I Am Not Here to Distract You: My New Social Media Promise

You know how sometimes random things come together in a way that makes you think of something in a different light? That’s partly a definition of creativity—seemingly disparate things/ideas being brought together to create something new. Well, yesterday I had a few things coincide that got me thinking about how I want to handle my online presence.

As many of you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and distraction lately (and really for a number of years now.) Hence my 30-Day Social Media Declutter (which I wrote about here) and what I learned from it (which I wrote about here.) So this is a topic that is constantly buzzing at a low hum in my mind.

Yesterday, a few things happened that got my gears grinding about this topic again. First, I attended an online workshop about how to do social media well as an author. I enjoyed the workshop and appreciated the information. Much of it was about picking which platforms best suit you and how to be fun and on brand as an author. This can include things like posting funny memes, cute pet photos, and entertaining videos. Things many of us enjoy. Things that many authors do well.

However, when I imagined myself looking for fun cat videos to post or finding cute memes, I kind of winced inwardly because—wow, I see that distraction train roaring down the tracks straight for me. I don’t think I can trust myself to go searching for those things because a) I’ll get lost in the internet black hole (I mean, what’s more tempting than endless cute animal videos?) and b) my perfectionism will make me search endlessly for the “perfect” one to post. Plus, I don’t post photos that aren’t mine or aren’t paid for after getting sued years ago over using a photo on my blog. So, I listened to the advice but also knew that I couldn’t heed some of it. But let’s put a pin in that thought for a moment. Because…

Later that night, I was reading the essay collection On Being 40(ish). This was such a great read, and I really got a lot out of many of the essays. I know I’ll be revisiting a few of them. But one near the end called “I Don’t Have Time for This” by Sophronia Scott really resonated with me. In it, she talks about how her friend called her to be miserable about the election results together. Here’s an excerpt:

“My friend has called me to commiserate. But I’m not miserable. I haven’t given a thought to being miserable. The sun is pouring through the windows of my yellow kitchen, my family is healthy, my friend is on the phone, and I’m glad to hear her voice. So I will try to figure out how to gently put into words the overpowering feeling I have more and more as I walk through middle age: I don’t have time for this.”

She goes on to talk about how her son was a Sandy Hook student who was a few doors down from the shooting and survived and how that gave her new perspective on how precious time is and how it isn’t guaranteed. So, she chooses to focus on the joy in her life and not wallow in the misery. Not sticking her head in the sand but choosing joy in her every day life.

So what could this possibly have to do with me writing about social media? Well, here’s where my brain went. Life is precious. We get our particular amount of time on this planet and then it’s done. I’ll turn forty this year. What do I want to do with the rest of my time? How do I want to spend those limited minutes? Which led me to…

Do I want to spend my time searching for cute dog memes to post?

And secondly…

Do I want to contribute to using up YOUR minutes with trying to keep you looking at my page and distracting you from your life?

The answer felt really clear in that moment. I’m not here to distract you. I don’t want that to be part of my job. Yes, I want to write the best books I can, and some people might see reading romance as a distraction, but I see reading a good story as an experience or a chosen respite. Time reading a book rarely feels like wasted time to me—unless the book was terrible, lol. Even watching TV shows usually doesn’t feel like wasted time to me. A good story well told is something that makes me happier. But when I get lost in the internet hole of social media or random videos or top ten posts, I rarely feel better for it.

And frankly, with all my blogging about reclaiming focus and taking breaks from social media and doing device-free summers, it feels hypocritical of me to post fluff to keep algorithms fed and you seeing my page. Note: This is absolutely not a judgment of anyone who does post those things or the countless number of people who enjoy the content. My husband starts many of his days with cat videos because that gives him a happiness boost before he goes to work. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is not about what should be posted or shouldn’t. This is a personal decision about what I feel aligns with who I am and what I want to give you.

When you visit my blog or read my newsletter or see something on my Facebook page, I want you to feel like you’ve gotten something of value out of it. It doesn’t always have to be serious, of course. Despite the tone of this post, I’m not a particularly serious person. Fun and laughter have great value. But I also don’t want my contribution to be filler that I’m posting just to keep the algorithms happy and eyeballs on my sites. I want it to be things that aren’t on a million other pages. My goal for my blog is for you to walk away with something to think about or a great book recommendation or a new TV show to try out. My goal for my newsletter is to make it good enough that people would actually pay to subscribe to it (I’m not going to charge, don’t worry. But that’s how I judge how much I like a newsletter: would I pay a subscription fee for this?)

Basically, I want to add value not distract.

And yes, of course I want you to buy my books. I really, really do! :) My family likes to eat and, you know, have a roof over our heads and stuff. (So high maintenance!) But I have to believe that if I put everything I have into writing quality stories (which involves me concentrating and not spending too much time on social media either) that you will still buy my books—even if I’m not constantly in your feed reminding you that I’m alive and have something to sell.

How about this? I work to give you good things to read and aim not to waste your time. You occasionally buy one of my books and tell your friends to read them. Deal? ;)

My promise to you:

1. I won’t blog unless I feel I have something interesting to talk about or offer you.

2. My newsletter will remain focused on providing you with quality content. It’s full of these posts plus extra content including what I’m reading, what books I’ve bought lately, and behind the scenes photos.

3. All book recommendations on this blog or any of my social media channels will continue to be non-sponsored content. I don’t accept books for review, so anything I recommend is being recommended because I enjoyed it.

4. I will continue to write the best stories I can (which sometimes means being a slacker on social media.)

5. I will do my best not to waste your time and will be grateful for any time you choose to share with me.

Thank you for being here.

And if you want to keep up with my posts along with exclusive content, sign up for my newsletter. This is, by far, the easiest way to keep up with me, no social media checking required.

Have a great weekend!

What newsletter would you pay for? I’m always looking for great new ones to check out. :)

After the 30-Day Social Media Ban: What Surprised Me & What I'm Changing

A month ago, I posted here and announced that I was going on a monthlong Digital Detox/Social Media Ban. I made the decision to give it a try after reading Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism. You can read the original post here if you missed it. But now I’m back with my report from the land without social media!

To be honest, I didn’t expect this experiment to be all that revelatory. I have been working on dialing back my digital distractions for about two years now. I’ve been blogging about that journey along the way. I thought a month without social media would be a good break and “detox” because I was annoyed that I was checking my phone so often again. However, it ended up being a lot more enlightening than I ever expected.

First, a play-by play

Week 1 - This is harder than it looks

I went into this way too confident, y’all. Smug, even. I got this, I thought. Ha. Week One told me to have a seat and rethink that notion. The initial week was tough! I kept picking up my phone and swiping to the screen that usually held my social media apps, and I had nothing to push because I had deleted them. The reflex was a hard one to break.

Also, I had posted about my social media break, and I wanted to see what people had to say about it, but I couldn’t. The need to get that little mental boost (aka dopamine) that people are reading your posts was real. I had to take my social media shortcuts off my desktop because I found myself too tempted to “just check.”

My Book of the Month came in the mail, and I wanted to take a pic for Instagram, and I realized I had nowhere to post it. I didn’t take a pic. (This would become a theme. I took a lot less photos in general.)

Day 5 - The Black Moment

In fiction, you eventually lead characters to the “all hope is lost” moment, which we call the black moment. My black moment on this journey hit at Day 5. I was really missing chatting with people online and checking social media. I yearned for it, lol. I felt this haze of loneliness even though I was still texting with friends and had my family around me. Day 5 made me question whether I could do it.

My guess is that when people try these social media breaks and give up, it’s probably around this day in the process. But wait! Hold out! Because…

Day 6 - Holy productivity, Batman!

The day after I was missing social media, I sat down in my office and started a stretch of days that would become some of my most productive ever. This month, I was working on putting together a new online romance writing course for beginners. In three days, I wrote 17k words of lectures. I hit a level of flow and deep work that I didn’t think I was capable of. I blogged more about that here, but I was able to manage four hours straight of focused work without any struggle. I was so excited that I was getting so much done, the yearning for social media began its rapid decline.

Week 2 - Traveling & Scandal

I put a similar background on my phone to remind me what I should be doing instead of picking it up. This one is from Austin Kleon and you can grab it here.

During week two, I traveled with my family to Florida for the Daytona 500. This meant sitting in airports, flying on planes, and then having a lot of downtime in the hotel room in between races—all with no social media. Normally, I would’ve been posting photos from the trip and scrolling through my feeds. Instead, I read in the downtime. I ended up reading one and half books on the three-day trip. Also, in some of the downtime in the room, my family and I used the Heads Up app to play the game and fill the time. We ended up laughing to the point of tears. I’m not sure I would’ve thought to bring out the game if I hadn’t been on the social media fast. I was bored. It gave me the idea to play the family game.

It was a little strange not being able to post pictures or video from the trip, but that just meant that I could keep my phone tucked in my bag for most of the trip. I did share some photos in my newsletter.

Another thing that happened in week two was a big plagiarism scandal in the romance writing community. Normally, when this kind of thing happens, all the social media networks light up with the “breaking news” and then everyone’s take on it. I have lost whole days in the past following that kind of thing. Instead, because I wasn’t on social media, I was alerted about it by a friend via text, and she sent me the link for blog posts about it after the facts were straight. It was so much calmer learning about what was going on from a well thought-out blog post rather than the 100mph feeds and noise of social media. The lesson here was that I wasn’t uninformed. I still heard about it. But I could get the information in a calmer way.

Week 3 - I’m a believer

I stopped missing social media. I honestly, truly did. I was drunk on productivity and focus, y’all. Lol. Being able to have that level of intent focus and mental flow without even trying was like playing with a new toy. It reminded me of how things used to be when I was in high school and college, when I could deep dive into projects for hours at a time. I wrote a novel when I was fifteen. There’s no way that would’ve happened if I’d grown up with Facebook in my pocket. I used to be able to concentrate. Now, I had the ability back. It felt like magic.

Week 4 - Finishing and Fear

This past week, I had days where I worked in deep work mode for 7 hours, only stopping briefly midday to eat lunch. The online class I thought would take me another 3 weeks minimum to get ready was done. Not only done, but edited, uploaded, and open for enrollment. That is crazy banana pants to me. I finished the project almost a month ahead of schedule. I know it had everything to do with this experiment.

I use the music program Focus @ Will for background music, and it tracks how long you use it. I only have it on when I’m actively working. So this is what my days started to look like. That’s 7 hours of focused work if you’re math-challenged like I am. Seven hours!

However, with that thrill of success came a hint of fear about coming back to it all. I knew from the start that I wouldn’t leave social media forever. Beyond being part of my job, I am a member of a number of author groups online that truly bring me joy. BUT I didn’t want to lose this newfound superpower. I knew I needed to figure out a way not to fall back into old habit. So that’s what I’ll be talking about in the rest of this post.

But first, a recap of what I gotten done in a month without the social media distraction:

• Wrote 33k words of lectures for the class.

• Edited 55k words.

• Researched teaching platforms and learned how to use one.

• Created worksheets for the class.

• Blogged and wrote newsletters.

• Created a slideshow and promo video for the class.

• Loaded and formatted 7 weeks worth of lectures into the class platform.

• Rebuilt the format of my author newsletter.

• Set up text to speech on my blog (if you click the little button next to the title, it will read the post to you.)

• Read 8 books. Eight!

• Went on a vacation and didn’t work.

• Opened my course for enrollment (there are still a few spots left at the beta price if you’re interested)

• Spent more time with my family without my face in my phone

Observations

• I took less photos (not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.)

• The time I spent on my phone (according to Screen Time) was about 2 hours a day. This is down about an hour from usual (7 hours added to my week!) This experiment didn’t make me stop using my phone completely. Almost all time spent on it was text messaging, reading articles on Safari, and podcasts.

• The morning was often when I missed social media the most because my husband would grab for his phone, and I’d have nothing to do for those first few minutes before I got out of bed. I ended up reading articles most of the time.

• Sometimes it was inconvenient not to have Facebook simply for logistical purposes. Restaurants only had a FB page or I needed to access one of kidlet’s activities, but they do everything through FB.

• When I blogged, I had no way to share my posts outside of my newsletter, so that felt a little frustrating. (I could’ve shared it remotely without actually getting on social media, but that felt like cheating.)

• I didn’t miss anything urgent or important while I was gone. I signed on yesterday and had hundreds of notifications, but nothing was urgent. (Also I found out that Instagram only lets you look back through 2 weeks of notifications, so the other two weeks are lost unless someone tagged me.)

The biggest takeaway

This felt entirely different from the things I’ve done in the past like blocking social media for a few hours while I work or taking a digital sabbath. Those give you a break, but don’t impact the habit. I think this long of a break is much more disruptive in stopping bad patterns and clearing your mind so that you can look at social media with a more skeptical eye. You get a taste of what it’s keeping you from. For me, that was higher focus and productivity but also a sense of calm.

So if you’re thinking about doing something like this for yourself, give yourself the full month. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that quitting for the weekend is going to make any real difference. I also highly recommend reading Digital Minimalism first because Newport gives a lot of tips on how to best set yourself up for the 30 days. If you go cold turkey with no plan on what to replace that social media time with, you’re more likely to give up in that black moment.

Going Forward

Gretchen Rubin talks about in her book Better Than Before that some people are moderators and some are abstainers. Meaning, some people do better with creating a habit by completely abstaining from something: I never drink soft drinks. Others do better as moderators: I only drink soft drinks twice a week.

Most people think they’re moderators, but I have a feeling that more of us would be better as abstainers. There was relief in knowing checking social media wasn’t an option at all. There was no decision to be made. The line was clear. And really, that is how I quit soft drinks fifteen years ago. I went from a four-a-day Diet Mt. Dew habit to zero and never went back. Abstaining was the key for me.

However, with social media, abstaining isn’t realistic for me (and many of you) in the job I’m in. I also don’t want to lose the good things I enjoy about social media like my Facebook groups. But after this experiment, I know that I need to make some serious changes because I don’t want to give up the newfound focus and calm.

My plan for bringing social media back into my life

1. Put 20 minute daily limits (via Screentime feature) on Facebook and Instagram on my phone.

   I thought that the phone would be the biggest issue for me and, for a while, planned to not put Facebook back on it. But I realized through this experiment that the phone was much less of a problem than checking on my desktop and disrupting my work day. So I have put these two back on my phone but with strict limits.

   UPDATE (3.18.19): I’ve taken Facebook off my phone again. Having it back for a few days made me realize that even with my best intentions, I find myself checking it more than I want. The 20-minute limits were too easy to get by because I just had to click “ignore limit” and it opened. I’ve left Instagram on my phone because that app doesn’t call to me very much. I’m fine checking that one a time or two a day and that’s it.

2. Turned on the Downtime feature on my phone starting at 8pm and ending at 6am.

   This will keep my from randomly checking my phone while I’m watching TV with the fam and hanging out with them.

3. No more social media shortcuts on my desktop.

   They are way too easy to click when I hit a hard spot in my work.

4. I’m keeping Twitter off my phone.

   I was already doing this before and plan to continue.

5. Only check social media on my desktop at lunch time and on weekends.

   This is the one that’s still in flux. I have also considered using my Hey Focus blocking app and blocking access to social media in the morning work zone and afternoon work zone, but I almost feel like I need to lean on that abstainer concept and make it very clear: I only check social media on my computer at lunchtime and on weekends.

   UPDATE (3.18.19): This hasn’t worked so far. I find that I need to check at least Facebook in morning to clear out the messages and respond or not having checked it becomes the distraction. I may shift this to checking in the morning in an allotted time and then at lunch. Still working this one out.

I may tweak these or come up with different methods, but I’ll report back. I have a genuine worry that I’ll fall back into old patterns, and I really, really don’t want to. I have a new book to write, and I love having the focus superpower. I’m thinking of getting a cape. ;)

So…thoughts? Questions? Suggestions? Anyone else going to try their own digital declutter?

And for any writers interested in my course, here’s the video with all the details. I’ll be closing registration soon because we’re getting close to full! Course starts March 30th.

Revisiting Deep Work by Cal Newport & Why I'm Such a Devotee

This week I've been nerding out with all my non-fiction book recommendations about focus and distraction, writing, and curbing the smartphone habit. Today, I've got one last pick for you. 

I blogged about Deep Work last year (almost a year ago to the day) when I read it for the first time, and I really credit it with being the book that got me thinking more deeply (haha) about this whole topic of focus in the world of distraction we face everyday. It was my ticket into exploring this whole issue on a number of levels.

So this summer, with all my reading on what the internet, smartphones, social media, etc. are doing to our lives and brains, I decided it was time for a reread of the book that started me down this path. This time, instead of racing through it like I do when I first read a book, I reread at a leisurely pace and took handwritten notes throughout. I'm not typically a re-reader but I really felt like I got even more out of this one the second time because I've been on the journey of working on my focus for a year. So things I may have missed last time landed on this read through. I also have seen some results.

Of all the books I've recommended this week, I think this is the most "user-friendly" one because there are practical tips on what to do. Not to say the information and science of it isn't dry at times--that's the nature of this type of book and something I don't mind because I love science/research type books, but it's not a heavy or dense read like some of the others. (Like below I mention The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain, which was awesome but very dense with history and detailed science and not something I'd recommend to a reader who isn't used to reading that kind of thing or is looking for a general overview.)

So, if you haven't seen my previous post on Deep Work, check that out here, but today I thought I'd share some quotes and thoughts like I've been doing for the other books this week.

First, the back cover summary:

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, DEEP WORK takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. DEEP WORK is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.

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Quotes - Thoughts - Observations

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On our current state...

"There's increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow [thinking] is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work."

I can absolutely tell you that over the last year and particularly this summer when I've greatly dialed back my smartphone, social media, and internet time that I can feel the physical difference in my thinking. Last year, I was afraid that something was wrong with my memory because I couldn't hold onto so many things anymore. I was afraid that I was developing ADD (despite having no history of it). But it wasn't some illness overtaking me, it was this fast-moving world of distractibility.

I was teaching my brain to always be stimulated and jumping from task to task. But now, I can feel the quieting of my thoughts, feel the ability to focus and get into "flow" with projects coming back. I'm calmer. I'm more creative. In some ways, I feel like I've stepped out of the matrix and am seeing everything with new eyes--which sounds cheesy but is the best description of what the experience has felt like. It helps you get perspective, asking, wait, why was I doing this again? Why did I find it necessary to pick up my phone every 5 minutes or check social media every bored moment I had? Why did I feel the need to document and post so many things out to the world?  Honestly, it's jarring at first to dial it all back. And then you start reaping the benefits...

On the nervous hum...

"the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives. I'm comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill..."

Which is exactly what my experience has been. I can concentrate. I can read a book without worrying if an email has come in. I can work on writing my book and not care what's happening on twitter. I can exist in quiet with nothing to do but think and be cool with that. In fact, I've come to crave the quiet, disconnected moments like I used to when I was a daydreaming kid.

On multitasking...

"People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand...they're pretty much mental wrecks."

I am now a devotee to unitasking. Science tells us that we can't multitask anyway. When we think we are, we're just cycling from one task to the next at a rapid pace but still only doing one thing at a time. But if I've learned anything from all these books I've been reading, it's that unitasking with purpose is where the magic lies. It's like a superpower to be able to dedicate all of your focus to whatever it is you're working on. Like right now I am writing this post. No email or social media notifications will interrupt me (because I've turned them all off permanently both on my desktop and phone.) I will not check anything until I'm done writing this and have to go grab the links to add to this post. And I will finish this post in far less time than it used to take me to write something shorter.

On the importance of boredom...

"If every moment of potential boredom in your life--say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives--is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where...it's not ready for deep work--even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration."

So here's the thing. This does take some time for your brain to retrain. I can say that from my own experience and also from watching my son do the device-free summer. There's almost a detox process involved. For one, shutting down a lot of the distractions may make you feel mentally tired and even a little down. Our brains are used to the constant entertainment and stimulation. Pulling back from that and replacing it with quiet time and focused concentration is a big shift. But that state passes. For kidlet, it took about a week from what I could tell. For me, a little less, maybe because despite how distracted I was, I have been writing books for years which had trained my brain for some level of deep focus. But then that tiredness/low mood lifts and the quieter, focused pace becomes fulfilling. Creative ideas start to pop up. An internal calmness develops. Plus, you're more productive on the things that count which is reinforcing. You don't want to go back to how things were. Like kidlet has taken to saying, "I think the video games and Ipad were tricking my brain."

On social media...

Don't take the 'any benefit' approach to a social media tool. Take the craftsman approach, meaning adopt a tool only if its positive impact on your success/happiness/professional/personal life "substantially outweighs its negative impacts." 

The key there is that last portion--substantially outweighs. We can find positive aspects of any social media. But just because a positive aspect exists doesn't mean it's worth the costs of the negatives a tool may have. Most of us do social media for a combination of fun/socializing and work purposes, but as we know, social media can suck up all of our time and attention because it's meant to be addictive. Companies don't want you to leave their sites. So take a hard look at all your social media outlets and determine which ones offer you more positives than negatives and pare back or get rid of the ones that are more negatives than positives. He gives a great example in the book, using a writer as the test case, on weighing the pros and cons of Twitter. I can't post it all here but it's eye-opening. And then he gives you tools on how to tame your social media beast.

On Shallow vs. Deep Work...

And finally, how do you even know what constitutes deep work vs. shallow work? How do you know if you're spending time where you should?

Ask of a task: "How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?"

If the answer is not very long, it's shallow work. Deep work is whatever your specialized skills are. For me, deep work is writing and editing. Deep work is not crafting a clever FB contest. It doesn't mean that the shallow work is not still part of my job, but it helps determine where I should be spending most of my time and effort. I have a career because I know how to write a book. That's my specialized skill. If I spend 80% of my day doing email, Facebook, Twitter, and skimming the internet, I'm just like anyone else who knows how to use a computer. So invest the lion's share of your work time in your deep work tasks and then take breaks from focused work to do the other stuff, instead of the other way around (taking breaks from distractions to do a little deep work in between.)

There are a lot more great points in the book and I don't necessarily agree with every single tactic he suggests, but overall, it was a world-shaking book for me in a good way. It's changed how I approach things completely. I highly recommend it.

And if you want to nerd out on the topic like me, here is a further reading list:

Thought-Provoking Reads from a Device-Free Summer (Day 2): The Power of Off

This week I'm taking some of the books I've read this summer while researching productivity, children and the internet/devices/video games, and how devices and the internet change our brains and am giving y'all some highlighted quotes for those interested.

I know that most people don't want to read a stack of books about the same topic, but I'm a nerd and a researcher at heart, so I love this stuff. ;) Hopefully by pulling some of the quotes from all these different books, it will give you some food for thought and also help you decide if you want to pick up the book to read. 

Yesterday I tackled The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Today, I'm going to cover a different book with a similar topic, but this one is more about how to protect your mental health in the connected world we live in. So yesterday's book was more philosophical, The Power of Off is focused more on psychology and self-care.

From the back cover:

Effective mindfulness practices for transforming your relationship with technology and reconnecting with your real life
 
Our reliance on technology is rapidly changing how each of us experiences life. We’re facing new issues and difficulties, we’re encountering new emotional triggers, and we’re relating to each other in new ways. As Dr. Nancy Colier writes, “How we spend our time, what motivates us, and what we want are all are on a radical course of transformation.” The promise of technology is that it will make our lives easier; yet to realize that promise, we cannot be passive users—we must bring awareness and mindfulness to our relationships with our devices.
 
“The compulsion to constantly check our devices plays on primal instincts,” teaches Colier. “Even people with strong spiritual practices or those who have never had other addiction issues now find themselves caught in the subtle trap of these miraculous tools we’ve created.” Through The Power of Off, she offers us a path for making use of the virtual world while still feeling good, having healthy relationships, and staying connected with what is genuinely meaningful in life. You’ll explore:  

• How and why today’s devices push our buttons so effectively, and what you can do to take back control of your life

• Tips for navigating the increasingly complex ways in which technology is affecting our relationships—with ourselves, others, and our devices themselves

• Self-evaluation tools for bringing greater awareness to your use of technology

• Mindfulness practices for helping you interact with your devices in more conscious ways

• A 30-day digital detox program to kick-start a new healthier relationship with technology 

With The Power of Off, Colier sounds the call for wakefulness, reminding us that we can use technology in a way that promotes, rather than detracts from, our well-being. This book provides an essential resource for anyone wanting to create a more empowered relationship with technology in the digital age.

Quotes that stood out to me in The Power of Off:

On why the internet and social media are so seductive. We think...

"If other people know about our lives, our lives will feel more real...If the world knows who we are, we will know who we are....With enough virtual destinations to choose from, we will find somewhere that we want to be."

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Like most of you know, I did a device-free summer with kidlet and was very nervous and intimidated when we started it, but it ended up being a great decision and easier than I thought. Her experience below with her daughter was similar to mine in that my kidlet handled it much better than I anticipated. I actually didn't have to say no except once because when I told him it was for the whole summer, he accepted that as fact, so he hasn't asked because he knows no devices or video games this summer, period.

"Getting kids off technology is not for the faint of heart, not once they’ve tasted the relief and glee that a princess video on YouTube can provide. Getting off technology is, in fact, hard for the whole family. In the end, for me, it’s a matter of using my resilience and my ability to stay present and connected with my love for my daughter, my deeper wisdom, and my clear intention to teach my child to enjoy herself without external entertainment. I want her to know her own internal resources and to trust the imagination and intelligence she contains. Thankfully, the more I say no, the more she returns to playing on her own, engaging herself, and being happy and proud about it."

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On FOMO, the fear of missing out. I had to deal with this some in June/July when I did a 3-week social media fast to get my book finished, but that anxiety about missing out faded in a few days. After the fast, I've been reluctant to return to the previous state, so now I'm still limiting my social media just because it feels better. I feel calmer.

"Indeed, many of us have grown afraid that if we don’t continually tell the world who we are, as everyone else is doing, we will become invisible and irrelevant."

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She also made me think more about what I post when I do post. This is no judgment from me about what anyone decides to post, but it has now given me personal pause to think more deliberately about what I'm posting.

"A Facebook post by an intelligent friend, a fifty-year-old woman, read: 'Up for an early bike ride, now followed up by some fresh fruit and an acai juice.' Why do we now use our time to report such things? Why is it important that the public know our morning juice ritual? Do we not reap the same health benefits and take the same pride in that bike ride if others don’t know about it?"

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These made me think because it's like that tree in the woods thing--if a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it, did it really happen? That's how social media feels sometimes. It didn't happen unless we post about it. (And I know the irony of me commenting on this as I blog about something I'm doing in my life, lol.) But it comes to my mind a lot at concerts when everyone has their phones up recording the performance and watching the tiny screen instead of, you know, actually experiencing the live performance you paid all that money for in order to get a low quality video that won't be as good as one you can look up on YouTube. 

"What has happened to the power of internal experience, the private knowing of what we do in our lives? It appears that internal validation is disappearing and we increasingly need an external response for each moment we live."

"The rise of technology in our lives has been accompanied not only by the drive to turn ourselves into a brand but also by an undeniable explosion in our need to be witnessed."

"And often what accompanies this swelling desire is the belief that everything we live, from every thought to every splinter, is of monumental significance and fascination to others."

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And a good question to ask if you feel you're more attached or dependent on social media than you would like:

"Ask yourself: What role (if any) does technology play in making me feel seen, known, or valued? Why is it important to me that others know about this? ...If they know, does it change the experience...? What changes or relaxes as a result of my making this experience known to the world?"

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On how our sense of self matures (or doesn't.) This definitely gave me pause since I'm in my thirties now.

"There used to be a developmental stage in life, usually sometime in our thirties, when we shifted our focus from the outside to the inside. That is, we stopped defining ourselves by what others thought of us and became more interested in what we thought of ourselves and the world. This stage could be called “growing up.” It seems that this stage of life is now disappearing for many of us. Now, the question Do I like myself? has been replaced by Am I liked?"

So if you're looking for a read that will make a case for stepping away from social media sometimes and give your brain a break in the name of self-care, this is a good one to pick up. 

Research Reads from a Device-Free Summer: The End of Absence

If you've been following me this summer, you know that we embarked on a device-free or screen-free summer for kidlet. (Device-free is more accurate because we allowed watching TV and movies as a family but screen-free summer had alliteration, lol.) Here are the previous posts:

• A Screen-Free Summer for Kidlet: How, Why, & If I'll Lose my Mind
• The 10-Day Update
• The 5-Week Update

The experiment has gone so much better than I expected. I anticipated much more push back and problems. I expected it to be HARD. In truth, week one was hard. The rest has been...surprisingly easy. We've developed new routines and habits. Kidlet knows he's going to get his devices back in very limited quantities (20 min max a day) once summer is over, but he hasn't complained or asked for devices. The pull they had on him before (what inspired this screen-free summer idea in the first place) has disappeared. So I'm thrilled that we decided to take the leap and go cold turkey all summer (as scary as it seemed at the time.)

In addition to helping him, this whole experiment has opened my eyes a lot and helped me as well. I've wrangled a lot of my device time and social media time and have developed an aversion to things that are stealing my focus. Part of that is because I'm the type of person who wants to know ALL the things about a topic when I'm interested in it, so I have read A LOT of books about smartphones, social media, internet addiction, the changes technology has caused in how we interact, how our brains function, and how we live our lives.

I'm not sure I'm capable of summarizing the wealth of information I've read this summer, but I thought, for those interested, I could post the books I've read and share some of the quotes I highlighted while reading. So, that's what I plan to do this week. Each day, I'll post one of the books I read and the quotes I found most interesting or helpful.

Now, a disclaimer, I'm posting all of this without judgment. If you're into your devices and social media and don't feel the need to disconnect sometimes or back off of it, that's totally cool. I'm sharing this because I didn't like how things were trending with my lack of focus and my free time and family time being eaten up by my phone. So if it's not interfering with you or your family, then feel free to skip these posts. But otherwise, I think there's good food for thought in these books even if you aren't looking to make changes right now.

First up is The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris.

This one mainly focused on our ability to be in the quiet, to be bored, to be alone. I thought he had a lot of interesting and thoughtful things to say about how the internet, smartphones, and social media have changed us.

Here are the quotes that stood out to me:

"Evolution (nature) endowed us with minds capable of fast and furious transformation, minds able to adapt to strange new environments (nurture) within a single lifetime—even within a few weeks. Therefore, we’re always products of both inherited hardware and recently downloaded software... The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world."

"we now need to proactively engineer moments of absence for them. We cannot afford to count on accidental absence any more than we can count on accidental veggies at dinner. Without such engineered absences (a weekend without texting, a night without screens), our children suffer as surely as do kids with endless access to fast food. The result is a digital native population that’s less well rounded than we know they could be."

This is part of what spurred me to do the device-free summer. I have an amazing kiddo. I knew he was capable of more than running to his Xbox or Ipad every free moment of the day.

"It’s becoming more and more obvious. I live on the edge of a Matrix-style sleep, as do we all. On one side: a bright future where we are always connected to our friends and lovers, never without an aid for reminiscence or a reminder of our social connections. On the other side: the twilight of our pre-Internet youths. And wasn’t there something . . . ? Some quality . . . ?"

This one above really made me think because I think sometimes what we chalk up to "nostalgia" may be more than that. There was a quality to my childhood and those pre-internet years that's missing. I've learned this summer that it's not something that can't be reclaimed. Doing things like playing old school board games with kidlet or teaching him how to cook or watching him make up his own games has recaptured some of what I didn't even realize was missing.

"Children do need moments of solitude as well as moments of healthy interaction. (How else would they learn that the mind makes its own happiness?) But too often these moments of solitude are only stumbled upon by children, whereas socialization is constantly arranged."

I loved that line about how would they learn their minds make their own happiness. 

"Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent."

Things I'd never thought about, but so true. Everyone has their heads down looking at their phones now.

"Solitude may cause discomfort, but that discomfort is often a healthy and inspiring sort. It’s only in moments of absence that a daydreaming person...can receive truly unexpected notions."

Sound familiar, writers?

"What will become of all those surreptitious gifts when our blank spaces are filled in with duties to 'social networks' and the relentless demands of our tech addictions?"

"I fear we are the last of the daydreamers. I fear our children will lose lack, lose absence, and never comprehend its quiet, immeasurable value."

God, I hope this is not the case. As a writer who makes her living in the world of imagination and daydreaming, I hope a new crop of writers, artists, creators is behind me. 

"Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose."

This quote will stick with me. It's going to make me stop and think--when I look at this device, social network, whatever, what am I looking away from? I'm not a Luddite who is going to totally disconnect from the online world, but I'm becoming a lot more deliberate and choosy about how and where I'm spending my time and energy.

Needless to say, I found this book an engrossing read. I have more to share from other books the rest of this week, but I think this one did an excellent job of making the case for creating time in your life and your children's lives for solitude, quiet, absence, boredom, and blank spaces for your brain to daydream in.

Dream on, y'all. ;)