One of the
problems I have with email is that little dinging noise the computer makes
whenever an email arrives. No matter
what I’m doing, I simply can’t seem to make myself ignore that little ding. I know you can push a button somewhere in your
system preferences and turn the ding off, but I don’t want to turn the ding off,
even though it interrupts me all the time.
I feel a little excited every time I hear the ding -- I can hardly wait
to open the email to see if it’s something good or if it will make me feel good. And sometimes, especially after I’ve sent
someone an email containing information that might not make them very happy, I
feel a little anxious too. Maybe it’ll
be something bad, I think, and then I’m in even more of a hurry to see what the
email says. Every time I hear the ding I
feel compelled to stop what I’m doing, open the email it’s announcing, read the
email, and then answer the email. (It
goes without saying that the same is true for texts, which arrive with even
more fanfare and are even more impossible to ignore. I have pretty much the same issue with phone
messages too.)
I think the real
problem with email is that it’s scattered throughout the day and therefore
makes us feel scattered. There’s no
sense of having completed a task when we email because just when we send one
email another one comes that needs to be responded to. It arrives in the midst of other tasks,
interrupts our concentration, and calls out to us – Pay attention to me! I might be saying something interesting! I probably need to be responded to! -- if we
try to ignore it. And it takes up time we’ve planned to devote to other things,
either by crowding them with little interruptions or by hogging their time all
together. How many times have you opened your email first thing in the morning
and then found yourself spending much more time on it than you thought you
would, or even ended up emailing instead of doing whatever else you had to do?
I know I’m not the
only person writing about this, and I’m certainly not the only person
struggling with it. A Pew Research
Center survey conducted last spring found that 67 percent of cell phone owners
find themselves checking their device even when it’s not ringing or vibrating. As far as being digitally addicted goes, I’m
probably somewhere in the bottom third of the pack. For me, at least so far,
emailing/texting/phone-checking is mostly a problem when I’m supposed to be
writing.
The other day when
I was sitting at my computer, I was dismayed to find myself checking my email
every few minutes. I also felt pulled by
my telephone, which I had turned off for the duration of my writing time, and a
few times I actually turned the phone back on and listened to my voicemail. (There was nothing interesting there, of
course.) Doing something compulsive to
get away from the hard work of concentrating on writing isn’t new to me. I used to eat during my writing time, and a
long time before that I used to smoke
during it. Still, there’s something
about this emailing and phone-message-listening-to that feels different. I feel pulled off course by it in a way
that’s stressful, somehow, at the same time as it’s compelling. I’m not alone at my desk with my writing any
more, I’m there with an infinite possible number of people who may or may not
want or need something from me. And the
quality of my attention, when I’m emailing or worrying about phone messages, is
different from the quality of my attention when I’m writing. It’s scattered and sprinkled with anxiety
about other people and their wants and needs.
And it’s watered-down – even when I was eating or smoking there were
times when I wasn’t eating or smoking and during those times I could write
without fear of interruption, and food and cigarettes didn’t pop out of nowhere
to tap me on the shoulder and get my attention, the way email does.
The obvious solution is to bite the bullet and
put emailing (and texting and making phone calls and listening to phone
messages and let’s throw in surfing the Internet and looking at Facebook too)
in their place. That is, find some
spots for them during the day and do them then instead of doing them all the
time along with everything else. Timothy
Ferriss, who wrote The Four-Hour Work
Week, says in a recent book that he only checks his email twice a day. A writer I know says he’s had good luck
emailing only after one o’clock in the afternoon. And a number of experts on time-management
have been suggesting more or less the same thing – that you pick a number of
times you’ll check and answer emails every day – say, four – turn your email
off the rest of the time and let your clients, and whoever else needs to know,
know when you are and aren’t going to be reading and responding to your
emails. All of which seems like very
good advice.
The only thing is,
I suspect it may be easier to tell somebody to turn off their email (cell
phone, et cetera) some of the time than it is to actually do it. That it might be similar to telling an
alcoholic to manage their drinking by only drinking wine from four to six in
the afternoon. That it might have about
the same result – that is, it might seem like a solution has been reached but
in the long run there won’t be much real change. I’m not saying that every single one of us is
a digital-aholic. But I do think we –
each of us, or at least most of us -- probably have to address or at least
consider the compulsive, addictive element of emailing (texting, surfing the
Internet, etc.) in our own situations before we can really get a hold of
it. I know I did, and I continue to have
to work at it.
I’ve started
turning off my email while I write. I have to turn it off -- I can’t just decide to ignore it, because I
can’t make myself ignore those little dings.
It’s been hard, I admit it, to turn off my email and leave it off. So far, during my one- or two-hour chunks of
writing time, the longest I’ve managed to avoid turning my email back on to
check my messages is fifteen minutes.
I’ve noticed that when I’m turning it back on I have a brief feeling of
pleasurable anticipation. Getting a nice little email, it turns out, feels to
me (and probably everybody else) like a little reward, like eating a cookie or
something. Usually the emails I get are
not particularly nice – they’re either totally boring advertisements or humdrum
communications about work or something else.
But there’s always a chance that one could be nice -- could make me feel
good, accepted, loved, rewarded -- and every so often one does. So I guess I’m like those research monkeys
that kept pushing the bar to try to get an intermittent dose of cocaine.
So what can we do about all of this?
Do we all need to go to twelve-step meetings to deal with our addictions
to instant communication? I don’t think
there are any such meetings, but maybe we can take a page from other
twelve-step programs. First of all, we
probably need to admit there’s a compulsive element to the whole thing, that it
might take a little more than just making a decision to change how and when we
email (and text and surf and Facebook, et cetera), to actually make
changes. It might help to try to change,
as I did, and then see what happens. Try
turning off your email (or your smartphone) for certain periods of time during
the day and see how it feels: Can you
stand it? Do you have to keep turning it
back on just in case? If you find it’s
hard to keep away from instant communicating, then that information in itself
may be helpful. Maybe you can just sit
with the feeling, acknowledge and accept it, notice how the compulsion to
communicate is taking away from your ability to peacefully stick to one task at
a time. (This is similar to step one in the twelve steps: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol,
that our lives had become unmanageable.”)
Maybe that’s all we have to do for a while; maybe doing that in itself
-- just recognizing what’s going on and accepting it – will make things better. It did help, has helped, me.
It might also be helpful to take a little inventory of whatever we’re
getting from constantly checking our email (as in step four: “Made a searching and fearless moral
inventory of ourselves”). Or we can make
a goal, such as only emailing at certain times of the day, and then picture
ourselves accomplishing that goal during our meditation or ask the larger
smarter part of ourselves to help us accomplish it. (Step three:
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a
power greater than ourselves.”) Or maybe
all we have to do is make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to
ourselves and our own lives, instead of turning them over to our computers and
our cell phones and other people’s needs and communications. And if worse comes to worse we can always
try taking a digital sabbatical or attending a digital detox retreat, as some
people are doing these days.
We can try all of the above, and then keep trying, until we find something
that works. We’ll know when we’ve
accomplished what we wanted to achieve, whatever it was, because we’ll feel
peaceful and productive – more peaceful than we ever have before, maybe – and
we’ll find time – more time, stretches of time, all of our time -- opening up
in our lives in ways we never dreamed of.
-- Mary Allen
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