Addicted to Information
Once the dust settled after our acquisition closing, I decided to use the moment as a chance to change my information seeking habits a little. I’d noticed that I was beginning to develop some serious ADD issues - focusing on a single task and seeing it through to completion was becoming increasingly difficult. This came as a surprise/shock to me - I’m generally quite disciplined when it comes to sitting down and ploughing through work, so my inability to focus was quite troubling.
I self-diagnosed myself as suffering from information overload and challenged myself to take the following steps:
- Turn off my iPhone data plan so I wasn’t permanently checking email every minute of the day
- Turn off my IM support for Twitter and remove the mobile notifications so I was only checking tweets when I went to the site
- When I didn’t have work to do, shut off the laptop and find another activity that didn’t involve staring at a screen.
So after trying that out for the past month, I can safely say that the only one I’ve managed to stick to is turning off IM/mobile support for Twitter. I’ve weened myself off the need to constantly have status updates in real time and so have one less source of interruption in my life. Unfortunately the other two steps didn’t work out so well. I thought that stopping myself from having access to email 24/7 would make me more efficient and reduce the permanent state of feeling like you’re working and hence lead to less stress. It didn’t work that way.
Not having 24/7 access to email made me feel more stressed than ever, I was constantly worried that I might be missing something important to do with work and found it difficult to relax.Perhaps I could have pushed through but after losing my iPhone in a cab, I’ve ordered a Blackberry Pearl and am switching on my data plan again as of tomorrow (the Pearl is a stop gap until the 3G iPhone comes out in June - if you want to pick up a barely used Pearl in June just let me know).
Also my attempt to reduce the amount of time I spend in front of my laptop failed miserably. The sad truth is I’m addicted to the thing. It’s my source of work/news/entertainment/relaxation and my life pretty much revolved around it. The fact that in some free time I’m sat in front of it blogging is testament to it. This is where I listen to music, download and watch movies and now even watch TV that is streamed by services like BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 on demand.
My failure has made me take a step back and think. There’s certain things that being addicted to are clearly accepted as wrong (drugs being the example that springs to mind for most people). Yet here I am, unable to relax without being plugged into some form of information and cramming more data into brain and no one around me blinks an eyelid. Of course being addicted to email doesn’t have as far reaching social consequences as being addicted to drugs but at the end of the day, an addiction is an addiction. It also makes you wonder whether the human brain was really built to be used in this way and whether we’re putting undue strain on it, or maybe we’re still only utilizing X% of it’s true capacity. Who knows?
Anyway, time to get back to my Google News homepage. It recommends stories I’ll like don’t you know.