Tag: disconnect

I have a challenge for you – disconnect

I want you to take the cell phone you have and do two things (if you are reading this on your cell, do it afterwards :-] )

• Turn it on silent
• Turn it over
• and I want you to leave it there for 10 minutes.

Don’t look at your twitter, don’t look at your texts, don’t look at the latest score. Just sit there and enjoy the moment. Just disconnect.

Do you feel that, the urge, the need to look at the phone, and the idea of slipping and not getting to see the latest thing. That is Fear of Missing Out, and I think its one of the biggest sores on our technology.

Phone drain

The cellphone made us connected, connected in a way we haven’t been before.

There is always a price, and that connection cost us concentration and focus. We lost that focus and concentration and became addicts to that connection. The connection becomes all.

It becomes our happiness and our sadness, our fears and our bravery. Either way, it becomes our comfort, because it is the thing we know.

Comfort makes us lazy.

So 10 minutes?

The reason why I proposed 10 minutes is because 10 minutes is just long enough to get you antsy. It isn’t too short to not find it in your schedule, but ten minutes is long enough for you to really feel it. Just long enough for you to disconnect without missing anything.

It’s hard to find an excuse for 10 minutes, so in performing this challenge, any excuse gets magnified. Did you need to check twitter or was that text that important?

It is difficult and that’s scary

If you told me 10 years ago that the little thing in my pocket was going to create a habit, I would have laughed and said no way texting and calling is that interesting.

But here we are in 2016, attached to our phones, and its taking away our opportunities to connect to the world around us.  So, take 10 minutes and disconnect.