Digital Cleanse

I’ve been thinking about how much of my time is leaking to the digital, always-available norm that exists, especially in the high tech industry that I work.  Basically, I’m in the same group of folks who are wired up to the inbox and always available.  This has become the norm because it is just easy to make this what you do and it creeps into life one television, computer, email, cell phone, text message, Google search, Facebook post, Tweet, Slack message at a time.  I am defining leaking as spending time without intent, to be blunt wasting time.  One of many, many examples is that I am on my phone during my commute reading about my work industry and I get distracted by a fancy algorithm that presents plenty of additional opportunities to wander off like a wild monkey through the forest – and I do, way too often. 

As a computer person, I most definitely need to spend tons of time in the digital world, so I am specifically talking about focusing on optimizing around intent and I am not talking about throwing my phone away and taking up a new career outside of the high tech industry.  I am performing a personal experiment by taking some time to reflect, 28 days in February, on what is important to me and then mapping what technologies I should use to add value to what I enjoy doing, work on, and participate in – in a nutshell, what is my intent when I connect.  The taking time part is important because while I will start by spending an hour to jot down the starting point, I want to have some daily checkpoints integrated within the day-to-day family activities, work-life and personal time to make sure that I am capturing everything, reflecting on importance, and making some decisions about intent.  Once I have my value framework mapped to digital tools and intent, I’ll spend the next couple of months – March to June – sticking to the plan, logging time, tools and activities while also noting what works, what does not work and making improvements along the way.  I’ll share some details in a future post.