In the previous pieces in this series, I’ve tried to offer solutions and experiments for using technology more mindfully without adding anything new to your technology stack, save for a free app to track your computer usage. I’ve also tried to do the same without demanding you throw away something you thought was a worthwhile investment. The reason is simple: throwing more technology at the problem is sometimes more placebo than panacea—and can often make things worse. Better to make do with what you have already, and learn how to use it better.

We need to solve our problems involving technology at the right level. Is Facebook keeping you from getting your work done, or is your work making you want to check Facebook? I know that when I’m lost and confused as to what is best to spend my time on, that’s when I’m most likely to fall into an Internet K-Hole. Since I don’t know what to do, I’ll do the easiest, most dopamine-boosting thing I know. Before I know it, the tab bar in my browser is a series of ten-pixel wide click targets with no text, and it’s time for me to consider going to bed. I will… Once I read through each damn tab. In fact, I mode switched so I could finish writing this, moving from my Mac at my desk, to my iPad. Here, I can type in slightly more peace, and distractions are slightly harder to get to.

When we look at our technology usage, we need to consider not just what we use and how, but how also why we use them—or don’t use them, depending on what we’re trying to fix. It is the “why” that remains most unexamined, of course. It’s easier to just slap on another technological band-aid, hence the proliferation of Focus Timers, Task Managers, Distraction-Free Writing Environments, Time Tracking Apps, tools to block time-wasting sites, and—yes—reviews, guides, and self-righteous thinkpieces on all of the above.

There’s nothing wrong with having technological solutions for technological problems, when they’re the right solutions… If blocking Facebook between the hours of 8 AM to 6 PM keeps you working on your work, then more power to you. If a Distraction-Free Writing Environment actually helps you bang out that Great American Novel, keep using it. But if these things aren’t helping, don’t assume that another technological band-aid is going to help, especially when you’re putting that band-aid on a papercut, while your temple bleeds into your eye. (Consider this a more gory version of Merlin Mann’s metaphor of the brain tumor patient who is trying to buy a hat.) The papercut really stings, but your bleeding head is going to be a much bigger problem, and much faster.

Step back and ask yourself, is each piece of problem-causing technology you’re using a cause of your stress, or a symptom? Are you actually overwhelmed or distracted by all the shiny lights, buzzing alerts, and endless streams of shiny new content? Or, is it more likely that you’re using the technology as an excuse for something else that’s keeping you from doing what you’re supposed to be doing?

The answers to these, of course, will depend on what you’re doing, and what you’re not doing. If you’re constantly being distracted by a busy box of pinging and buzzing devices every day, then you’ll want to get that part of the technology under control. If you’re clicking through baby pictures on Facebook instead of starting the Henderson Report, I’m willing to bet Facebook isn’t the problem. It’s something deeper, and instead of looking at new software and hardware, you’ll be better served by looking inside yourself and figuring out the real problem.

How many computing devices do you use daily? Be honest. Count your work computer. I’m going to guess that the bare minimum devices you have will average out to three: a home PC, a work PC, and a smartphone. If you have a fourth, it might be a tablet or e-reader. I have five in my life right now: a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, an e-reader, and a smartwatch, but I’m an outlier. What are all of these devices for, especially since they can all do so much?

As I mentioned in the previous post in the series, there’s no such thing as a unitasking device anymore. Technology hasn’t just broken down the barriers between work life and home life, it’s broken down the barriers between many of the things we do at work and at home. Despite this, each of our computing devices should still have a specific role in our lives. I mean, you’re not going to do your taxes on your work computer—though you might check Facebook on it, depending on how chill your office is.

To make it all work, It’s become incumbent upon us to create an optimal environments for us to work in. In other words, we need to know how to use our technology to help us switch modes. Why do so many self-employed and remote workers like to set up shop in Starbucks? Because it gives them a different physical space to work in—and a different mental space, too. They use that different physical location as a cue to switch modes, knowing that this is where they get down to work.

One thing I love about my iPad is that I can carry it anywhere, set up shop anywhere with a flat surface, whip out my favorite Bluetooth keyboard, and start writing. I don’t even need WI-Fi to work, but it’s nice to have it. It doesn’t have to be anywhere special. In the mornings, I’ve taken to setting the iPad up on my dining table and banging out Morning Pages—750 words of private writing—every day. [1]

Sure, I could do Morning Pages at my desk, with my big monitor in front of me, my laptop display to the right, and my comfortable desk chair, but there’s something about switching to the iPad at the dining table that feels like I’ve sat down with purpose. Besides, the Mac has my music library, various other apps I can switch to, and endless things to fiddle with. It’s easier for me to single-task on my iPad than it is on my Mac. And first thing in the morning, when I haven’t even had my coffee, that is a godsend.

But you don’t need extra hardware or software to switch modes. It can be as simple as throwing up the app(s) you need to do your work on full screen, carrying your laptop into a different room, or even launching a different web browser. There’s a technology “lifehack” that’s circulated for years of creating a separate user account on your computer just for doing work, versus one for goofing off online. Even turning off the technology in favor of a pen and paper is just another form of mode switching. Whatever it takes to jostle our brains out of existing patterns and tell ourselves that, right now, we are focusing on our work—or focusing on our play, for that matter.

There is no such thing as a unitasking device any more. The computer I’m writing this on is my home stereo, my home theater, a video game console, and a gateway to the most intense legal K-hole you can get without a prescription. (Damn you TV Tropes!) If you’ve ever sat down at your machine with the full intention of getting down to work, only to emerge a couple of hours later, with no work done and no recollection of how you spent your time… you are not alone. I’ve done it twice, today. See, I’m figuring all this stuff out too.

One secret weapon I have, however, is that I’m tracking everything I do at my computer. When I need to figure out exactly what I’ve been wasting my time on, I can dive into RescueTime and get a sense of my day. I even have Rescue Time set to send me a summary of what I did during the week, every Sunday, so I don’t even have to log in to find out what I’ve been up to. There are other solutions as well—many time tracking apps will do the same thing, so you can see if you’ve spent your day in Photoshop or on Pinterest. RescueTime has the benefit of being cross-platform, and being free (with a paid upgrade option that I don’t use.)

A not that great week in RescueTime

There’s no RescueTime for iOS for obvious reasons, but in iOS 8, Apple added a section to the Battery settings page to show what apps have used the most of your device’s battery. This gave a general overview of what apps you might be using most, but In iOS 9, they added a clock button which shows, to the minute, how long each app you use has been on-screen. It’s not as detailed of a report as RescueTime, but it’s helpful. Long story short, I’m spending way too much time refreshing Tweetbot these days…

I think Me and Threes need time apart

Here is the thought technology, to borrow another Merlin Mann-ism. Set up a tracking app, and then just let it run. Go about your standard computing life for a whole week, without even thinking about the little cross icon in your menu bar watching your every move. (If you hide your menu bar, like I do, it’s a lot easier.) Once that week is up, take a look at the data and start identifying the patterns. It’s up to you what to do with the data, but without a clear picture of what your behavior is, how will you know what to change?

When trying to change a habit, a lot of us have a tendency to just throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We also have a tendency to try to change a million behaviors at once—Well, maybe just a dozen, but the point remains. Having hard data on how we’re spending our time on our devices each day gives us something concrete we can use to take action. A proven, effective way to change a habit is to identify the cue, and then change the behavior. Adding your technology usage gives you insight into that.

But data alone doesn’t give you the full picture. Maybe you’re one of those increasingly common people whose job is to constantly check Twitter, live in your email inbox, or tear through RSS feeds all day. Don’t laugh—I had a job that required all three. Even my most recent job had chunks of the day that involved me waiting for Gmail to refresh with my latest assignment. Email wasn’t keeping me from getting my work done, email was my work.

Also, knowing what we waste our time on doesn’t identify the reason. There’s a whole psychology of procrastination that’s way out of scope for this essay, but sometimes our distractions have a root cause that isn’t actually technological in nature. While you’re going through the reams of data you’ve created in your week of private espionage, try to keep in mind all the things you were intending to do, and why you ended up not going them. That will give you insight into how to solve the real problem instead of unplugging the modem twice a day when you need to get down to work.

If there’s one complaint I hear most about our lives these days, it’s that technology is everywhere, and it’s driving us nuts. We’re distracted, we’re frustrated, we’re annoyed, we’re angry, we’re overloaded. We carry our jobs home in our pockets, out of the office and to our dining tables and bedsides. We read and write think pieces on leaving Social Media for a week, like it was a habit akin to eating raw chicken. I’m no stranger to the feeling, myself. Or the thinkpieces.

Worse yet, many of the technology tools we use each day are deliberately engineered to maximize habits and routines that keep us coming back for yet another dopamine hit. Social media is the biggest culprit here, but there’s so much more. For example, some email clients are set, out of the box, to notify you about new messages every five minutes. That’s 24,000 times per year. That’s insane. How are you supposed to get anything done with things popping up and buzzing and generally driving you nuts every five minutes? That is, five minutes, if you’re lucky.

But here’s the thing. Many of the same technologies and tools that drive us to distraction can also be used to give us more focus on what we’re doing. We just have to use them the right way. We need to use them mindfully.

Mindfulness is a word that means many things. It’s often used in the context of mindfulness meditation, but that is not what I’m going on about. If you want to get into that side of mindfulness, you could do far worse than by checking out Patrick Rhone’s book Mindfulness for Mere Mortals. That said, in many ways the practice of mindfulness meditation is relevant in how it strengthens the parts of our mind that keep us on task—even when that task is to have no task at all to focus on. It’s hard to do that when the siren call of some annoying social app is gnawing at your brainstem like some angry pathogen.

The idea of mindfulness, is to enable us to be present and focused on what’s going on now, and our technology doesn’t have to be an enemy of this. In the coming days, I’ll be writing about some ways in which we can use technology to do just that. We don’t necessarily need new apps or hardware to keep us on task. No distraction-free writing environment, or $500 cloud-connected word processor will get you to make the clackity noise. Instead, you can use the tools you have to keep you making the clackity noise, whether you’re doing it with a distraction-free writing environment, or just Microsoft Word.

There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit we can grab to make our technology more of an aid to mindfulness, not an enemy of it. The first thing you can do is turn off notifications on your devices, except for those that will be truly urgent. I’ve written before about this topic, but there’s another benefit to cutting down the number of notifications you get thrown in your face. In environments where people are subject to a large number of alarms and alerts, there’s a problem known as “Alarm fatigue”, wherein the sheer volume of alerts desensitizes people. It happens a lot in hospitals, but it can happen to anyone.

For example, I use an app called Due to remind me of various time-sensitive tasks. This could be anything from my monthly phone call to Mom and Dad, or just taking the eye drops my optometrist told me to use so I can sit in front of glowing rectangles all day. One of the great things about Due is that it will keep bugging you to do something you’ve asked it to remind you to, and on a schedule you set. This is powerful stuff, but has potential to get overwhelming, fast.

A while ago, I hit a point where alerts and alarms would occur so often, and at such inopportune times, that I would start dismissing them out of hand, and not actually doing what I wanted to be reminded of. By stripping down the number of notifications I get, and the degree to which Due continues to buzz my wrist if I miss a reminder, I’ve brought that back under control.

And sometimes you’ll want to stop all the interruptions. Fortunately, our chattering and buzzing devices come with tools for that too: “Do Not Disturb” mode. This setting on devices turns off all notifications, with the potential exception of alarm clocks and timers. On top of that, if distraction is a problem, you can always choose to disable the Internet connection, either through Airplane Mode, or just pulling the Ethernet cable out of the Wi-Fi router. (Don’t try this at the coffee shop, though.) If it gets truly desperate, you can always just turn the damn thing off and sit down with a pencil and some paper.

None of these are new ideas, but I’m surprised at how few of the people I see online bemoaning the annoyances and interruptions of their tech lifestyles think to try them. The biggest thing any of us can do when trying to use tech more mindfully is to spend a little time just thinking about how we use it, and what small changes we can make.

It only takes one moment, one action, to start changing an ingrained technology habit. A huge part of mindfulness is learning how to step away and reset your focus. It’s a big idea, but even a big idea can be started by a small action. Once you get the technology to work for you, and not against you, you’re already on your way.

Next time, I’ll talk about how you can get a picture of how you’re using your technology. You might be surprised what you’re really doing each day.

“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

— Douglas Adams

There’s a difference, as I noted a few years ago, between skeptics and naysayers. It’s okay to be skeptical of something new and unproven. History is littered with the corpses of the next big thing in technology that never made it: Pneumatic trains, steam-powered cars, Multimedia CD-ROMs, WebTV, Google Glass… Then, there’s the corpses of the first attempts, where the idea was sound, but the execution was not: LaserDIscs, the Apple Newton, and various attempts at Virtual Reality.

That last one is one I’m still skeptical about. I can see practical use cases for it in niche and professional areas, much like I can for augmented reality, like Microsoft’s HoloLens, or even Google Glass. In the consumer space, though, I can’t see VR catching beyond video games. What advantage does would perfectly smooth, nausea-free, lag-free VR have for the applications most people do outside of entertainment? [1] Nobody has been able to give me a compelling answer for this, so I retain my skepticism that VR will ever catch on in the home outside of hardcore gamers.

Does my stance on VR tip me over towards the naysayer side? I don’t know. Recently in a few podcasts, Merlin Mann brought up a Twitter account called Pessimist’s Archive, which collects negative and pessimistic reactions to tech from across history. The posts comparing hoverboards to bicycles are spot on, as is the related Medium post. [2] What game changing, ground breaking technology am I being pessimistic about that I don’t even realize yet? And how can I push back. I was pessimistic on smart watches for ages until I decided to put my money where my wrist is with a $99 Pebble. Now I wear an Apple Watch almost 24/7—and love it.

The biggest obstacle to technological skepticism is the cost of trying something new—and I’m talking money. Let’s go back to Virtual Reality again. The Oculus Rift, which is the state of the art in consumer VR hardware, is $600, plus the cost of a compatable PC—which starts at $950 according to the Oculus website. The Samsung Gear VR is $99, but requires a Samsung Galaxy S6, S7, or Note 5 smartphone. You can get the S6 for $150 with contract, so $250 for a full-featured VR package. I’ve tried the Gear VR, and was moderately impressed with how lag-free the experience was, especially compared to playing Duke Nukem 3D in VR back in the mid–90s. Sadly, the Gear VR is not optimized for wearing over glasses, and certainly not for people with amblyopia, like me. Finally, there’s Google Cardboard, I suppose, which you can use with any smartphone that runs the app. I haven’t tried this, mostly because I’m terrible with a pair of scissors.

Even if you can have a VR experience for the price of a pair of scissors and some old cardboard boxes, is that going to be enough to convince people that this is a technology they need in their lives? Let’s move up the cost stack to smart phones. Smartphones at least hit a point in the technological adoption curve where quality and price allow almost everyone to afford a decent one—even subsistence farmers in Myanmar. They also have a killer app that’s attractive to almost anyone: the Internet (or at least Facebook) in your pocket. And you can get one for free, with a contract. Smartphone prices have gotten to the point where I’m giving serious thought to buying a Moto E, just so I can experiment with Android for a while and not be tied to a year-long contract with my phone company.

Money may not be a factor for exploring some new technologies, but time is. When you use your technology to get things done, switching things up for the sake of just trying something else is a hard sell. I’m approaching the age where in Douglas Adams’s rule number three will apply, and I’m already starting to feel all I want is something to bloody work, damn it, without any of you fancy young people smart, Internet of Things crap. (See also: my continued negative stance towards streaming music.) Asking people to upend what works for something new and unproven is a big ask. Some of us want to approach the future at our own speed, even if that speed is as close to zero as makes no odds.

But we should still try to push back against our skepticism whenever possible. Whether it’s by research, or by experience, it’s the skeptic’s job to at least entertain the possibility of something being awesome, or at least useful. Part of why I keep my feet in the wading pool that is technology writing is because I am interested in what cool, powerful tools are coming my way. I’m interested in how I can do better work, learn new things, and make the world better. Supposedly, Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” I don’t think he’d scoff at the new-fangled, Internet-Connected Smart Levers the kids are using these days, but what do I know?