In the stress of rising expectations I wrote about how the society of leisure that we expected to come with computer technology has turned into a massive hamster wheel. We keep trying harder to go forward but we never seem to gain any ground. We’re totally stressed.
Somehow we’ve also convinced ourselves that we have to be constantly busy. Taking time to relax, day-dream or do nothing is a waste. Every second has to be filled with something stimulating.
This stress is due to the rising expectations that have come with the new technology. The salvation of our sanity and our leisure will come when we learn to adjust our expectations and allow technology to serve us and not the other way around
Information addiction
Are you addicted to information?
When I ran a national television newsroom I was bombarded by more than a hundred emails every day. With something as timely and competitive as news, email was very difficult to ignore. People needed my decision or input now. Stories were happening everywhere. People expected me to know everything that was going on in the world. With the advent of the “smart phone” I was always attached to my inbox.
After a number of years, I started longing for a day when I would no longer be subject to this constant stream of data and information. When I left television news I had my wish. My email dropped from over a hundred messages a day to less than a handful. What happened? Did I relish in all of this liberated time? No. I kept checking my email at the same frequency and oddly enough became more and more anxious the less email I got. I was addicted to the data stream. Without that stream of information, I felt I must be missing something important.
Why?
My guess is that I spent years telling myself it WAS important and surrounded myself with people who thought the same thing. Rather than email helping my life, my life had become my email.
Life hacks
Life Hacks have become popular. There’s even a site called www.lifehacker.com that will help you use technology to automate things you spend a lot of time doing.
There are many simple lifehacks that deal with email for instance. Have a bunch of different email addresses you check? Use forwarding to send them all to one place. Save time finding different emails by setting up categories that directly send emails from certain people or organizations into a specific file. Use the auto-respond feature of your email to let people know you only check email at certain times a day (or on certain days not at all). Let them know if it’s urgent they can phone you. It’s rarely that urgent.
One word of caution with life hacks. There’s a temptation to take the time you save with life hacks and put it back into the data stream of the digital world. Don’t! Take a walk. Read a book. Be bored for a while. It’s easy to get so addicted to life hacks you spend your time solving problems you don’t have.
Guilty parent syndrome
I do feel sorry for parents these days. Apparently if you don’t have your child signed up for swimming lessons, French lessons, piano lessons, soccer, hockey, baseball and math camp all at once you’re considered a bad parent. No doubt many of these things are enriching, but too much of it trains our children to be like us – stressed and obsessed with being busy. We forget how much creativity comes from having time to do nothing. Lessons teach kids to follow rules and learn tasks, but true genius often comes from having time to experiment and dream.
My parents enrolled me in a few organized sports when I was a kid and I did enjoy them, but when I look back on my fondest memories of childhood, organized sports or events never make the list.
What I remember most are the early times before I went to school full days. I remember sunny days when my mom and I would go for a walk in the local park. During the week everyone else was at work or school. The playground was quiet. You’d hear the birds in the trees, the squirrels rustling through the grass and only occassionally a passing car. My mom and I didn’t even have to speak to each other to feel close. We were able to simply enjoy each other’s company and the silence that came with it.
I rarely see people enjoying the park that way any more. They are either listening to their iPod, chatting on their cell phone or else texting someone on their Blackberry.
Watch what you buy
How much is your “stuff” keeping you from that enjoyable, relaxed, walk in the park? The next time you buy something think of the cost in time. How much time did I have to work to get the money to buy this? How much time will using it take away from other things I could be doing? Am I suffering from information or stimulation addiction?
Manage time based on your values
Finally I suggest managing time based on your values, rather than what other people consider urgent. Check out The Three Best Time Management Tools and How to Use Them.
Once you’re done reading that maybe you can go take a walk in the park. That’s where I’m headed right now.
