Step Away from Your Desk. Take a Break from Your Screen(s)

Like most teenage boys, my sons are on their devices pretty much all the time. As card carrying members of GenZ, they watch TV on their phones. They game (a lot) on their consoles. They’ve learned everything from the correct way to tie a bow-tie to building a drone from scratch via YouTube and eHow.

In short, they grew up with tech. Their devices are like appendages and 24/7 tech is part of their DNA.

While both boys (age 15 and 19) play competitive soccer, baseball, and other sports and seem to plenty of friends, they wouldn’t think twice about spending a beautiful summer day, holed up in the basement by themselves playing Fortnight for hours on end subsisting on pizza bagels, popcorn and juice boxes. If you have teenage sons or grandsons, you know what I mean.

That being said, my 15 year old spent four weeks unplugged from technology this summer. He spent three weeks at a sports camp in Maine living in a tent--a camp with a NO-ELECTRONICS policy. That was followed by a weeklong family reunion at a fishing cottage in remote western Michigan….spotty internet service at best.

Sure, he resumed his digital life the minute he returned home. But, he’s toughened up a little, both mentally and physically, and is showing a few glimmers of maturity sprinkled in with the teen slang, mood swings and snarky comments.

If he can take a tech break, so can you.

Whether gaming or working, research shows that sitting for hours without moving can slow the flow of blood to our brains, and that can have implications for your long-term brain health and productivity. But research shows that standing up and strolling away from your desk for just two minutes every half-hour seems to stave off this decline in brain blood flow and may even increase it.

So, ignore the angry stares of your colleagues, supervisors and clients. Get up from your desk at least once an hour to clear your head and recharge your battery. For more, see Why Sitting May Be Bad for Your Brain.

Your brain tricks you into doing less important tasks

As Tim Herrera explained recently in The New York Times, thanks to the urgency effect, our brains tend to prioritize immediate satisfaction over long-term rewards. Citing a Journal of Consumer Research study, Herrera wrote that we’re more likely to perform “smaller-but-urgent tasks that have a deadline” than to perform more important tasks that don’t have an immediate deadline. This is true “even if the outcome of the smaller task was objectively worse than that of the larger one,” added Herrera. He suggests setting your computer or phone to beep at you every half-hour and get up, stroll down the hall, take the stairs to visit a restroom a floor above or below your own, or complete a few easy laps around your office.

Our take: That’s not slacking off. That’s being more productive and creating better value for your clients, firm and colleagues. 

At our firm, we have a policy of “rough draft in the morning, final draft before you go home.” That means, you never turn in assignments or client work in the morning unless (a) you are 100-percent on you’re A-Game, (b) have double and triple checked your work and (c) have stepped away from your desk for a least an hour beforehand.

I routinely take 90-minute lunch breaks to train for triathlons, run errands and make doctor’s appointments. So do most of my colleagues. No checking email, text messages, or voicemails.

I can’t tell you how many times what looked so brilliant before my “decadent” lunch break, looked like crap upon my return. “Thank God I didn’t turn that piece of crap in,” I’ve told myself hundreds, if not thousands of times. And we’ve never lost a client because we were unreachable or unaccountable.

“Avoid being on the grid 24-7,” advised Anat Lechner,  an NYU Stern School of Business  professor in a recent NY Times interview. “Carve out for yourself the three or four hours that you need every day to get off the grid and relax and teach the rest of the world, as well as yourself, that not all hours are email hours.”

Conclusion

Our take: While some of you are at the mercy or bosses, clients and HR directors who still place a premium on facetime, if you have 90 minutes away from your desk and come back 3x more productive, isn’t that a positive ROI on your human capital?

You can’t get that kind of ROI when you’re constantly connected to the grid.

For more on this topic, see our related posts Time to Take a Break from Technology and Too Many Gadgets, Too Little Time.

TAGS:  Digital detox, walk away from your desk, take a break from tech, digital distraction, work life balance, Fortnite addiction

Time for a Technology Time-Out?

Lost amid the inauguration coverage, the anti-Trump demonstrations and the NFL conference finals, was the death of a young tech visionary named Levi Felix.  Just 32, Felix succumbed to complications from a brain tumor. Felix’s name may not ring a bell, but you are probably familiar with Digital Detox, the organization he co-founded to help people of all ages unplug from the grid and reconnect with each other and the real world. 

A self-described geek (“not a Luddite” he’d argue), Felix once lived the tech entrepreneur lifestyle—70 hour workweeks, guzzling Mountain Dew, always-connected, pulling all-nighters at the office and sleeping with a laptop under his pillow. That was until he was hospitalized for an exhaustion-induced esophageal tear and decided to change his life. “I love that technology connects us and is taking our civilization to the next level,” Felix told the New York Times in a 2012 interview, but we have to learn how to use it and not have it use us.”

Again, Felix didn’t turn his back on the tech world after his awakening. He simply felt that regardless of one’s age, we should be taking more time to reflect and experience what we’re doing instead of constantly sharing it, posting it, tweeting or pinning it. He also felt we should spend more time looking at each other’s faces, rather than our screens.

A recent Pew Internet study found that one third of Americans prefer texting to talking, and an international Time Magazine poll found these disturbing signs of tech addiction:

·         84 percent of respondents said that they could not go a single day without their cellphones.

·         50 percent of Americans sleep with their phone next to them like a teddy bear or a spouse.

·         20 percent of respondents check their phone every 10 minutes.

Houston. We have a problem here. As I’ve mentioned several times in this blog, I take a 24-hour “tech fast” every almost weekend from mid-day Saturday to mid-day Sunday. It’s not that hard, and the world hasn’t come to an end once during my weekly tech purges.

As (human) columnist Alexa O’Brien opined last week about artificial intelligence, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and other on-demand personal digital assistants could be making us dumber as they get smarter.  Through big data collection and analytics, these AI assistants “will come to know us in ways we can’t even know ourselves,” wrote O’Brien. “The platform offers endless choices, virtual connections and access to a world of information, but what this major-domo of the ‘internet of things’ may deliver is reductive banter, mindless consumerism and a universe of trivia.

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Conclusion

High performing companies consider technology a strategy rather than a department. For high-performing individuals, our contention is that technology should be considered a tool, not a lifestyle. Tell us what you think.


TAGS: Levi Felix, Alexa, Siri, artificial intelligence, Digital Detox, unplugging from technology

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