Part 2: How to achieve a better work/life balance
Take control of which demands for your time you 'allow' to consume your timeRead in 2 minutes
We previously wrote about how to achieve a better work/life balance and generally be more in control of your life as a result.
To follow up, we loved this post, by Seth Godin, so much that we felt obliged to share it with readers of our blog. Seth’s post hits the nail on the head for what must be the ultimate aim for all of us… to regain control of how and when we communicate and what incoming demands for our time we ‘allow’ through.
In turn we will be able to give more of our time to the people and things that matter, family, friends, health and doing what we love.
Seth’s original post is below:
Paying the smart phone tax
It might be costing you more than you think.
Urgent or important?: Your phone has been optimized to highlight the urgent. It buzzes and beeps. It sorts things. It brings everyone else’s urgent things right under your nose, reminding you about them until they become your urgent things. A full day on your phone is almost certainly a day where you buried the important in favour of the urgent.
The moment: The smart phone brings the world to us, in our pocket. But if the entire world is there, presenting its urgencies, it’s harder than ever to be here, right now, in this moment.
Brevity over density: Just about everything produced on a smart phone is done in a hurry, because there’s something urgent happening just a click away. As a result, we favour brevity. Brevity in what we consume (LOL) and brevity in what we produce (GTG). It’s not clear that brevity ought to be our goal in all things, or in how we spend hours of each day.
The filter bubble: Even more than on the web, the closed gardens of the smart phone world mean that we’re most likely to consume ideas that we already understand, from people we already agree with. Not a path to growth, certainly.
Off the hook: Because it’s so easy to hit ‘send’ and because there’s so much noise, we can easily relieve the tension of creation with a simple click. Easy in, easy out, easy delete.
Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can’t live without.
To read more from Seth’s blog, go to: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/
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Thanks for reading.