♦ 7 ♦
How Can We Make Technology Healthier for Humans?
The Blind Men and the Elephant
In a well-known parable, a group of blind men encounters an elephant. Each man touches a different part of the elephant and receives very different tactile feedback. Their later descriptions of the elephant to each other disagree, though each individual’s description is accurate and captures one portion of the elephant: a tusk, a leg, an ear. Humans often have only partial information and struggle to understand the feelings and observations of others about the same problem or situation, even though those feelings and observations may be absolutely accurate and valid in that person’s context.
Though more multifaceted than our perceptions of an elephant, our relationships with technology are similar: Each of us experiences it differently. Each of us relates to technology in a unique, highly personal way. We lose or cede control, stability, and fulfillment in a million different ways. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in the novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
In the same vein, the road back from unhappiness, the path to taking control over technology, and, by extension, the path to regaining freedom of choice takes a multitude of steps that are different for each of us. The steps nonetheless carry some common characteristics that we can all use as a basis for rediscovering and reentering real life.
Beyond Binary: Rethinking and Redesigning Our Relationship with Technology
The refrain we commonly hear is that we need to unplug and disconnect. Conceptually, this recommendation may feel good as a way to take back total control and to put technology back in its place as a subservient, optional tool. But using technology is no longer a matter of choice.
In San Francisco, if you want to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, you can no longer use cash to pay the toll. A camera can read your license plate and can send you a bill. But the vast majority of residents pay for the crossing using radio transponders mounted on their dashboards, through a system called FasTrak. Interacting with FasTrak in order to set up and manage your accounts is an online experience. If you choose not to set up a FasTrak account, you have to pay on a per-use basis by check or credit card over the phone. It’s a significant inconvenience, and you pay a higher toll.
FasTrak and automated tolls are the way of the future; we can expect that eventually all such transactions will be handled by connected technology. The infrastructure to manage the inner workings of our administrative lives will be digital.
Even in the personal sphere, our friends share pictures digitally. No longer are printed photographs of the soccer team or birthday party mailed to us. Restaurants that use the OpenTable online reservation system often will not take phone calls for reservations; if you want a table, you must reserve it via the Internet. Service after service, business after business, function after function is moving or has moved into the realm of technology in a way that necessitates our participation and connectivity. Yes, we can opt out of those services and businesses, but if we do, we lose out.
An unhealthy relationship with technology is not usually equivalent to alcoholism or drug addiction. With substance abuse, the solution is nearly always abstention and radical changes to life and environment. Drug addicts, for example, are encouraged to move to a different neighborhood in order to avoid old friends from their using days and in order to remove any perceived triggers from their lives. People who believe they have strong online gaming or pornography addictions may be able to similarly move to a new city and avoid the online places that used to ensnare them, but unfortunately such a strategy won’t work for technology. We cannot simply stop using technology if we plan to hold good jobs and navigate the world around us. The requirement for us to interface with technology is not decreasing but increasing.
Delta Airlines has just announced, for example, that it will be eliminating its human-attended check-in counters. This means that the only way to get a ticket for a Delta flight will be through a screen of one kind or another. We cannot tell our children that they are not allowed to use mobile phones and tablets if that is how schools administer tests. And we would be hard pressed to stop texting if it is the only or primary means by which our friends and parents contact us.
In the business world, we cannot avoid technology unless we start our own business and run it in some remote town or village. And even that is not realistic. If you were to apply for a white-collar job of any kind and inform the hiring manager that you refuse to use e-mail, you’d get a swift rejection. Likewise, if you refuse to use a smartphone or a mobile phone, you will rule out a wide range of executive roles and other positions for which emergency availability after hours is crucial. And refusing to use videoconferencing on the basis that it makes it too easy to schedule stupid meetings may get you fired.
Real-life practicalities also suggest the value of applying discernment to technology use. The same technology that we may consider unproductive and harmful in one situation may become necessary in another. The cell phone that teenagers cannot put down is a lifeline when they need a ride home from a party because their driver has consumed too much alcohol or taken drugs or simply left without them.
Even the most basic services, such as health care and checking in for a flight, are in line for mandatory digitalization. When Alex needed an X-ray recently, the hospital told him that he had to check in through an online kiosk, an increasingly common requirement. This digitization ranges from the mundane to the mildly entertaining. We have spoons that connect to our smartphones to tell us whether our portion sizes are appropriate. There is the Quirky Egg Minder, a connected egg tray that notifies an app on our phone how many eggs are in our tray. And Brita has made a water-filter pitcher that warns you on line when the water in the pitcher is getting low.
A key part of this digitalization is a move to digitize money. China provides a glimpse into our digital currency and technology future. Use of cash has become a rarity in major cities there.1 Many merchants simply refuse to accept it, as do many merchants in Sweden, where the government and major banks have collaborated closely to reduce the use of paper money.2 India, as well, aspires to be cash-free, albeit in an attempt to expose corruption and to ensure equal distribution of government benefits to all its eligible citizens.3 To make a cashless society possible, India has rolled out a national biometric system that many critics fear has already undermined citizen privacy. Called Aardhar, the system has already been hacked several times but is firmly entrenched in India.4 Aardhar forces more online banking and the use of smartphones to pay for goods and services or simply lend and repay money.
In Estonia a massive cyberattack by Russia froze the country’s infrastructure and convinced the government of this small Baltic country to set up an entirely virtual infrastructure that could be moved to data centers in other countries in the event of a reprise of the attack. This move to cloud computing included critical government and administrative functions, such as the issuance of passports.5 Other governments are studying what Estonia did and are considering adopting similar models in order to secure business continuity.
So, increasingly, unplugging wholesale is not an option. Nor for most of us is it an appropriate response to life in the age of technology. The question then becomes how to selectively unplug. How can we set better limits? How can we control our environments at work and at home, and the environments our children live in, in order to make them a bulwark against assaults on our freedoms, privacy, and sociability?
“One Small Change I Made That
Improved My Daily Mental State”
Mark Suster is a prominent venture capitalist who has built a huge following for his blog, Both Sides of the Table. He is a featured speaker at conferences and a sought-after investor because of the online persona and presence he has built. Suster is a leading voice on critical moral matters facing the venture-capital community and the technology community at large.
In October 2017, Suster published a blog that had a click-bait headline suited to Buzzfeed or HuffPost: “One small change I made that improved my daily mental state.”6 In the blog, he told of several small changes that he had made to restructure his life in ways that gave him greater control and awareness of his technology consumption.
Two years ago, Suster stopped bringing his smartphone into the bedroom in order to check texts and social feeds before he slept and to check e-mail in the morning. He preferred to have quiet time to think and zone out. Suster writes that in the morning “if I need to get work done I’m infinitely more productive if I come to my computer with a big screen and a keyboard. . . . So my goal was to either have more time to just think or relax or admit that I have work to do and do it more productively. I’m happy to say that this has been a huge improvement in my life and productivity.”
In the summer of 2017, Suster took a bigger step: he deleted both Facebook and Twitter from his smartphone. He did not stop using the services entirely; he just removed them from his phone to discourage impulsive checking of them. For someone who was prominent in the Twittersphere, often involved in broad-ranging online discussions covering hot topics on technology, this step may seem radical.
Truth be told, Suster began to question the value and wisdom of his entire pattern of technology use. He noticed that he used Facebook and Twitter on mobile primarily when he had little else to do—say, when he found a speaker at a school event boring or when he was waiting for a meeting—and not for anything terribly useful or memorable. He found that it made him less present in the moment. Like many of us, Suster felt bad about the compulsion to use social media even when, deep down, he didn’t really want to.
After deleting his phone’s social-media applications, Suster found that his days became a lot more enjoyable and productive. He still checks Facebook and Twitter, but he does so a lot less often. He stopped using Facebook for news and started going directly to news sources that he likes and trusts, such as Axios and the New York Times. He still uses Facebook, but only for connecting with friends and family and seeing their pictures. He uses Twitter for light professional conversations and to check feeds of companies he is interested in. In general, he uses mobile social applications significantly less. He also shuts off all applications’ notifications on his phone. He writes, “Your app can’t try to pop my dopamine and try to drag me into being addicted to using it. I’ll check when I’m ready.” And it’s pretty obvious from the post that Mark Suster is happier with his life and his day-to-day existence than he was before making these changes.
Suster took control of his environment and set boundaries and rules. He examined what he liked and what he disliked about how technology was affecting him and thought about how to improve his interactions with it. He put in place a system to design his interactions with technology to suit his needs and maximize the value of his time.
Suster’s life modifications may not work, or be necessary, for everyone. Those who check Facebook only twice a day may not feel compelled to erase the application from their phones. People who need to check Facebook every fifteen minutes for their jobs but never check it at night may likewise have no cause for concern about having the application on theirs. But for those who, as Suster did, find themselves using social-media applications from compulsion and feeling unhappy about it, erasing them and changing their environment is a smart strategy.
Designing one’s environment to maximize specific behaviors and outcomes is a well-known strategy in addiction therapy and in the new and burgeoning field of performance management. All of it, in fact, harks back to behavioral design and Fogg’s calculus for inducing new behaviors. In his best-selling book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg discusses behavioral design in the form of breaking and forming habits.7 In their book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, the winners of a Nobel Prize in economics, discuss how to encourage healthy behaviors such as saving money for retirement by employing the same tricks that phone-application developers apply to make us “Like” and share more.8 On their popular podcast Freakonomics, Steven Dubner and economist Steven Leavitt regularly look at matters relating to behavioral design and performance management.
Our relationship with technology is more complicated than going about forming or breaking habits, though. Yes, we can erase Facebook from our phones. But eliminating e-mail access from them may be impossible, even for someone like Suster who has an extraordinary degree of control over his job and his technology use.
Moving Slow, Moving Fast in China
Vivek first visited China more than a decade ago, before the era of wireless data connections and ubiquitous broadband. He found that he could not book ordinary hotels in advance and that catching a taxi was a nightmare because no one spoke English. He needed to have the concierge write his destination on a piece of paper to hand to the taxi driver, praying that he didn’t end up in the wrong part of the city.
When he visited again in 2016, Vivek found that the technology landscape had changed. Everyone had a smartphone with fast information transfer. Booking hotels was easy, as were finding online restaurant reviews and catching cabs. Communication was easier, not because more people spoke English but because real-time translation applications had become so good that the Chinese people could hold slow but functional conversations with Vivek by uttering a phrase into their phones and playing back the English version. This trip was less fraught with stress and uncertainty, thanks to modern technology.
The smartphone became a way to help Vivek make the most of his journey and spend less time on the drudgery of logistics and discovery. He felt more in control, better able to navigate, and more mentally free to experience and be present on the trip rather than worry about where he would stay or eat. And whereas using Google Maps in our hometown takes us away from the present and reduces us to watching the blue dot and remembering a lot less about the journey, the map and general online knowledge are an enormous help to the traveler who visits the hinterlands of China, where navigation is more challenging.
Understanding Our Tech Dependence and Addiction
In almost every case with regard to our use of technology, the context matters. In almost every case, the type of activity also matters. Excessive viewing of pornography is likely to have a more negative impact than excessive checking of social media. Porn is generally consumed alone, not as a social activity, and therefore lacks the countervailing benefits of connection and sharing that social media may offer. An online shopping addiction is probably another serious problem, because the long-term consequences of spending too much money on line in an uncontrolled fashion could be far more serious and devastating to someone’s life than spending too much time texting or on online dating sites. Then again, a problem with texting while driving can be the most serious problem of all—one with a tragic outcome. Spending eight hours per day on social media, to be sure, has its own real problems: it’s pretty hard to hold down a job or hold meaningful conversations in real life if you are constantly checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
The nuances of context offer special challenges in building smart strategies for healthy technology use and in shifting our interactions with technology from toxic to measured and beneficial. There is no defined category for technology addiction, but psychiatrists have been debating whether Internet addiction is a real malady. It was not added to the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic bible of mental health professionals around the world. (Online gaming is a subsection of the gambling-addiction section in that publication.) But a working definition of Internet addiction serves as a useful lens through which to view most technology pathologies. In an article on the topic, psychiatrist Jerald Block broke down Internet addiction into three clear subtypes: sexual preoccupation, excessive gaming, and excessive or uncontrolled e-mail or text messaging.9 This article was written in 2008, so Block probably had not taken account of social media, then not yet in broad adoption. Social media, online shopping, and video watching would be additional subcategories today.
Regardless of the category, Block’s enumeration of the phenomenon’s negative influences is relevant to nearly any form of addiction or technology pathology.
The first is excessive use, sometimes associated with a loss of sense of time or an (occasionally fatal) neglect of basic needs such as food, drink, bodily evacuation, and sleep.
The second is some form of withdrawal, including feelings of anger, irritability, tension, or depression when a device is not available or when there is no (or limited) Internet connectivity.
The third is tolerance of and willingness to make alterations or purchases to accommodate the addiction. The tolerance may be to acquiring better computer equipment or more software, to spending more hours of use, or to spending a great deal of money.
The fourth is the negative psychic repercussions stemming from arguments, lying, lack of achievement, social isolation, and fatigue. According to the research cited earlier, the repercussions include depression, anxiety, and loneliness.
With these negative influences in mind, we can propose a simple set of questions to ask ourselves in deciding how to create a more mindful and conscious engagement with our technology.
We start by asking a very simple question: does our interaction or use of the technology make us happy or unhappy? There are many derivatives of this question: Does it make us tense or relaxed? Does it make us anxious or calm? The answer may be “both,” and that is okay, but we should consider whether, on balance, an interaction leaves us with good or bad feelings.
Good Tech or Bad Tech: Engagement by Design
One way to address the overall question of how a technology affects you is to go through the following exercise. It is a classic decision-framing exercise, not magic; but being able to count, visualize, and weigh effects and considerations is immensely helpful in undertaking it.
Here is what you do. Write down a particular activity or technology at the top of a sheet of paper. (It is definitely best to do this exercise on paper.) It can be anything relating to screens and technology. Draw a line down the middle of the paper. On the left-hand side, list all the positive things and benefits that you feel this technology or technology-driven behavior brings you. On the right-hand side, list all the negatives.
Be expansive. Consider not only the immediate feelings and effects it brings about but also secondary and tangentially related effects that you can perceive. All are critical in the calculation. If the negatives outweigh the positives, then you’ll know that a change will be beneficial.
Because we are so immersed in technology, we can slip into a state of constant and paralyzing introspection. At a remove from these disabling effects, this decision-making technique enables life-supporting self-analysis and action—true executive function such as Mark Suster described in implementing his own personal controls.
Ask yourself: Should you remove Facebook or Twitter from your phone? Should you install an application such as Slack on it? Should you ban screens from your bedroom? Should you turn off the Internet on Sundays and after 8 p.m.? Should you lock your phone in your car’s glove compartment? If you consume porn or online gaming, should you completely ban it from your life in order to restore balance? These are some of the decisions you will want to make.
You will also want to examine the secondary effects. For example, Alex has until recently used the music app Spotify to play tunes during his runs and workouts. On its face, this seems to make sense. Research has shown that music can positively affect motivation to work out. Alex really liked the feature on Spotify that matches his running pace with song beats of the same pace.
Then he started to pay attention to how much time it was taking for him to manage Spotify during workouts and how much time it was taking away from the workout. Though not the majority of it, the time was considerable. For example, in a standard weightlifting and calisthenics workout, Alex was spending about three minutes per session to manage songs. In a thirty-minute session on a busy day, that was 10 percent of his time—for no good reason. It was dead time due to technology.
Listening to music on Spotify is surely a net positive: Providing an endless selection of tunes with infinite playlists, it opens up rich new worlds. The service also makes sharing with friends very easy. It allows Alex to expose his children to Bach, Mozart, John Coltrane, and Celia Cruz, all from one easy screen, the same screen from which they hear music by Nicki Minaj, the Gym Class Heroes, and Kendrick Lamar. But this example shows the importance of consciously designing the style of our engagement even with a technology application whose use is, by and large, positive.
In engaging with technology, both Vivek and Alex actively and consciously select and lean toward the contexts and uses in which they find the technology behavior to be largely beneficial and satisfying. Though simple, it’s an approach that any of us can make work, simply by asking ourselves relevant questions—and being honest about the feelings and other effects the technology raises in us.
Identifying the Problems Tech Causes in Our Lives: Six Simple Questions
The simple framework outlined in the previous section for analyzing our interactions with technology is one that’s easy to expand on. We can efficiently analyze our interactions with technology, and evaluate their effects, through six questions. The answers can be as simple as a mental checklist, and they are usually obvious and intuitive. It can even be useful to list positives and negatives explicitly. The questions to ask yourself about a technology or application are as follows:
1. Does it make us happier or sadder?
2. Do we need to use it as part of our lives or work?
3. Does it warp our sense of time and place in unhealthy ways?
4. Does it change our behavior?
5. Is our use of it hurting those around us?
6. If we stopped using it, would we really miss it?
As an exercise in analyzing our interactions, we might consider one of the primary technology platforms that we use each day, Facebook, and another example of technology use: texting while driving.
First, we analyze our interactions with Facebook.
Question 1: For Vivek and Alex, the answer is that Facebook creates unhappiness. The answer really depends on an individual’s nature, but for both of us, the answer is a definite negative: no happiness here.
Question 2: For Vivek and Alex, the answer is that we do not need Facebook: ceasing to use it would cause minimal disruption of our daily lives and equilibrium.
Question 3: For Vivek and Alex, Facebook does warp our sense of time. Aimless scrolling down our newsfeeds has resulted in our spending a lot more time than we intended to in Facebook.
Question 4: For Vivek and Alex, Facebook does not radically alter our behavior. We may waste a little time on it, but the changes are barely noticeable in the context of our days. We know that others spend hours and hours on Facebook, but that’s not us.
Question 5: For Vivek and Alex, the answer is that our use of Facebook is not hurting those around us. The answer to this question is somewhat dependent on that to the previous question, but it is still instructive. It is important to take an expansive view of whether our Facebook use is harming those around us; sharing photos and checking status to the detriment of other, more important pursuits, such as spending time with friends and family or completing key work projects, may mean that, yes, our usage is harming those around us.
Question 6: For some people, stopping Facebook would be a loss, because it is their chief means of connecting with people important in their lives. Some grandparents find Facebook the easiest way to keep track of far-flung families. But for Vivek and Alex, Facebook is probably something we could take or leave.
Based on these responses, restricting or deleting Facebook would be a positive move for Vivek and Alex.
Next, we analyze our interactions with texting while driving.
Question 1: For Vivek and Alex, this is a far easier case to consider. Texting while driving definitely makes us sadder rather than happier.
Question 2: For Vivek and Alex, we know it is terrible and that we don’t need to do it. There is never a situation in which texting while driving is demanded or necessary.
Question 3: For Vivek and Alex, absolutely it warps our sense of time. As discussed in chapter 6, a moment of reading a sentence or two, two seconds of travel in which we imagine nothing occurs, raises the probability of a crash by 2,000 percent. We think we can react much faster than we actually can, and we think that we are less likely to have accidents while we are texting then we actually are.
Question 4: For Vivek and Alex, indeed it can radically alter our behavior. In how many other cases would we say that we embrace a behavior change that increases our chances of dying by more than 50 percent while on the road?
Question 5: For Vivek and Alex, driving while texting definitely does hurt those around us. Hundreds of thousands of car accidents and pedestrian and cyclist injuries are attributable to this pathological behavior.
Question 6: For Vivek and Alex, we might miss texting while driving for a brief instant if we stopped doing it, but then we would probably be exceptionally relieved.
So, based on these responses, our use of the technology clearly detracts massively from the well-being of Vivek and Alex.
Note that texting while driving is a subset of texting, and that texting in other situations is a different matter for consideration. For us, for instance, judicious, appropriate texting is an efficient way to connect to our spouses and friends and children. So context is important.
We can consider each technology either on its own or in a context. Sometimes the technology is not good for us, and sometimes it’s merely the context that’s not good for us. For example, Alex made a conscious decision to not post his children’s pictures on Facebook, as a way to preserve their control over their identities, and decided not to consume friends’ photo uploads because it made him sometimes envious of their fun and adventures. Comparisons, he decided, were not joyful. The sharing was nice, but it was too much for him. Competitive by nature, he saw no reason to inflame needless jealousy of what are, in fact, only the very best portions of his friend’s lives.
Oddly, when the sharing bares our lives, warts and all, then the impact may be the reverse—it may stoke empathy and push us toward closeness. The posts that Alex remembers to this day are those of a distant friend sharing her struggle with cancer and, simultaneously, with the loss of a child. A New York Times tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo, wrote about his experience with a feature on Instagram and Snapchat called “Stories,” which attracts a less polished view into the lives of friends and family. Wrote Manjoo, “Though Stories is only a few weeks old, I have already learned a lot about my friends. It turns out they do not live in perfect houses—some of theirs are as messy as mine—and don’t always have perfectly combed hair. They don’t always get things done; they sometimes eat less than stellar-looking food; their kids sometimes misbehave just as much as mine.”10
A False Dichotomy: To Tech or Not to Tech
A question grew in the mind of economics professor David Laibson: are laptops negative externalities in my classes? In his classes at Harvard University, many students used laptops and tablets, their fingers clattering across the keyboards as they took notes—or perhaps perused social media or read e-mails. A negative externality, as discussed earlier, is a secondary negative effect of an action. For example, industrial manufacturing of plastics may produce a negative externality of pollution. Economists have struggled to place a price on negative externalities, as their effects can be manifold and pervasive. In our daily lives, we face negative externalities all the time; second-hand cigarette smoke is a clear example. Wood smoke from fireplaces in wealthy areas of Califiornia is one of the worst pollutants and another clear negative externality.
To students at Harvard, many of whom are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for an education, Laibson concluded that the interruption caused by the use of technology in class constitutes a meaningful negative externality. “The web offers instant gratification that undermines our very good intentions to get the most out of class, and that’s all about present bias,” said Laibson on the Freakonomics podcast. “We go into the classroom, and we are convinced, ‘I am going to be a good student.’ Suddenly, other things become very appealing and very tempting. We’re distracted by those other very gratifying opportunities. Suddenly, we’ve lost forty-five minutes of the fifty-minute lecture.”11
Laibson thought that banning laptops from his classes would be controversial (though a number of professors ban them from their classes, and many companies have a laptops-closed policy for meetings). After all, many students do use laptops effectively to take notes more quickly than they could with pen and paper, or to search for supporting information and links on line while listening to a lecture. And even though most evidence to date suggests that students learn less effectively in the presence of devices, Laibson did not want be paternalistic and dictatorial.
So Laibson proposed an innovative solution. He would create two class sections. One section would be technology-free; the other would permit the use of laptops and tablets. The reaction from his class has been quite positive. Laibson surveys students at the end of the year asking, “Did this policy of having these two sections facilitate your learning?” On a 0 to 10 scale, the average rating has been just over 8. “It’s about letting people choose for themselves, but letting them choose in a deliberative, thoughtful, careful way at the start of the semester,” Laibson told Freakonomics. Laibson hopes to make this same choice available to other classes at Harvard in the not-so-distant future.
As Laibson demonstrates, the choice of using technology need not be an all-or-nothing or one-size-fits-nobody solution. “Disconnection or overload” is a false dichotomy, we believe, in the majority of instances. We can design environments that restore choice and allow consideration and fulfillment of individual preferences.
Vivek teaches students at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) College of Engineering at Silicon Valley about advancing technologies. His classes focused on how those technologies can make it possible to solve the grand challenges of humanity, such as providing healthy food, free energy, health, clean water, and a quality education to everyone on earth. Last semester, his classes were live-streamed to the CMU’s Pittsburgh campus and to twenty-nine universities all across Mexico and Peru. These foreign schools were generally lesser-known universities in which the majority of students were the first in their families to attend a university. It was an ambitious experiment to see whether Vivek could simultaneously teach thousands of students. But its success was limited.
The Silicon Valley and Pittsburgh students ranked the class as one of the best, but the Mexicans and Peruvians couldn’t keep pace—largely because of the language and cultural barriers. Technology simply couldn’t bridge these barriers; a human element was clearly needed. On top of that, a constant chatter during class of messages among students in the class Slack channel became a burden for all students. After students complained to him, Vivek decided to ask all students to shut down the Slack channel during class. The students were told that they could take notes on their laptops but that chats and social media would have to wait until after class.
The lesson Vivek learned was that too much technology can be detrimental—and that technology cannot transcend social and cultural barriers. He is no longer offering the class to students outside Carnegie Mellon University, and he has decided that, beginning in the next semester, he will require students to turn off their laptops and smartphones for the first two hours of the four-hour class. The first two hours consist of lectures by Vivek and his son Tarun, who teaches with him, and by visiting professors. The next two hours consist of discussion, debate, and brainstorming; there is little time to post Facebook messages or review Instagram photos during those last two hours. This is how Vivek designed the environment to create for his students a healthy relationship with technology.
At Mozilla, Alex put in place a “no-meeting Friday” policy for his team, to give them a safe time to turn off Slack, avoid e-mail, and focus on the deep work that would benefit from uninterrupted time and make his team’s work more rewarding. The concept of no-meeting days is hardly novel, but it is a surprisingly rare tactic considering the simplicity of this choice.
On a vacation to Hawaii, Alex’s friend Helen instituted a simple strategy to save her sanity and preserve the sanctity of her vacation. Her teenage daughter was a heavy Instagrammer, whose every trip turned into an Instagram photo shoot. Helen’s husband felt compelled to record everything on video in order to share it immediately with his parents, who replied by text. For her part, Helen felt compelled to check Twitter to keep up with the political back-and-forth in Washington, DC, that was part of her job (and classic FOMO). On their previous vacation, they had logged more screen time than real time. On the first day in Maui, Helen rolled out her vacation policy: “Everyone has to pop their SIM card and leave it in the hotel room,” she said. “No exceptions.”
After some initial protests, the family agreed to give it a try. They drove the storied road to Hana, stopping at waterfalls, and lounged on a black-sand beach before returning to their hotel, exhausted. The day had been a good one. The family had spent time with technology, for sure. The daughter had taken pictures for later Instagram posts, and the husband had shot videos. But, unconnected to the wider world, the family members took the opportunity to interact with each other. The screens were there in the day but did not dominate. The memories were captured, even enhanced, by technology. For that day, they lived in the present and just with each other. It was a fairy-tale ending, achieved simply by ejecting their SIM cards.
Truly, we can have both our technology and our freedoms. Whether to tech or not to tech is a question easily transcended through creative environmental and behavioral design.
Defensive Tools, Defensive Strategies
The arsenal of hardware and software to help people better control their technology use and make it more mindful is expanding. There are a handful of smartphone applications, such as Freedom, Focus, Unglue, and Moment, that measure active time spent on the phone and limit its use to a specified maximum. Other applications, such as Space by Dopamine Labs, insert a pause, delaying users’ access to applications or services they wish to limit their use of. The pause helps people break their habit by making their choice to check Facebook or LinkedIn more conscious and more active. At work, there are any number of applications designed to better structure and batch e-mail usage, such as Inbox When Ready.
There are routers such as Torch and Circle that let parents shut off certain users’ Internet access during certain hours of the day and filter the kinds of activity they can engage in. This capability has been around for a while, going back to OpenDNS, which Alex used, but for people who are less comfortable managing complicated networking technologies, the newer products make the process easier for regaining control of their technology. There are, too, parental controls baked into a growing number of the services, including Facebook. Curiously, Instagram defiantly refuses to allow for parental controls, although it is possible to download apps such as Netsanity, which can be used to control a minor’s Instagram usage and block the use of other applications.
Software solutions may not be the most effective or the most rewarding ways to control technology use. Layering more technology on top of technology doesn’t attack the root of the problem and doesn’t help us build the mental muscle that will, over time, help us recover our freedom of choice and our real lives. Using additional technology to corral our own use of technology adds more to the cognitive load we carry by adding a new technology product to our portfolio of things we have to mentally manage. A technology product may work for some people, though, and we encourage you to continue using whatever works.
We prefer solutions to problems of toxic technology use that, like the six questions discussed in this chapter, are more generic and human based. With that in mind, chapter 8 presents a few playbooks that we hope you can use. If they sound simple, that’s because they are. We consider that injecting another prophylactic layer of technology management—products to manage products, applications to manage applications—on top of the existing mental burden of managing our technology lives is a waste of our finite mental capacities.