Category: Wellness when Always-On

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The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Lite services

In the Hapi app, you type in whatever subject matter you want to talk about, and then you’re connected with a vetted and trained active listener within a few minutes. The listeners are mainly former volunteers at crisis helplines or psychology students who study mental health, all of whom are screened about their interest in helping others.

Hapi, exists for the sole purpose of letting you vent your worries anonymously to an active listener… some people are intimidated to book a therapist appointment. Using Hapi works as a way to dip your toes into what it feels like speaking to someone else about your stresses… As genuine as their intensions are, your loved ones often can’t be objective listeners

– I Tried An App That Let Me Vent To Strangers For A Week

It reminds me so much of the Someone To Talk To lightweight chat service I’d considered building. A lightweight, affordable version of an otherwise high-commitment service, one that does not over-promise with technology.

Lite services thrive in areas where the choice is between nothing or full-fledged high-cost professional services. In a totally different domain, the recent explosion in stock-buying and stock-trading apps like Robinhood is an example of this.

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Wellness when Always-On

Pause

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Wellness when Always-On

Of wonderment and compulsion

Losing an hour down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole is very different from scrolling through Reddit or Twitter the same amount of time. No matter how frivolous the topics on Wikipedia, I’m learning something new – even if I’ll forget most of it later the same day. With social networks the joy diminishes rather quickly, but I’m kept scrolling by some inexorable pull.

Both leave me surprised at where time’s disappeared, but one leaves me energised, the other with brain fog. The answer probably lies in that I float – flit? – through Wikipedia out of a sense of wonderment, and I scroll though social feeds out of a sense of compulsion. There seems to be more free will in one than another.

(Featured image photo credit: Daniel Fazio/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Applying anti-smoking techniques to content addiction

(via Kottke.org)

This writer tried the usual techniques to kick her phone addiction – turning off notifications, deleting apps, tracking usage, using apps to block usage, going cold turkey – none of it worked. Then she turned to a technique people use to quit smoking – one of the hardest addictions to kick. From the book she read:

… there is a huge disconnect between what we want and what we actually enjoy. They’re different neurological processes. That’s why you can desperately crave, for example, an entire blueberry cheesecake, but when you actually eat it, it’s only OK… He tells smokers to pay attention to their next cigarette. It’s like mindfulness but for noticing the unpleasantness. How does it taste? Not, “how did you imagine it would taste when you were craving it,” but how does it actually taste?

When the writer tried it with her phone consumption,

I paused and paid attention to my body. Do I feel better than I did 30 seconds ago, or worse? Inevitably, it was worse. My brain felt frazzled and crunched up. My body felt more tense and defensive. The experience had been a net loss… The more I really paid attention to the reality of how much I “liked” checking my phone, the easier it became to resist the impulse.

It’s fortuitous I should come across this. As I’ve been going through my second 30-day Reddit isolation, I have realised that I do enjoy browsing the site, but I pass from happiness to mindlessness pretty quickly, without realising it. Quitting entirely is a net negative, but so is consumption without self-awareness – I’m working on understanding what that transition point is for me.

(Featured image photo credit: Lawless Capture/Unsplash)

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Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 4

(Part 3)

While Shawn Blanc schedules every minute of his day so he can make “make sure I do all the things I want to do”, the investor Marc Andreessen, in a famous 2007 blog post, described the polar opposite:

Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule.
He’s crazy, you say!

I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — and in many structured jobs, you simply can’t — this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity. By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day. As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.

Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it! Want to spend all day coding? Do it!

You don’t have to follow either extreme – although if you do and find that it’s working, I’d like to know and learn.

The three important principles here are

Be mindful of the fact that distractions will fill up space that you don’t actively schedule.

Be mindful of what you schedule for yourself.

Set aside time for mindfulness.

For the last, I point you to my twenty-minute daily solitude practice.

Since your life is the sum total of how you spend your time, a reset of the boundaries of your time means a reset of the boundaries of your life. This year is an opportunity to change power balances, almost all of which involve you trading your time. Seize it.

(ends)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 3

(Part 2)

My Morning Routine is an website we have referred to once or twice on this site. It describes itself as

… a retired independent online magazine that published a brand new, inspiring morning routine every Wednesday between December 2012 and July 2019.

It’s unfortunate that they aren’t publishing new interviews this year, or even updates to existing one. It’d be interesting to see how people’s routines changed in the new work-from-home world in 2020. What would it say about those whose routines had not changed much?

Their last published routine in July 2019 featured this:

I view the first few hours of the day as “free,” unclaimed time. If I don’t use it deliberately, I’ll squander it on email or Twitter or the news or some other mindless timesuck that doesn’t make me feel good. Plus, I’ve learned that my focus is better in the morning than it is later in the day; I want to make good use of that time.

This resonated with me, because even last year it revealed an awareness of the need to claim time for yourself, however you then choose to spend it.

We had discussed the question of how in my post about stretching out time:

We can choose to restart an interest of ours. Re-engage with communities and groups we’ve fallen out of touch with. Start a new hobby we’ve always liked but didn’t know if it’d stick. Pursue our physical and mental well-being. Join a local cause. Whatever it looks like for each of us. And do it for no reason than because we can.

The writer Shawn Blanc takes it to an extreme by scheduling every minute of his life (or at least he did, in 2016):

I used to think a schedule meant I’d never get to have fun. Because if you’re scheduling your time then you should only put Super Duper Important things on your schedule.

Well, I do only schedule Super Duper Important things. I just have a smarter definition of Super Duper Important.

Did you know I schedule time to watch Netflix? I schedule time for a mid-day nap if I want. Time to read for an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon. Time to take my wife out for dinner once a week. Time to go running at the gym. Time to play trains with my kids. Time to have lunch with a friend. Time to help my wife with dinner. Time to write for as long as I can handle in the morning.

In fact, by scheduling every minute of my day, I help make sure I do all the things I want to do — for work and for play.

(Part 4 follows tomorrow)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 2

(Part 1)

In the old world, boundaries used to be imposed naturally, although they were not always welcome. Leaving for work was a sharp boundary. The start of the work day at the office was another. Then there was the lunch break. Your commute back. Your evening at a pub or a restaurant. And so on.

Those boundaries were almost always set by (or with) someone else. Typically the only one you truly set was your run or gym session.

In the absence of those boundaries, your time is up for grabs. This is a threat and an opportunity. If you’re passive about it, it’ll be claimed – all of it – by your boss, by your kids, by social media and online TV, and by a hundred parallel low-attention messaging threads.

I’ve seen this story before: back in 2009, I ran the consumer Internet division of a company. The flagship product was an SMS subscriptions store that promised to fill up the tiny free moments in your life: waiting for your train, taking the elevator, standing in line. It was designed on the premise that you had a finite number of such moments in your life, and therefore needed a finite (though renewing) amount of content to fill them. It was a great idea and took off immediately. Within weeks we had over a quarter of a million people try it out, and a significant number of them jump through hoops for paid content on the store.

But in just the next couple of years, most of the Indian middle class had smartphones, everyone had Facebook – and Twitter – on their phones. They had games from Zynga and from local studios. They discovered YouTube! And just like that, you had an infinite amount of content to fill those little moments.

But the tide shifted even further. Filling crevices of time wasn’t enough, this new content created new gaps for itself. You’d quickly scroll through Facebook at traffic stops until the car behind honked at you. You’d interrupt meals to post photos on Instagram. You’d check Twitter during conversations. You’d play games while putting off chores.

By the middle of the 2010s, we were already living fragmented lives. At the end of the decade, the pandemic has knocked down natural boundaries of time too. Everything is fluid.

What shape are we going to give it?

(Part 3 follows tomorrow)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Discovery and Curation The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

This year has reset your life’s boundaries – what are you going to do about it? – Part 1

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)

(Featured image photo credit: Tim Mossholder/Unsplash)

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Wellness when Always-On

The ‘social’ in social media is important

These are powerful findings from a study on the use of social media. In short, the most people interacted with others on social media, the happier they were. The more passively they scrolled, instinctively comparing themselves with others selectively-published lives, the worse they felt.

Wirtz notes that viewing other people’s posts and images while not interacting with them lends itself to comparison without the mood-boosting benefits that ordinarily follow social contact, undermining well-being and reducing self-esteem. “Passive use, scrolling through others’ posts and updates, involves little person-to-person reciprocal interaction while providing ample opportunity for upward comparison.“

The more people used any of these three social media sites, the more negative they reported feeling afterwards. “The three social network sites examined—Facebook, Twitter and Instagram—yielded remarkably convergent findings,”…

Wirtz’s study also included offline interactions with others, either face-to-face or a phone call. Comparing both offline communication with online, he was able to demonstrate that offline social interaction had precisely the opposite effect of using social media, strongly enhancing emotional well-being.

The study was conducted across ten days of social media use. I iwsh I could find what the sample size was. The freely-accessible preview of the paper (link) does not state this.

However the conclusion is clear. If you use social media to stay in touch with people, form new connections, join and try out new communities, you will find it is energising. If you use it as an endless timeline of other people doing things you are not, it’s not hard to see that the experience would leach happiness from you.

I’ve always kept in touch with many friends over messaging apps and email. Anonymous interactions on my Reddit communities have been mostly rich and wholesome. So while I am not on Facebook or such social networks, while I’m on relatively few online groups, and while even before the pandemic I used to meet relatively few people in person, I’ve always felt connected and energized by my social interactions.

(Featured image photo credit: Priscilla Du Preez/Unsplash)

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Wellness when Always-On

What are you unwilling to feel?

From a readworthy interview of Tim Ferriss by GQ magazine:

I know centi-millionaires and billionaires who are utterly miserable. As Derek Sivers, one of my friends and podcast guests, once said, “If more information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs”… The inescapable fact that if, at best, you tolerate yourself, and more often berate, hate, or criticize yourself, how can you possibly fully engage with others, accept and love them, and find peace of mind and life? I think the answer is you can’t.


To borrow from Tarah Brach, she said to me once, “There was a wise old sage who said, ‘There’s really only one question worth considering and that is: What are you unwilling to feel?’” So I really check in, in the morning and at night. Do you wake up with a sense of foreboding and anxiety and a desire to stay in bed? When you go to bed, is it full of anxiety and worries and preoccupation about what happened, or what’s going to happen the next day? If so, that’s an issue.

A good relationship with yourself is the foundation of thriving at life. The problem almost always is that you can hardly work on cultivating an accepting relationship with someone how you treat with distaste. I dealt with this for a long time – years. I wrote to myself then

“If I treated another person like this they would not survive for even a short period of time… Finally, even meditating on this is difficult. My mind is filled with hate about the person meditating. This means that when awareness returns after my thoughts wander, instead of observing that fact and moving on, there is an eruption of castigation at the meditator’s inability to even hold their own thought.

This is when external counselling helps – it’s an intervention for both of your you-s to talk to each other.