I have been reading and researching for my next book “The First Two Hours” and have come across many articles around the notion of how we are slaves to our smart phones and other technologies. We are technically addicted.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, I decided to test a few suggested remedies on myself with surprising results:

The first one has been around focus. Many of us are still believing the old paradigm that multi-tasking works, and it’s a way to get multiple things done. This is made evident by how many people take their laptops to meetings and think they are being productive by pretending to be present in the meeting, and then sending half-thought emails to clients and colleagues.  

I tried the Pomodoro Method. In a nutshell, it involves focusing on one area of work for 25 minutes, followed by a 5 minute rest. After 4 rounds you then take a 30 min rest. I have been using this method for the past couple of weeks and my productivity (including the production of this article) has gone through the roof! Things I thought would take days to do, are taking hours.

The second principle I have been testing (related to the above) is turning off alerts on phones. My phone no longer “dings” or “buzzes” when someone likes something on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or sends me an email. Then I turned off the “badge” notification (the little red number that appears to show you how many messages or notifications you have in an app). I realised that part of my own addiction came from the dopamine hit I would get when I turned on my phone and saw those red numbers. The excitement and anticipation of those notifications contributed heavily to my need to read and respond.

Now when I open my phone there are no red numbers and it allows me to choose which app I open for a distinct purpose. It has slowed my access to apps significantly.

This leads to the third aspect I read about when dealing with tech addiction: Have a purpose for opening an app, rather than just opening it for the sake of it. I found myself in the past opening Facebook and just browsing aimlessly through the posts. This in and of itself isn’t really a problem, until you are doing it every 5 minutes. Again, this is brought about by the dopamine hit that we get from seeing a like or comment on one of our posts or seeing a new post by a loved friend.  

I’m now only going in for a purpose (read or post something specific) and then while I’m there I will browse.  This has slowed my access down from checking every 5-10 minutes, to only once every 45-60 minutes.

As I read back on this post it makes me sound like a total slave to tech however I’m not sure that my use of social media and email was any worse than the average person. I didn’t think I was a slave until I started consciously accessing and choosing my time for social media and mail rather than being led by it.

Credit for the brilliant drawing goes to my fabulous friend and graphic recorder Rebecca Lazenby.