Slack, Digital Sabbath and Fredrik Backman
Some interesting essays that I came across in the last two weeks:
I am sure many of us have been grateful for Teams and Slack, which have made communication far easier while operating remotely during the pandemic. However, hasn’t a sort of fatigue started to set in given the constant bombardment of messages? Cal Newport makes this point in his essay on Slack and similar communication platforms. He calls it the right tool for the wrong kind of work. His argument hinges on the fact that Slack/Teams-like platforms ensures all-round availability and allows little time for deep work. Moreover, the ease of communication results in an endless fragmentation and bombardment of messages. While emails were never deemed as a perfect communication tool, not sure if Slack is a step ahead, or a further deterioration. ‘Though Slack improved in the areas where e-mail was lacking, in an age of high message volume, it simultaneously amplified the rate at which this interaction occurs.’ Newport writes in his essay. Slack was recently acquired by Salesforce and if the billons paid are indicative of the inherent value of the platform, chances are that such platforms will only become more ubiquitous.
Searching for strategies to go technology free, I found this yet another self-reflective essay by Kevin Roose on how he ditched his phone. His problem is not unique, and most of us might see the same symptoms of phone addiction that he experienced, in ourselves. For instance, in the case of Roose, he “found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations”. In an attempt to ditch his addiction, he first measured the time he was spending on his phone - more than five hours every day - similar to the time that I also spend with my device, unfortunately. The next step, which I found quite powerful but difficult to apply is to be more mindful while picking your phone, i.e. asking these three questions every time you wish to pick the phone: “What for? Why now? What else?”. Admittedly, he created a good amount of friction in his interaction with his phone by putting a rubber band over the phone, which allowed him enough time to pause and ask the questions instead of mindlessly swiping on it. I found this an interesting technique to experiment with, and counter all the frictionless-ness that technology giants are aiming to introduce in their devices and apps. ‘If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing. So during my morning walk to the office, I looked up at the buildings around me, spotting architectural details I’d never noticed before,’ Roose writes. In my case, I have favoured taking longer (3-5-10 days) digital sabbaths. However, Roose’s approach of introducing such a sabbath in short stretches daily seems a more robust approach instead of waiting for those long breaks.
I recently reviewed Fredrik Backman’s new book ‘Anxious People’ (link). While doing the research on the book, I came across Backman’s essay on his own struggles with anxiety. This is a piece which cannot be summarised in few lines and has to be read in its entirety. So I invite you all to do so. I will just pick a few lines from it: ‘Because this book took nearly everything for me to finish, and I ended up in a breakdown late last year. I started waking up in the middle of the night with nosebleeds. Got headaches. Forgot things, small stuff at first, but then later on I looked at pictures from our family summer vacation and had to ask my wife “where is that from?” I started feeling really stressed out, the pressure and expectations of everything around this…career thing…really started wearing me down.’
A quote that I came across:
Because you’re up in the air. And when you’re in the air for long enough it’s getting really difficult to know the difference between flying and falling.
— Fredrik Backman
