A study by British marketing agency Techmark last October found that the average smartphone owner uses more than 1500 times a week, or more than 200 times a day, for an average duration of 3 hours 16 minutes a day! The average smartphone owner starts the day by checking their phone without getting out of bed and ends up using it at 23:21 pm.
In my opinion, sad statistics. But even without this data, I understand that I myself use the phone too often and that it becomes like an addiction. Therefore, one of the items on my list of plans for 2015 is the fight against electronic addiction.
The fact is that the continuous penetration of high technologies into our lives, families, bedrooms, the brain significantly increases the level of stress and makes us less adapted to normal human communication. We need to stop and give ourselves the opportunity to develop the right habits for using technology and gadgets, set an example for children, do not forget about normal human relations – all this will make us healthier.
I often come across information about how people struggle with e-addiction on a personal level or as part of corporate practice. For this article, I have collected several such examples, which, I hope, will be useful to you.
How to start your personal digital detox
The most important step I will start my digital detox 2015 with is leaving my phone outside the bedroom! I will try to part with him no later than 30-60 minutes before the planned sleep. I have written many times about the benefits of this approach to using your phone and other electronic devices for the quality of your sleep. It is also better not to start the morning with your phone, but postpone checking mail and news until you have breakfast and are ready for work.
A dinner in which most of the participants are constantly grabbing their phone can be corrected in this way: put the phones in the center of the table, and the first person to pick up the gadget before they bring the bill will have to pay for everyone. And when inviting friends to a party at his home, the owner can invite guests to leave their phones in the hallway.
E-Vacation Reduces Stress and Increases Performance
In addition to advice for personal use, I come across a lot of information about how some Western companies practice periodic “disconnection” of employees from continuous communication with colleagues, counterparties and partners. As a rule, their experience shows that the efficiency of the work increases significantly.
One company that has tried this technique, the Boston Consulting Group, guarantees its employees one email-free evening a week.
New York-based startup Quirky closes its office for a week three times a year and turns off work electronic communications for its employees.
In 2013, the CEO of Learning as Leadership announced that email would be banned for the next week. Employees were skeptical about this, but he said the results were amazing. “Our all-inclusive e-mail approach has disappeared,” he wrote to Forbes. – A focused and highly productive energy has come to replace it. Day by day, the level of stress in the team significantly decreased. And productivity grew. ” The experience, he adds, “reminded us of what the power of human interaction is.”
American Volkswagen has a special policy regarding employees who are equipped with smartphones and do not belong to the company’s administration: work mail is turned off 30 minutes after the end of the working day and turned on 30 minutes before the start of the next working day. This allows employees to go about their business and devote time to their family, without feeling constantly at work.
At Full Contact, a Denver-based software company, employees receive a $ 7500 bonus if they follow these guidelines: 1. Take a scheduled vacation. 2. Cut off communication with colleagues during the rest. 3. Do not work while on vacation.
What will help the digital detox process?
Paradoxically, one of the most developing industries in the development of mechanisms to combat the impact of technology is … the high technology industry. Initially, the main purpose of the emergence of the Internet was information and again information. But today we have enough information, moreover, we simply choke on it. Many in the tech world are realizing that there is a growing need for apps and tools to help us focus and filter out information and distractions. Some examples of such tools are:
- Offswitch is an application that blocks access to social networks and thus allows you to avoid these distracting sites. You can set the time periods when it is important for you not to be distracted, as well as select the sites to which you want to restrict access.
- Concentrate combines several useful tools at once. This Mac app lets you choose between different activities (teaching, writing, etc.) and then configures your computer so that it won’t let you do anything else at certain times.
- Checky is an application with which you can analyze your relationship with your smartphone and find out the whole truth about how many times a day you use your phone.
- Rescue Time analyzes your online behavior: how long, on which sites and for what activities you spend.
- Freedom (Android) helps you silence your phone (or some of its functions) for a set period of time. Very useful to use while on vacation in my opinion.