I Used to Be a Human Being (2016)
nymag.com
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I uninstalled my news apps, and instead I actively browse to a news site whenever I want to read the news. In the years following more apps got uninstalled, and I down scaled my phone contract.
Nowadays I never use mobile data, and my WiFi I always off. It became a habit to always actively get my information. So if I want to check my whatsapp messages, I sit down, turn WiFi on, read messages, and turn it off.
I don't even think about it anymore, it's the normal way of handling my phone for years now. This week I read people on average take between 2 and 3 hours a DAY on there phones. That sounds like alien to me, just can't imagine.
Assuming you work at a desk job (like a programmer), keep work-related items off of your phone. If your superiors complain, tell them you don't want to be responsible for leaking company secrets if you happen to lose your phone. If there's an emergency, your teammates could signal you that your help is necessary via SMS, and you can use a separate device to help them out.
Don't sell your soul to your employer. I always establish this limit when starting a new position. My phone is for personal use only, and no work-related communication (business email, Slack etc.) would ever go near it.
No one is asking you to be active on chat on your personal devices all the time.
Specifically, I personally am able to keep my work stress level in balance just if I have all work communications (especially emails and slack) on my phone, so that I can take a quick look at what's happening even when I'm not working.
This doesn't mean I actually end up working after hours: in fact, 99% of the times I just skim over the push notifications in a few seconds and go back to what I was doing.
I found it to be much less stressful than having to wake up in the morning and see the massive burst of activity that happened between 5pm and 8am (especially if your team is distributed across different time zones like mine).
And God forbid if I did that when I go on a 2 weeks vacation, I actually wouldn't be able to enjoy the vacation at all because I would always be thinking about the mayhem that's waiting for me on my return. If I am able to glance at the notifications a few times a day instead and occasionally reply on some really high priority stuff, it calms me down because I can get an idea of what has been happening.
I'm not sure this is healthy, but I tried your strategy several times and it never worked for me, and this is also in different contexts (e.g. different teams and/or employers). It might also be because I have always held a position of tech lead/manager, so in general there is always a stream of people who are asking for my input on something (that being said, I heavily rely on delegation and people are fully responsible for their own decisions, but they just end up pinging me regardless because I have significant contexts about the projects).
If you need to 'get away', for real, what you really need is a sabbatical, and to hand off all your work responsibilities to other people. Then you can unplug more fully and might actually stand a chance at finding true value and connections with other people in a more extended trip to a part of the world you've never visited.
That's how some people vacation. There's a whole host of meaningful activity that falls between vacation as product and a sabbatical.
Yeah, and they have some other advantages too. Disconnecting from people is half the reason I need a break in the first place.
I'm waiting to get the opportunity to do a _complete_ sabbatical. One day.
Careless mixing of realtime chatter, async memos, and reference documentation leads to a fear of missing out. You have to wade through a stream of junk to see if you missed something important. Eventually, people even expect you to know the whole stream whether you were present or not. How mad! If something important happened during your vacation, someone in your organization should tell you about it once you return. Otherwise, you should return to a clean slate, only tracking the chatter that happens while on duty.
In the best recent office cultures I've seen, instant messaging is used without history. It's water-cooler banter or popping your head in the next office. Important but still transient things can go in email and be read a week or two later when you return, but there aren't so many of them. And stable things go in a wiki, not in email, i.e. if subsequent new hires are supposed to know about it too. Nobody should be onboarded by telling them to crawl through transcripts of previous work weeks, and a proper vacation lets you return as if you are onboarding.
By the way, early in my career, these same types of careless people abused email the way they abuse Slack today. Busy people dealt with hundreds of emails in a day, not counting spam nor automated notification messages, which weren't so common then. Your inbox would be flooded with realtime chatter, async memos, and attached documents that should have been in a repository somewhere. Eventually, those with enough clout were driven to set auto-reply messages that they are on vacation and no email received during their absence would ever be read.
For me turning off Wifi, and consciously turning it on a couple of times a day is the big difference. Just like checking mail 15 years ago. You decided when to open Eudora or Hotmail, checked mail, en closed it again.
For me any app I use is like old school mail checking. I decide when to check. My friends know it can take a couple of hours or sometimes days for me to respond. If something is really urgent, they call me :)
News isn't just "information" anymore, it's a signal of social norms. If you stop thinking of breaking news as "this is important", and rather that "this is what people want me to think is important", it is far easier to dismiss in substance, but still value as contributing to your understanding of what constitutes common knowledge.
So now it's 1. What's your job, is that good enough for Mr. Jones to judge? 2. What's your house look like, and do you have curb appeal? 3. Do you have the proper level of outrage over the latest news stories?
It's fascinating. Watching societal norms take hold. Honestly.
It is fascinating, but these norms are crucial to meeting and interacting with new people. Even if you disagree with some social norms, if you don't understand them and the positions behind them, then you can't effectively communicate with new people you interact with. Saying, "you heard X today, total BS" is far superior than saying "what is X?"
Social norms allow folks who have never met to still know each other to some degree. They are not terribly helpful with building meaningful relationships (eg close friends, etc), which is why so many dislike them as they seem superficial, which they are. However, they are instrumental in building early relationships and trust with someone who is unfamiliar.
If you think of norms more as a tool to help you connect with folks that would otherwise be strangers, and less as a "dick-measure contest", they seem lest distasteful, even beneficial.
And, I don’t see this changing. That being said, having access to things 24x7x365, does have its consequences. The servers are on, your phone is on. Amazon is available, Video programming is available be it cable or streamed over the web or broadcast TV. Then social media and work. People keep responding to work email even when not at work. This seen as normal. That needs to change.
There is no pause. No forced downtime in modern life. You only get natural downtime in remote areas of developed countries or in poor areas of developing countries. But we are not adapted to this well.
"New French law establishing workers’ “right to disconnect” goes into effect today. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails. The goals of the law include making sure employees are fairly paid for work, and preventing burnout by protecting private time."
Source: https://fortune.com/2017/01/01/french-right-to-disconnect-la...
People plugged in and responsible 24x7 is silly. I was talking to a dir of physical security at some big company with tens of thousands of employees. He’s the guy. He’s the one to make the call on an emergency be it 9AM or be it 2:30AM. That’s nuts!
Kind of think any remotely obsessive person is going to have to regulate themselves like this to avoid going crazy. The potential shame of breaking the lock is enough to ensure I won't even consider it, for people who have even less self control I feel like there's probably room for some kind of social shaming application which notifies a select set of people when you break rules you impose on yourself.
And then of course, you can comment on them and follow the ensuing discussion.
And it's even easier if you're a journalist/blogger/YouTuber/content creator. In those fields your very popularity and social standing depends on how up to date with current trends you are, and sites like Twitter promise to provide said information.
So you end up spending hours there every day, desparately chasing after everything even remotely considered 'newsworthy' so you can get an article or video about it out online. Social media is like crack for content creators, and something that will almost inevitably end up taking over their whole life until they burn out.
But still, what can you do? The algorithms demand regular posts and updates, and anyone who can't provide them will sink without a trace. And you're certainly not gonna understand what's popular at the moment if you're not keeping up with it all.