Q: Do you ever feel the urge to pull out your smartphone while someone else is making a point in a conversation?
Q: Have you ever realized that you were texting or checking your e-mail while your child was telling you about her day at school?
Q: Have you ever felt that something hasn’t really happened until you post it on Facebook?
Q: Does a flashing red light on your BlackBerry make your heart flutter?
Q: Are you spending time with your spouse or significant other without talking to each other because you’re each immersed in a different device?
If you answered yes to at least a couple of these questions, you’re among the millions of Americans being overrun by technology.
Trust me, I’ve been there (and on some days, I still am). I’ve covered technology for several television networks over the past decade, but while working at CBS News in late 2009, I realized that technology had gotten the best of me. I was more distracted and, ironically, more disconnected than ever before. I was so immersed in technology and work that I’d neglected several important life events: my father getting remarried, a good friend’s pregnancy, my stepbrother getting divorced.
So I spent one year untangling my wires and streamlining my digital life, including checking out of social networks for eight months. I rediscovered why I love technology so much — but now it plays a more manageable role in my life, improving it rather than cluttering it up.
There are plenty of anti-technology manifestos out there these days — Jaron Lanier’s“You Are Not a Gadget,” Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” among them — and many instances of people trying to pull the plug on connectedness altogether. But I’m not advocating an all-out war against technology. To the contrary, I say it is time to make peace with all our gadgets and fold them into our lives more effectively. We need a strategy that that puts us back in control, rather than letting technology overwhelm us. Here’s how.
Step 1: Rethink
Say you spend a total of two hours each day posting on Facebook or Twitter, mindlessly surfing the Web, sculpting your online image, or all of the above, in ways that don’t relate explicitly to your job. It doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of a year, that adds up to roughly 30 days — an entire month vanished in the ether. What do you have to show for it? What else could you have accomplished in that time?
Even multitasking — the preferred excuse of the gadget-obsessed — isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A study published in the journal Science in April 2010 found that performing multiple simultaneous tasks leaves the brain somewhat baffled (the phrase “jack of all trades and master of none” comes to mind), while a 2009 Stanford University study found that massive multitaskers are easily distracted and have a hard time sorting out irrelevant information. This unfocused state often results in irrational decision-making. Our brains are, as Washington neurologist Richard Restak put it to me, being “sculpted” by digital forces.
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