As I reach for my iPhone first thing in the morning to check my email, or see what’s happening on Twitter while I’m pushing a kid on the swing I’ve also been thinking about the rush of dopamine we must all get when we get a new email, twitter @ reply, blog comment, etc.
Oh the thrill! Oh the excitement! Oh the addiction!
How do you cope? How do you manage to disconnect and maintain a semblance of balance?
Some food for thought from the web of late:
From Lifehacker:
Why Technology Is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout
From the New York Times:
Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime
Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain
(and then leave me a comment to give me my dopamine fix, please! I need it .. I need it…)
4 comments:
I got an iPad with the hope of aggregating all of that stuff… twitter, facebook, email, Instapaper, RSS. I try to do it all within the sandbox of the iPad. Then I'm more free to concentrate on work on my laptop.
Though the overlap in content relevance is heavy, these sources can be effectively segregated and attended to in a mindful way, while allowing for less distractions to get creative work done.
Anyone over run by these things can get a grip. Whittle down your sources without remorse. Make sure you've got the cream of the crop, and not the noisemakers. Then use them in a conscious manner.
Great post! I shut it all off when I need to do real work although it's hard since I work virtually from home and these tech tools are my way to connect. But if not, seeing those unread tweet, FB and message notifications come up is too hard to resist. 15 minute connection dosages with a coffee in hand at a couple of points during my workday is my equivalent of hanging around the coffee machine.
Brian, I like the idea of segregating activities by the device. In the age of the smartphone, so many temptations at such close range can be hard to resist. Now I need to buy an iPad!
Rachel, I'm in the same situation as you, working virtually. I find it easy enough to stay away from Facebook during the day. Twitter is social but in a work kind of water cooler way -- easier to justify as I'm connecting with my industry.
It's when my kids complain that mommy's looking at her iPhone again -- Saturday morning - that's when I know I have a problem...
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