Just a little update on things i’ve done to try and clear my head since that wonderful time off work that ended on 6th February with coming back to what seemed like a wall of noise and distraction.
We have now managed to cement into position the fact that I generally check and reply to my emails on a Wednesday and a Friday. I will scan the emails other than those times and so will Marie but unless anything is absolutely urgent then I don’t respond because there is no urgency.
I have also created a separate email account and so my work email now comes direct to Marie and she is able to filter out some things which I don’t need to know about because there is just no space in my head for them. Anything else she can send on to me and I can dictate replies for on Wednesdays and Fridays.
The other thing I’ve done though is turn all notifications off on my new iPhone apart from text messages, voicemails messages and Strava (I still like Strava and have a vert small group of friends on there. I like to out my bike rides on there when I’m training well)
It was interesting though getting a new phone because the default setting for notification centre on your iPhone and for all your apps is to notify because, of course, that’s the point. I found for a while with that new phone that things were pinging up all the time and the distraction was horrendous.
Switching everything off is fantastic because, in truth, I get very few calls and not so many texts, maybe 3 or 4 a day, i’m not on Whatsapp anymore and the emails are checked twice a week.
I realise to most this seems like I’ve gone back to the stone-age but I would like to thing of myself as being further ahead of the curve than everybody else. I think it’s only a matter of time before more than 18% of the population begin to appreciate that the electrical corporations are stealing our lives away and we are poorly designed to deal with the addiction that causes. We need help.
Interestingly an old analogue book catalogue came through the door the other day for The Book People (we’ve used this a lot for books for our children) and they’re now touting a book called ‘How to unplug your child’. My God isn’t it bad that we’ve got to the stage where we have to write analogue books to give our children their childhood back?
Blog Post Number - 1236
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