How often do you communicate using some form of technology in a day? Answer: a bazillion times (note: this is a rough estimate).
In this day and age it can be hard to find peace in everyday life. At work, chances are you face ringing phones and a constant stream of email all day long. When you get home in the evenings, you have texts and phone calls from friends and family. You have Facebook posts, Twitter replies, personal emails and YouTube comments to deal with.
You also have face-to-face conversations with your family and girlfriend/wife. You have to get through all the technological backlog, then deal with the same old “How was your day?” relationship talk.
Needless to say, you’re constantly surrounded by various gadgets that allow you to communicate. Before, most people just had a mobile phone. Now we all have laptops. A fair few of us have iPods. And more of us have portable devices that allow us connect to the internet and social network to our hearts content – even e-readers have an internet connection.
This communication obligation eats into our time. One way to save a day of your life? Simply unplug and go off the radar. However, we know that if you don’t post a Tweet telling your friends and family that you’re actually still alive, a search party will be launched and possibly go viral within a few hours (depending on how popular you are). Eventually people will show up on your doorstep to annoy you with further communication which defeats the purpose of going offline to save a day of your life in the first place.
So closing off ALL communication is a no go. What you can do, however, if you desperately need an hour to get some important stuff done, is cut down on your methods of communication.
Turn off your mobile phone. If this seems too drastic then start small: put your iPod away or unplug the internet for an hour. Tell your friends and family that you can ONLY be reached by one method of communication, such as your personal email address and that you won’t respond to any other messages.
When you don’t have the distraction of Facebook updates or Tweets or texts or phone calls, you’ll be amazed at the time that’s immediately opened up for you. Hours will no longer be wasted trying to think of something funny to say on Twitter so you don’t look like a complete douchebag.
The method is incredibly simple: pick one form of communication and scrap the rest. However, it is important not to go overboard. Don’t become obsessed with your single method of communication. Don’t fall into the trap of sending one email every five seconds. And don’t go too far the other way either. There’s a fine line between using one form of communication and being dubbed ‘Hermit McHermit’ for the rest of your life by irate friends who REALLY want you to like their funny Facebook status.
If you don’t think you can trust yourself to only use one method of modern communication, why not opt for something that’s harder/more boring to master, such as smoke signals or using a messenger pigeon.
The advantages of opting for a more traditional (historical) mode of communication is that even MORE of your time will be free because chances are you’ll get too fed up to use it and no one will know how to go about contacting you anyway. The major disadvantage is that you are likely to spend a little bit longer cleaning up pigeon crap. It’s a dirty job and because it’s your pigeon, you have to clean it, sorry.
Once you get whatever it is that you need to get done finished, you can happily return to the use of various technological devices to check all your social networks, messages and emails.
Just don’t forget to release the pigeon back into the wild when you’re done with it.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
