There’s no time to think anymore
I started using WhatsApp a few years ago. Initially I saw it as a better version of text messages and liked the group feature where I could chat with a few of my friends at the same time. Over time I kept being added to more and more groups. I never knew I was so popular!
I’m now possibly a member of over 100 friend groups and maybe receive over 200 messages a day. That’s about 200 individual messages from friends every single day. And that’s a slow day. That’s 8.3 messages an hour. And that’s just from one app.
In the last year or so I progressively started to switch off from it. Not because I wasn’t enjoying all the random gifs, links, updates, questions and random thoughts my friends were having. I just couldn’t deal with the amount of communication I was expected to deal with. I’d reached notification overflow where my brain just couldn’t compute all the different conversations I was supposed to be having. Technology was running faster than I could handle. My brain was putting the brakes on.
The trouble right now is that all day long we have all our apps, constantly messaging us, trying to get our attention to capture a little bit of our time to make some money. We’ve reached a point where this attention is being traded for the most clickable notification on our phones. In this new normal we have little to no time to actually think.
I recently wrote an article about the challenges communicating over Zoom all day in a working from home environment. It’s exhausting. When I used to go into the office regularly I would spend my commute thinking about my day, having random ideas or thoughts, experiencing my own brain’s ‘notifications’. And also doing this at lunchtime and on my way home in the evening. It was the randomness of my day that fed my creative spirit.
But now, if you succumb, your day is being organized for you by your phone. In fact, your phone is planning all your thoughts too. Because without resilience, you are answerable to the thousands of notifications your phone produces, every single day.
You might say — just switch off your notifications, or organize them to see only the most important ones. I have, and I continue to manage who and how I’m communicated to. I also have ‘no phone time’ between 5.30am (yes, I get up early) and 8.30am. I generally don’t start my day answering to my phone. Equally I don’t look at it before bed, I stop at 8.30pm. After that, it’s my time. There’s a very good blog post you can read with lots of tips and tricks to avoid ‘notification overload’ here.
When I’m mindlessly scrolling through my phone notifications it’s often ‘dumb time’. I’m not really ‘engaged’, I’m switching off and being thick for a while. You’ve got to make time to read a book, go for a walk or to meditate these days. More crucial though, is to create time in your day to think, to have those random thoughts that improve your mental health, drive your ambition and keep you going. Aimless walks alone are probably the best way to force this to happen. Don’t let your phone steal that time away from you.
