Digital Detox

 

Digital Detox, will you?

Off the cuff, this thread popped up in my mind more as an afterthought just yesterday when I watched a recent interview of Former First Lady Michelle Obama. When she was asked how’s the former first family is going through the pandemic, she succinctly said that after breakfast, Former President Barack goes to his ‘office nook’ while Malia and Sasha go to their respective rooms as well. They gather together during the next meal but by 5pm everyday, their house rule dictates that everyone will converge to the living room and they would reconnect amongst themselves with no gadgets with them at all. They go into board games, they exchange thoughts and even short stories casually.

If the thought of having quality time with your family really resonates, consider this. Life’s equation always had TIME + MONEY as the variables but while some believe that both carry the same weight in life, that is a fallacy that has been shot down over and over again. If you lose all your money, you can always recoup and recover but if you lose your time, there’s no way you can recoup lost time because time is finite. And time will always be at the very core for you not just to reconnect with your family but reconnect in a quality way, no lip service. It takes a gumption for you to go into a detox digital but the effort won’t be gargantuan. How?

Firstly, don’t cut and cut clean so abruptly. If you’ve been spending like 12-15 hours digitally everyday, let’s roll out the ‘RULEs of THIRD’ which means, work-from-home the third of your 24 hours and one-third for your digital immersions and another one-third to rest and sleep.

Secondly, after you have seemingly and effortlessly rolled out the RULEs of THIRD, come next week, reduce your ‘digital time’ from one-third to one-fourth while expanding your time to reconnect with your family. Simply put, you need to disconnect to reconnect.

Are you in? At the end of the day, ‘the most important time is family time’.