A couple years ago I got (improbably) an invitation to join the RSA, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. (An acquaintance of mine had just gone to work for them.) Money was a bit tight so I passed, but perhaps it’s time to sign up, given their interest in Slow Movement(s) and mindfulness.
This post about mindfulness and Daniel Kahneman’s work is also good.
I can’t go, as I’ve got to get things together for my Seattle talk and have a day job, but this conference on email actually looks quite good, especially for a conference about, well, email.
A couple pieces from the Harvard Business Review blog:
Don’t think I ever took note of this San Jose Mercury News piece from earlier this year:
In the heart of the Valley of Digital Distractions, mindfulness is the latest coin of the realm.
“The speed at which information is coming at us can get overwhelming,” says Google’s Gopi Kallayil, a marketing manager for Google+ who also teaches a popular weekly yoga class for stressed-out Googlers. “I’m seeing more and more people in Silicon Valley moving to yoga as a centering, anchoring ritual because it gives them a respite from that relentless onslaught.”
From Google’s “Optimize Your Life” program that helps employees unplug from the digital grind, to the valley darling Asana, a Web-based productivity-services firm that lists “Mindfulness” at the top of its corporate-values list, everyone’s getting into the awareness-raising act….
Deborah Burkman, who leads yoga retreats and “urban-wellness” programs for companies, has been teaching meditation at Twitter, the microblogging behemoth that practically embodies the frenetic digital drill so many people are caught up in.
“Twitter’s really into this,” she says. “There’s a whole mindfulness program they’re trying to build there. Like a lot of companies, they’re concerned about the well-being of their employees, and they’re big believers in trying to have people be consciously connected.”
A useful data-point.
I confess that usually I hear “Lululemon” as part of a cutting social observation of life in Silicon Valley, in a sentence with “Range Rover” and “Scandinavian stroller.” But it turns out that the company has a rather interesting blog, which features a post from earlier this year about yogis talking about their digital practices. Some of the rules people report they follow:
Be mindful of your breathing as you open your inbox and practice deep breathing. Email apnea occurs when your breath shortens before you open your inbox. – Scott Rosenberg, Grist.org Executive Editor
Don’t use your iPhone as your alarm. If you use your iPhone, you immediately go from sleeping to your digital stream of information with no time in between to wake up in the “real world.” – Congressman Tim Ryan
Meditation > Facebook. The feeling of gratification you get through interactions on a Facebook update could also be achieved through meditation. – Kaitlin Quistgaard, Editor-in-Chief of Yoga Journal and panel moderator
Do one minute of yoga and one minute of mindfulness a day. Why? Because everyone has 60 seconds (and you will likely do more than this naturally). – Gopi Kallayil, Google
All are very sensible, but I admit I’m subject to confirmation bias: I open the first chapter of my book with a description of email apnea, while another chapter features some interviews with Buddhist monks about their social media use.
I’m not sure I agree with the second. Personally, I have no trouble not immediately checking my email when I use my iPhone as an alarm, and I like being able to set three alarms 15 minutes apart just in case. Still, maybe Ryan’s observation explains why I’ve been looking at Braun’s new version of its : sleep and waking are important enough to deserve their own special technologies and small rituals, and shouldn’t just automatically be folded into your everyday material and technical life. Using your smartphone as your alarm clock threatens to just throw you right back into your normal day, if not your digital stream, too quickly.
There’s also a post today, a meditation for email overload.
Following my post last night about the irony of “addicting” social media, I ran across this piece asking “Is email evil?” It poses the Kevin Kelly-like question, what does email want?
This, I think, is what email wants most people to feel: powerless. It wants this because, in the end, it’s not so much a physical technology as a set of assumptions and laws encoded within the tools we use every day. Until the laws themselves change, all the good intentions in the world count for very little. And laws don’t tend to change until enough actual lawmakers take an interest…. But if enough bosses, gurus and digital law-makers can manage to think outside the inbox, we can at least hope to contend with lesser evils.
Again, while there’s some argument to be made about dopamine squirts and hyperbolic time discounting, I think this is right on. When I’ve interviewed people about their email use, and what makes it difficult for them to put down their Blackberries, the biggest obstacle is the expectation on the part of bosses or clients that they always be available. And as I said last night, “with the right behavior we can improve each other’s habits.”
BBC Future has a pretty decent “psychological self-defence course” to avoid email overload:
Here’s a pretty safe assumption to make: you probably feel like you’re inundated with email, don’t you? It’s a constant trickle that threatens to become a flood. Building up, it is always nagging you to check it. You put up spam filters and create sorting systems, but it’s never quite enough. And that’s because the big problems with email are not just technical – they’re psychological. If we can understand these we’ll all be a bit better prepared to manage email, rather than let it manage us.
For this psychological self-defence course, we’re going to cover very briefly four fundamental aspects of human reasoning. These are features built into how the human mind works. If you know about them, you can watch out for them and – most importantly – catch yourself when one of these tendencies is leading you astray.
The idea that the problem with email isn’t just (or primarily) a volume or processing problem that can be solved through better filtering or data management, but a psychological one that needs to be solved by changing habits and mental rewards, is one that’s very much in sync with contemplative computing. Much of time the solution to digital problems isn’t faster technology, but more mindful behavior.
If social media really is “addicting” (and I’m not entirely convinced that the term is correct) isn’t it a strange sort of addiction where we are all each other’s dealers?
And isn’t that ultimately a reason for hope? It means that with the right behavior we can improve each other’s habits.
Another variation of digital sabbaths, from the :
Technology Review's Jason Pontin suggested that while a wide range of interests is essential to connection-making, it can be overdone. At Technology Review, he said, "information fasts" are regularly imposed.
He didn't elaborate at length but it's not much of a stretch to understand why. Given the pervasive nature of information today, I think the constant ping-pinging of contemporary life can overwhelm minds conditioned by the last couple hundred thousand years to notice the outliers. Is that rustling in the bush friend or foe? When seemingly every call, email or detail demands our attention now, our sensitivity to what might be essential or new or important is dulled. Information fasts are a perfectly sensible response to information fatigue; they might also pay a welcome creative dividend.
IdeaFestival seems like a great event. I hope to get to it one day.
Perhaps I should start keeping more systematic track of these shorter, sabbath-light practices.
Problems keeping technology in balance aren't specific to the United States, according to Northern Ireland business Web site Business First Online:
While technology ownership in Ireland has seen swift growth, with 60% of NI (Northen Ireland) and 51% of RoI (Republic of Ireland) consumers owning smartphone and a further 18% of Irish technology loving consumers saying they plan to buy one by the end of 2012, it seems today’s technology is not without its pitfalls.
Indeed it seems technology may be taking its toll on the physical health of the nation as today over one in ten (12% RoI and 11% of NI) of Irish consumers claim that technology and the internet has negatively affected their sleeping habits.
Indeed, new research from Mintel’s Irish Lifestyles report, examining the impact of technology on Irish consumer habits finds that some consumers may in fact be over-reliant on being online, with some 18% of consumers feeling a sense of anxiousness when they are ‘cut off’ from technology and the internet.
According to Brian O’Connor, Research Manager, Mintel Ireland:
“Consumers are getting less sleep because they don’t want to switch off from technology. Between on-demand TV, addictive video games and the constant bombardment of information from the internet, consumers are finding it harder to pull away from technology and get a full nights rest. In the end, the more consumers use technology, the more anxious they are likely to be when ‘cut-off’.”
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul© 2018 Deliberate Rest
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