Standby mode
It’s been a pretty busy time since the year began and the 2016 Adventure got underway. Or more precisely, it’s been a pretty busy time since Monday, when I returned from a week’s holiday by the sea. Since I got back, the new term has begun, teaching and marking have kept me busy, and there’s also been the usual array of other jobs and research and practice chugging along in the background. But there’s also been something of a revolution in the way I’m dealing with work, and it seems, so far, to be doing great things for my sanity. So I decided, in a moment of tremendous generosity, to tell you about it.
I don’t know about anyone else, but it always takes me a good couple of days to actually remember how to be on holiday. I’d done all the usual prep work to try to clear my head: set out of office messages on my million e-mail accounts, got through a heap of forward planning so that I could look forward to a smooth transition back into work on my return, and so on. I promised myself that whilst I was away, I would check my personal e-mails once a day to remove the junk and ensure that there were no major crises. After that, everything could wait.
I got to my little holiday cottage, and spend the first two days creating things to worry about. I starting scheduling in my head when there was nothing to schedule; getting anxious about things due to happen months or even years in the future; panicked that I wasn’t making the most of my time off and that I should be holidaying… better. All that stuff. Gradually, by day three, the spring finally unwound, and I relaxed. I stopped worrying. I ate cake, and walked along the beach, and sat by the fire, and did as little as humanly possible. It was brilliant.
But there was another reason why, when I came to at the beginning of the third day, I felt a great weight had been lifted. There was, for the first time in many months, a complete absence of activity from my mobile phone.
Like most people – and I suspect like almost all freelancers – I have a smartphone. And like pretty much all smartphone-owning folk, I have a whole heap of notifications set up: e-mails, Twitter, texts and so on. It’s a good way to keep track of correspondence, to be able to reply quickly and efficiently to messages and alerts, and so on. When the phone is on silent, and has been banned from vibrating, it very humbly alerts me to the presence of these notifications with a little flashing light above the screen, which blinks slowly to tell me something’s arrived. And on the night of my second day on holiday, more out of curiosity than anything else, I turned this tiny little light off completely. I killed all notification options stone dead. And then I went to sleep.
The next morning, and for the rest of the day, I felt like a completely different person. I felt as if a great weight had been lifted. When I pressed the screen on to check the time, there was no blinking light. When I woke up in the middle of the night, there was no blinking light. When I got up first thing in the morning… nothing. Nada. I could have 50 emails or none. Could have been tweeted at incessantly for the last twelve hours, or completely ignored. No way of telling at all.
I realised, then, how very gradually over the course of the last few years, I have allowed myself to become ruled by my correspondence. The light is, after all, a teeny tiny little light. But it is activated often, and that prompts you to compulsively check, read, deal with it all NOW. If I were a surgeon on call, or an instrumentalist waiting for dep jobs to leap into my lap, the situation would be different. But actually, for my line of work – and for the majority of jobs, in fact – it can wait. They can wait, whoever they are who has decided to write to you.
We are terrible at this. There are countless articles about the problems we now have with attention, focus, switching off from work, getting away from that driving need to just look at one more page, or one more YouTube video. For years, I have rather smugly assumed myself to be largely immune to this, and at least conscious of the few occasions when I have fallen down a video black hole. But it turns out I’ve been kidding myself all along. And of course, if you don’t stop replying to everything IMMEDIATELY, people will continue to expect, and eventually demand, that you do so.
So I have come back from holiday, and left my e-mail notifications off all week. I can’t tell you how much more productive this has made me. I look at my messages as and when I am ready, and then I shut them down and get on with other things. I deal more efficiently with mail when I do look at it. And overall, despite having the usual sixty-eight juggling balls in the air at once, I no longer feel that little underlying prick of urgency, of must-look-now. Truly, I commend it to you. Just turn it off. Check it once an hour if you must, but otherwise turn it off. Trust me. Getting actual stuff done is so much more satisfying.
