of attention residue. Basically, when we are constantly task-switching and distracted by our phones, email, etc., we never fully recover the focus we had before that distraction. Because we tend to take a little bit of what we were just thinking about with us into the next task on our list. This can have detrimental impacts on both relationships (you’re thinking about the email you just read instead of really listening) as well as our ability to focus and think deeply on our work.
There is plenty of research that suggests that screen time is highly correlated with mental health issues (see here for example). We just weren’t made to stare at screens all day.
I also watched the popular Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. This covers a lot of the issues above, and more. Two of the points that stood out to me:
Anna Lembke: “Social media is a drug. We have a biological imperative to connect with other people.”
Tristan Harris, Co-Founder of the Center for Humane Technology and former design ethicist at Google, compares our phones to slot machines (link). They are built on the same concept of “intermittent variable rewards”. Every time we refresh Instagram, we are playing a slot machine to see what new post comes up. Every time we check our phone (most studies suggest we do this ~75-150 times per day on average), we are playing a slot machine to see who might have texted us or emailed us.
Part of the issue here is that this sort of behavior has become so commonplace and socially acceptable. I think part of what we need to do is recognize and accept that it is having real, material negative consequences on our lives. Everyone has seen headlines touching on the above issues. Few people ever seem motivated to change.
Perhaps the idea that a phone can have so much power over us is a little damaging to our egos. I’d encourage you to simply take a look at your screen time and try to be honest with yourself about whether it’s at a level you are happy with (and remember this doesn’t capture desktop time). And if it’s not, accept that and commit to making a change. Talk to people about it and find people to hold you accountable.
So What Can We Do?
Once we have decided this is something to work on, where can we start?
There are two clear rules that I want to be strict with myself about going forward:
Keep the Twitter app off of my phone
Do not sleep with my phone by my bedside and do not use my phone in bed.
For me, this is a small start and I intend to monitor how it impacts my screen time going forward, and layer on more rules and habits until it gets to a place I feel is acceptable.
The two items listed above are pretty clear cut rules that 1) are easy to distinguish between failure and success on, and 2) won’t interfere with my professional or social life in any way.
There are some other ideas I have that I want to incorporate but aren’t so simple as to say “I will no longer do this”:
Be intentional about finding specific blocks of time where I can keep my phone outside of close proximity to me. So for example, take an hour long walk and leave the phone at home. Or if I am watching something on TV, put my phone in the other room. As I sit in a coffee shop writing this, I turned off my phone and put it in my backpack.
I have been using a tool called BlockSite. This allows people to do a Pomodoro type approach where you can set e.g. four 30-minute sessions of back-to-back work time, where 25 minutes of “focus time” (where Twitter, LinkedIn, and Outlook are blocked) are followed by 5 minutes of break time (when they get unblocked).
Other things you can do include turning off notifications, generally being weary of which social media you use, time block out specific sessions to check social media, printing out material instead of reading it online where distractions are a click away, etc.
I’d like to hear about your own experiences and thoughts about this. Comment below or reach out by email (stockthoughts81@gmail.com) or Twitter (@stockthoughts81).