Making more of life: 4 tips on how to stay sane, have fun, thrive, and to make the most of your life. That includes taming your time online.
Making more of life 1: tame your time online
We all need to spend less time online. Do you flit from news site to news site, check your social media, chortle at a comic video, post something, and find thirty, sixty or more minutes have passed? Me, too.
I’ve written before about ways to smartphone detox; and tackling smartphone addiction. These methods help.
Here’s a new trick.
Take your phone; go to your “clock” app, and choose “timer”. Set it for one, two or three hours. Unmute your phone, in case anyone calls. Answering the phone is fine – it is usually a human being.
Put the phone in another room and try not to touch it until the alarm goes off. Each time you think “I’ll just check X on my phone”, tell yourself you will wait until the timer goes off. Start with once a day and see how it goes. You may even find that you don’t need to carry your phone around with you all the time.
It’s a liberation.
Making more of life 2: enjoy isolation
Check out the BBC story, The benefits isolation can have on your work. Its thesis, based on research at the University of Boston in 2015, is that too much communication leads to bad decisions and “groupthink”.
You kind of knew that, right? But it’s great to see it confirmed in a scientific study.
The experiment also explored what happened to problem-solving in groups with constant interaction; moderate interaction; and no interaction at all, ie people working by themselves. They measured both the average performance of teams, and the performance of the top performer in each team. They found that the “moderate” teams performed best.
A further study, at Carnegie Mellon University, also found that teams that communicated in “short bursts of communication”, rather than less intense conversations spread out over a longer time, got the best results.
The key finding? “We probably don’t need to be connected to each other all the time, and sometimes our interactions with others are best taken in small doses.”
Sounds right to me.
Making more of life 3: Elif Shafak on staying sane
I had the privilege of meeting Elif Shafak when I was British Consul-General in Istanbul. Like Joseph Conrad, she is someone who originally wrote in one language (in her case, Turkish) and then began writing in English – an astonishing feat for anyone who has learned languages but would hesitate to write more than a sentence or two in any of them.
Her “Forty Rules of Love”, “The Bastard of Istanbul”, “Honour”, and “The Architect’s Apprentice” are all great reads.
I once met Elif and saw that she had annotated the book she was reading, in English, with copious notes. I found the fact that this successful writer was constantly working, applying herself, and learning new skills, inspiring – a lesson for us all.
Elif Shafak was born in France, lived in Turkey, Spain and Jordan, and has now settled in the UK. In her recent book “How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division”, she explores what it means to belong in many places at once. She describes how “the city that always pursues me is Istanbul”, and yet how she is also deeply attached to the Balkans, the Middle East – or London, Britain and Europe. Multiple belongings, she argues, are not about stamps in your passport but about thinking fluidly about yourself and other people.
“A human being,” she says, “every human being, is boundless and contains multitudes.”
Making more of life 4: be aware of polarisation in social media
Elif Safak also examines the polarisation of social media, and the disappointments it has left in its wake. Participants, she says, “are not there to listen and they are not there to learn. They are there … to fulminate.”
“Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity”, she writes.
I’ve written about this myself, less elegantly, in my pieces The Internet is dangerous and What is Cambridge Analytica? My piece Things are getting better not worse also quotes research showing why the media publish more bad news than good. It’s because that’s what we click on.
Other resources
I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post on making more of life. For more, see my other blog posts on existential issues, eg:
- Living your best life: can you re-imagine your relationship with time?
- Microcourtesies
- Uncertainty: 4 ways to cope
- Vintage Season: are things better than we think?
- Sex, alcohol, people, knowledge: what makes you happy?
- Hans Rosling DON’T PANIC – why things are much better than we think, proved by a Swedish mathematician. Includes an hour-long video I strongly recommend or, as I say, “a compulsive communications masterclass”.
What to do next
Read my books! They may well cheer you up, especially my comedy “Seven Hotel Stories”. But my thrillers “Palladium” and “Blood Summit” or my new book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Diplomacy” may entertain you too. Details here:
