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Digital detoxing without losing your job (or your mind)

<i>[It's hard to put down the digital devices, but every once in a while, it can be the right move.]</i>
[It’s hard to put down the digital devices, but every once in a while, it can be the right move.]

Michael Harris convinced himself he was the world’s greatest multitasker, able to seamlessly navigate the three screens on his desk and the dozens of windows they had open.

“I was living with a kind of ambient awareness of everything, (my) attention 10 per cent on 10 different things,” says the former magazine editor and author of the Governor General’s Award-winning “The End of Absence,” an exploration of the way being plugged in has changed our lives practically, socially, intellectually and emotionally. “I was staring at glowing rectangles and realized this wasn’t the life I imagined for myself.”

So in 2012, he quit his job and decided to focus his attention on writing “The End of Absence,” complete with a 30-day digital detox. Now before you jump to the comment section, it’s worth noting that Harris knows his stance is a somewhat privileged one.

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“For most people, taking 30 days offline while still trying to be a productive member of society is not reasonable,” he says, adding that pulling off a digital detox is actually possible for “99 per cent” of society.

Yahoo Canada Finance spoke with Harris and fellow Canadian digital detox expert Christina Crook whose book “The Joy of Missing Out” looks at finding balance in a wired world, about how to escape from the moment-to-moment connectivity without losing your mind and your job.

Decide on your ideal media environment

“When we look at the Internet as a tool, it helps put our use of it into perspective,” explains Crook. “Start by asking the right questions: how is the technology serving me and is it actually serving me in the ways I want it to?”

Defining what goals you want to complete with or without technology can be anything from writing out a list of planned accomplishments to developing a hard schedule.

“Social media is basically a technological meme that has evolved with the expressed purpose of filling in any gaps that you leave, so you can’t be passive about your day’s schedule,” adds Harris. “If I know I’m doing three hours before lunch of concentrated creative work (then) the media environment I require is one of total digital silence – no phone and no email.”

Make your media diet

“The jolt of dopamine you get when you check your phone or email and there’s a message (is) the real reason you’re running back to your inbox,” says Harris. “In the same way we are designed to hoard sugar and fats and oils and have to make a decision to not eat McDonald’s everyday, we have to craft a healthier media diet for ourselves… which (requires) using a bit of willpower.”

Harris advocates spending at least one day every week or so unplugged while Crook recommends taking an afternoon a week where you unplug and do other activities like exercise or non-digital work.

“Leave the house and your phone behind or if you take it with you, have it off or have the data off,” she says. “Just give yourself over to other activities as a weekly reset.”

Keep people in the loop

The key to keeping your job while spending less time with your mobile device is to let your colleagues and boss know.

“We all believe the world would fall apart if we left, especially in business,” says Harris. But checking your email from a beach in Hawaii isn’t doing your colleagues a favour. “Usually there’s confusion for about half a day when somebody genuinely goes offline and then people figure it out – just make sure people understand you’re going offline.”

Crook agrees that setting parameters even on a day-to-day basis can help you preserve your online/offline sanity.

“There’s so much unspoken in office,” says Crooks. Which is why managers and employees alike should be communicating what that media environment needs to look like for them to be at peak performance. “We need space with mental real estate for invention – that fuels us creatively.”