Find your moment to pause

If you don’t recognize that symbol to the right, you are (perhaps) among the lucky few. The icon is the “message waiting” indicator for the very popular workplace collaboration tool Slack, and it’s been slowly killing me.

This isn’t going to be a condemnation of Slack, though. Rather, I want to talk about the hyper-responsive world that we’ve built around us, and how it quietly erodes your focus, and what you can do to counter it.

The woman with no cell phone

For several years in my 20s, I lived in a small city, within walking distance to shops, restaurants, bars, and the water. I was soon a regular at one particular family-owned restaurant.

I got to know the owner pretty well over the years, and we talked often. During one of those chats, it came out that she didn’t have a cell phone. Not even a flip phone; no cell phone at all! In 2008! Apple sold ten million iPhones in 2008.

I recall asking her, What if someone needs to reach you? She explained that she’s usually at home or at the restaurant, so people can call her there, and if she’s somewhere else, they can leave a message.

They can leave a message?!

The spiral of expectations

When any new communications tech comes out, which makes a new responsiveness possible, adopting that new level of responsiveness can be a signal that we send to our friends, family, and coworkers about how dedicated we are. But, as UC Irvine professor Melissa Mazmanian wrote, the opposite becomes true: not adopting that new responsiveness might signal that we aren’t dedicated enough.

Mazmanian termed this the “spiral of expectations.” The response time that society demands gets ever shorter, and as a result, we lose our ability to simply be.

I frequently, compulsively glance down at the Slack icon to see if it has a red dot. Yes, I have notifications snoozed most of the time, but even then there is a part of my brain saying what if someone needs me?

It is like I am in search of some reason to not be doing what I’m already doing, and when I think about it that way, it’s pretty messed up.

This is what the constant-notifications culture has done to me; it has made me a slave to that little dot. Because I want to be responsive, I want to be responsible. I want people to like and trust me.

My friend the restaurant-owner with no cell phone beat the system by simply not adopting the new technology. To 26-year-old me, it made no sense. Why would anyone want to be less connected?

But now I realize that she made the right call: to preserve her attention, that priceless and limited resource, for only what she chose. How freeing.

“[T]he mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day.”

—Charles Dickens, in a letter to a friend, rejecting their invitation

Be free, for a while

I challenge you to disconnect for one hour, today. To live free from notifications, and especially, free from expectations. I’m giving you permission to pick an hour, or two, or more, and simply rest.

This doesn’t mean that you must do nothing, although I fully support spending some time in purposeful boredom. You could take a walk, read a book, draw a picture, play an instrument. The important part is that you do this without distraction and without guilt. Leave your phone somewhere else.

Let me know how it goes

I want to hear your stories of living a distraction-free hour (or more). You can comment on this post on the web, or reply directly to the email if you received it in my newsletter, or DM me on Twitter (@aaronbieber).

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