Falling into a bit of a routine now and seem to have adapted to being offline for a whole day. Not sure how this is impacting people who want to get in touch with me. Is anyone not calling or emailing because they are not sure if I will receive their communication in an appropriate time frame. Please let me know if this is true for you!
I had an interesting experience last week when I wanted to check emails, and do a range of online tasks on the day following a WhiteSpace Day. Due to a clerical error at my ISP they thought I had hit my monthly download limit and hence choked off the speed. So I was severely limited in my ability to access emails and the web. The previous day I had been quite comfortable being offline. But now I was incredibly stressed because I couldn’t go online! I was like a bear with a sore head. Grumpy. Irritable.
This demonstrated to me how dependent I am on these tools. Yes, I can choose not to use them, but when I do want to use them, I want speed and quality. And I don’t want to wait. ”How funny,” I thought to myself as my blood pressure slowly returned to normal. ”If today was an offline day the broadband speed would not matter. But because it is an online day ‘I want it now’”.
I also found myself struggling to accept a simple time delay. Whereas I had just waited 24 hours I now was upset at having to wait another 2. Are these signs of addiction?
Very intriguing. Addiction? Maybe not, maybe just a habit and expectation.
It reminds me of when I worked in IT and there’d be blackouts. People would stand around chatting and looking out the window. They were so accustomed to working on the computer, that when it was down, they weren’t able to work manually. This despite their desks having plenty of paperwork that normally processed manually – e.g. filing.
So it seems, despite 10 days of whitespace, you haven’t yet retrained your subconscious to be able to move on to something else when technology is limited.
So don’t see it as an addiction, but a habit fed by expectation.
Why can’t we reorganise our priorities when technology goes down? Why do we become obsessed with the intended task instead of moving onto something else?
It’ll be interesting to see how many days in whitespace it takes to break this habit.