I wonder if I could do it…
Today was pretty uneventful at work, it was a slow day and we only had 2 customers, both of which were not assigned to me, so sadly I am unable to report on any interesting characters for the day. So in lieu of a customer story I figured I’d share my thoughts on a really insightful article I stumbled (literally) across this evening. It’s a really good “make you think” piece from one of my newest blog discoveries, decor8 (www.decor8blog.com).
Basically it discusses an article by James Sturm, a writer at Slate Magazine (www.slate.com) about his attempt at going 4 months without using the internet. Personally, I’ve been struggling with some of the same exact questions about my life (and the internet’s role in it) lately, and I can relate to the author describing how when he’s not using a computer he’s thinking of ways he can get back to using the computer.
“The question I’ve been wrestling with lately is whether it’s all going by so fast because that’s just the reality of middle age or because of the way I’ve been living my life. Specifically, I’ve started to wonder whether that feeling might be connected to all the time I spend online. Too often I sit down to dash off a quick e-mail and before I know it an hour or more has gone by.” – James Sturm (from his article ‘I’m Quitting the Internet’: http://www.slate.com/id/2249562/entry/2249563/ )
Thinking back, it’s really kind of crazy how internet/social media obsessed my generation has become. I mean, there’s people I know (myself included on occasion) who can’t go 5 minutes without checking their cell phone to see if they’ve gotten a new email or text message. And those same people often end up replying to those emails and text messages immediately after they see them in their inboxes. If you think back to the time before myspace, facebook, twitter and all of the other social media outlets, to a time when we actually got out of our houses and interacted with each other…it’s just mind blowing how much society has changed in the past 15 years. When I think about how often I check my email, and my cell phone, and all of the various social media networks I belong to, it kind of makes me sad. I really do feel like I shouldn’t have to check my email so often, or let checking my email turn into an excuse to spend hours on the internet wasting time at various websites (I’m looking at you, youtube.)
I went to Ollie’s Bargain Outlet yesterday, which was an adventure within itself, but while I was there I found the book “Upgrade your Life” by Gina Trapani, the founding editor at Lifehacker.com. I started reading it last night and I’m hooked. The book itself is fantastic, it’s a collection of tips and tricks to increase productivity and to in essence, upgrade your life. The first thing the book mentions is taking control over your email inbox. It seems that more often than not, we are becoming slaves to our inboxes, reacting everytime we get a notification of receiving a new email, then immediately dropping everything we’re doing to respond to the email, which then can usually lead to other internet based distractions…which we all know leads to the internet becoming a huge source of time suckage in our lives. The book describes easy ways to empty and sort your inbox so that you’re not a slave to it, and it teaches some really awesome ways to manage your time and dedicate only certain amounts of time to email responses and how to effectively shorten your email responses without omitting important information. All in all, the book is really informative and I’m looking forward to putting some of these “Hacks” to use!
