20

Technology Is a Terrible Master

There is more to life than just increasing its speed.

MOHANDAS GANDHI

Someday in the future, we’ve all been told, we will be running around in special clothing that communicates with our bodies and our environment, looking through lenses that digitally enhance the world. We may not be there yet, but it is true that technology is already so woven into our everyday lives that we live and breathe it constantly. The never-ending barrage of notifications and emails and the pressure to know exactly what is going on with all your friends every second of the day constitute an enormous source of stress in today’s schools and colleges.

Even if you are able to resist the temptation to constantly look at your phone, you are likely doing a portion or even most of your schoolwork on a digital device of some kind. That device is almost certainly connected to the internet, and the internet desperately wants your attention. In fact, in the tech industry, companies do not refer to “market share” anymore. Market share is the percentage of existing customers who buy a company’s products. Instead, they refer to something called “mindshare.” What they mean by this is that they consider the mind of their consumer to be their market, and they are spending billions of dollars to control as much of your mind as possible.

Since this is the reality, how you choose to manage your use of technology is going to have an incredible impact on your productivity, your achievement, and your success both in school and later in your life.

You Have a Choice

The most important thing to remember about your relationship with the digital world is that you do still have a choice. It may not always feel like it, but you do. Even if digital tools make it exceptionally hard, there are always ways to be in control of your digital life. Remember, even where technology is concerned, you are responsible for your choices and actions.

For you to stay calm, clearheaded, and capable of performing at your best, choose to detach on a regular basis from technology. A researcher who asked a group of CEOs and entrepreneurs to unplug from technology found they had improved memory, deeper relationships, better sleep, and a greater likelihood of making life-transforming decisions.¹

When people are too plugged in, communications technology quickly becomes a destructive addiction. If you are anything like the average teenager or young adult in America, you may be spending as much as six to nine hours in front of a screen every day.²

From now on, turn your phone off when you go to sleep, and don’t turn it on in the morning until you are fully awake and have gotten dressed and eaten breakfast. You can even try waiting until you have left the house. Don’t start the addictive dopamine cycle right away.

Manage Your Notifications

The first and most important step in managing your technology is turning off as many notifications on your phone and computer as possible. Every app must ask your permission to send you notifications. You can go into the settings in your phone and turn off an app’s ability to send these to you.

Letting notifications take over is a double challenge: they try to get your attention in real time and will distract you from whatever task you are working on in the moment. Then, even when you manage to ignore them for a time, a large backlog of notifications can sneakily masquerade as a to-do list, making you feel as if you have to look through all of them! Make no mistake: your backlog of 300 notifications is not as important as the to-do lists you have learned to make in this book.

Choose which apps you allow to send you notifications very carefully. Select just a few and turn off notifications for all other apps on your phone. This alone will save you hours every day.

Don’t Give In to Temptation

You may need a computer to do some of your assignments. Unfortunately, a computer is one of the most challenging environments for personal productivity. It is a machine that has been built specifically to do millions of tasks at a time. Here’s the thing to remember: the computer is meant to do millions of tasks at a time, but the human being using the computer is not!

It is easy to keep a chat box (or ten) open or a video going in the background, and of course, those invasive notifications are everywhere on your computer too. As with your phone, websites need to ask your permission to send you notifications. Make it a practice today to always choose “no” or “block” when a website asks you for permission to send you notifications.

If you have to chat with classmates to work on a project, do so intentionally and set specific times for the conversations—-and do so only between bursts of sustained, focused work. While it might be tempting to leave your chat windows open all the time, constantly chatting with friends while you are trying to focus will result in massive lost time and retention. In other words, when you are chatting, you learn poorly and remember less, and any work takes three times as long! The next time you sit down to do your homework, disable all your chat functions and see how long your assignments take you. (Here’s betting you finish in one-third the time!)

If you get your work done without distractions, you will have much more time to actually hang out with your friends and family. This holds true even if your friends live far away from you and you use digital tools to communicate. Regardless of how you spend time with loved ones, you will still be able to focus better on a video call or text-based conversation if all your schoolwork is finished.

Fight the FOMO

A journalist for Fortune magazine once wrote that when he arrived back at the office after a two-week European vacation, he had more than 700 emails waiting for him. He realized that it would take him a week to get through them all before starting on important projects.

For the first time in his career, he took a deep breath and punched the Delete All button, erasing those 700 emails forever. He then got busy with the projects that were really important to him and his company.

His explanation was simple: “I realized that, just because somebody sends me an email, it does not mean that they own a piece of my life.” Although not many people would delete their entire in-box, you can definitely delete and ignore more emails than you do right now. Empower yourself to remove all emails that don’t relate to important goals and relationships.

The fear of missing out that drives many people to obsessively connect to their devices is a real and pervasive facet of modern life. The anxiety it produces is powerful and seductive—if you had just seen that one notification, you might not have missed an important piece of news, an event you would have liked, or a friend’s personal life announcement. Like most forms of anxiety, however, this is a lie that your brain is telling you.

The reality is that you can never keep up with all the things that are happening in the world. Even if you were to quit school and obsessively read every single notification that came through on every device you own, you still wouldn’t find out everything that might impact your life. You will miss everything going on in front of you though!

Accept that you can never keep up with everything, and focus instead on what is in front of you. Try a new relationship with the digital world and see how much more time you have every day!