In my post earlier this month, we saw how you can make time stretch longer while also improving its quality:
Living deliberately is making an active choice in how to spend one’s time – and, over weeks, months and years – one’s life… Fewer hours just slip by. Days begin to look different. Milestones emerge. Memories form. A narrative forms about how we spent October or November. Time crystallises, no longer disappearing through a sieve.
This year – and who knows how much longer – a combination of less structured days and ubiquitous entertainment from our devices means it’s easy to fill up time outside of our commitments via endless consumption. It’s not just easy, it’s the default way we’ll spend our time.
This year the severe curtailing of face-to-face meetings outdoors means that we’ve moved to messaging to keep in touch. With all of its upsides, messaging with a bunch of people all days takes – all day. It’s less efficient than a conversation, it means day-long interruptions via notifications, and unlike a catch-up, has no defined beginning and end.
Added to this, we have an abundance of apps that have been designed to hold our attention: notifications, pull to refresh, gamification with streaks, guilting through use of language, ‘smart’ defaults like auto-loading the next episode, and a myriad of others. It’s hard to say no. The minutes and hours add up: go to either iOS’s Screen Time or Android’s Digital Wellbeing Dashboard to see how long you spend on your devices, and how often you pick them up.
Further layer on top of this the end of any boundary between work time and ‘life’ time. Despite increased flexibility for the most part, not only are we starting work early but are also less and less putting a firm end to it.
The common theme across these is the blurring of boundaries.
(Part 2 follows tomorrow)