I had several conversations when I was at the Digital Symposium a few weeks ago with people who were interested in one way or another about the blog. In general these conversations go something along the lines of “I read your blog” “I like it” or “I like that blog you wrote about whatever”. The one that sticks in my mind the most was a little bit different, and I suspect the person who spoke to me may well be reading this for obvious reasons. If you are reading this please do not take this in any way as an insult or derogatory comment, its just more about an observation for all of us.
So the person in question I have known for a long time, in fact since back in dental school. They came up to me in the coffee room and said, “how do you find the time to write that philosophical s**t everyday?”. In the first instance I thought my reply was brilliant but I think I was the only one that did so I replied, “how do you have time to read that philosophical stuff everyday”? But that major underlining philosophical question is why would you read something that you don’t like. And even worse why would you read something you don’t like repeatedly. I’m not sure if the individual in question likes the blog or not but the comment made me think that it wasn’t really worth while which I am absolutely cool with I’m just a little bit confused as to why anybody would read something that they thought was negative or not in any way enhancing to there life. But in fact that’s what we do all the time.
We are completely in control of were we obtain our information from and the streams we allow into our lives and don’t. In a recent conversation with Andy I introduced him to the concept of notifications on an iphone. If you go into settings on your iphone and hit the notifications button you can decide which apps ping up on you phone and which ones don’t. You can turn everything off so that nothing pings up on your phone. You can put your phone onto do not disturb so you don’t even get calls. Or alternatively you can let everything ping up on your phone so that every time you see your phone or every time it makes a noise there are a dozen messages for you to look at and be interrupted by. This is of course were we are now we are in the age of interruption.
When I work from home I frequently have people knocking at my door trying to sell me something, give me something or talk to me about something. Despite the fact I’m on telephone preference service they phone me, and now I get phoned from the alarm company in the middle of the night telling me that I have an intruder alarm at the practice. This in particular is a good type of interruption, because the insurance company will not insure the practice unless we have a monitored alarm. But the monitored alarm seems to go off now two or three times a week for a single alarm that they wont call the police for as there is no one moving around inside the practice. This is a problem I have to fix. An interruption that I have to remove.
But the point is this, we choose the channels that interrupt us and we allow them into our lives. Everything has a switch now, everything has an off button. In the middle of the overwhelm and the avalanche of in coming just start switching things off, if you wont to do it scientifically do it one thing at a time and see how detrimental it is to your life. Answering emails on your terms not on there terms, turning notifications off on your phone. Removing the facebook app on your phone and only using it through a web browser is one of the simplest and easiest way to cut 50% on the amount of crap interruption that it caused.
It has honestly made an enormous difference to me in the space that I have available and the ability to do actual work that counts instead of work to somebody else’s agenda. Also gives me the ability to read the stuff I want, not the philosophical s**t everyday.
Blog Post Number - 1282
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