Recently, I spent five days in the mountains without internet-connected devices. It was great.
Meanwhile, however, 207 e-mails were mercilessly piling up in my inbox. Upon my return, I immediately e-mailed a friend to complain and he wrote back right away with the quip, “Now you have 208.”
Some readers will laugh at my mere 207 unread e-mails. 207? That’s nothing, right? I only write and teach part-time; for those who do computer-related work full-time, I’m sure the number of e-mails stacked up after five days would be considerably higher.
I have no regrets about my days away under the tall, tall trees of the North Georgia mountains. I watched my children play raucously in the creek with their cousins for hours on end. I feel refreshed, reconnected, and reset afterwards. I feel grounded once again in place and family.
So then why does making the choice to unplug completely, to do something so good, something that we all should be able to do, come with such a crushing penalty upon the return to ordinary life? Why does life punish us so for doing that which is so obviously right?
The fact is that in our fast-paced context of constant availability via device, we are rightly afraid that truly unplugging for even a day or two will result in a punishing overload upon our return, not to mention significant displeasure from co-workers, bosses, or customers who could not reach us while we were offline. As I discovered this past week, unplugging may be good for us but yes, it really will also result in an avalanche a few days later.
So it’s no wonder that we don’t “just” unplug. There will be consequences, and some of them will be negative. Pretending that unplugging has no negative results is unhelpful. Yet the accompanying truth that our “always-available” lifestyle is tremendously draining and distracting, not to mention bad for our bodies and brains and moral culture, still remains.
What then, are we to do?
Putting the question of minor daily limits aside—we all know about tricks such as turning off all devices at dinnertime and not allowing either your teens or yourself to keep a smartphone on hand while sleeping—what can we do to give ourselves long-phase exposure to real life without these devices? How can we get in a day or two regularly without creating unsolvable workplace problems?
The internet, though largely to blame for this problem, offers many suggestions, as does common sense. Here are a handful that come to mind for managing a few days “away,” ranging from most connected to least connected:
- We can keep a device on us at all times during a “break”, checking it frequently, taking work calls as needed, and yet still doing and enjoying non-work things. This doesn’t seem to work very well for creating mental and emotional space, but still, it’s something.
- We can do as my sister-in-law did during our recent mountain trip, checking in periodically with her work texts and e-mails but also setting an e-mail auto-reply saying that her responses would be delayed. This little delay gave her the chance to focus fully for several hours at a time on disconnected activites, not constantly checking her phone but still not falling disastrously behind or upsetting work connections.
- We can unplug totally, setting up an e-mail auto-reply, and plan to have to deal with a significant amount of stress and catching up upon our return. This is what I did most recently. It was fabulous while I was unplugged, and miserable when I got back.
- We can unplug totally, setting up an e-mail auto-reply or not setting one up, and refuse to catch up afterwards. We can say to the e-mails that pile in, the articles missed, and the to-do’s passed by– perhaps with the exception of a few truly crucial ones—“you are dead to me,” and move on.
- We can teach others not to expect our constant availability by regularizing our unplugging, providing an auto-reply that turns on automatically every weekend and says either “I will respond to you on Monday” or “Please e-mail me again on Monday if the matter is important.” (How scary!)
This last option is the most intriguing to me. Could we teach others and ourselves to respect certain limits on our time by establishing ourselves as quirky individuals who don’t have internet access on the weekends? Would our employers tolerate such a thing? And could we really just not catch up on Monday, except for regarding truly crucial matters?
Recently, I’ve been reading about professionals who do this, like this fellow, who says the key is to “make it sacred and don’t apologize.” Their productivity does not seem to suffer, and so their employers do not seem to care (or they are self-employed). Of course, you’d have to have a good amount of job security to even try this, it seems to me. But perhaps it is worth contemplating.
After all, do we really have to live and work like we do? And if we chose to unplug briefly, do we truly have to accept the consequence of a miserable few days catching up afterwards? Could we start to challenge this culture not by pretending that it’s easy to unplug but just by being unwilling to accept the inhumane consequences of disconnecting, like that need to catch up?
These questions remind me of a policy my husband and I adopted in graduate school, when we were studying at least sixty hours per week, and probably more: no schoolwork on Sunday. At first, it seemed impossible. It was very scary to consider actually not working for any minute of any day at that time.
But the actual result was that we both grew in both rest and self-discipline and our productivity also grew. I have slipped from this commitment lately, and so now I am making a new one: I will not use any device at all from late Friday night until Monday morning. Every week. We’ll see how it goes.
I will admit that I am a bit frightened, even after my first such weekend went very well. Because here’s the other problem, the secret and very most demanding problem: if I’m honest, my lesser self really does not want to restrict my time on devices, my “work time,” even if it’s good for both me and my work to do so.
The reason is that being on the internet feels really good while I’m doing it (although not always afterwards) and it makes me feel important, too. And sometimes my “real life” does not feel good and does not make me feel very important.
Real life is where the real joys are; it is where I can watch the kids playing with their cousins and see all the connections back to my own days playing that same creek with my cousins. But real life is also where the real hardship is, and I don’t like that part. I know its valuable. But I don’t like it! I don’t want it! It hurts!
The truth is, though, that if we never find a realistic way to unplug, we will never experience this hardship to the fullest, and so we will never resolve it. And so we really must find a way to unplug regularly. Because in all life’s hardship and joy, we really must not fail to face it.