Observing Our Online Lives
It is 9:15 am on Monday and I’ve just arrived at my favorite coffeehouse. My plan is to spend the next couple of hours working on this book. I feel rested and alert, and ready to get down to work. With my cappuccino on the tabletop to my left, I open the chapter I was last editing. I also open my email inbox—just to check, I tell myself. Glancing at my inbox, I see my various obligations—those left over from the previous week, as well as those new messages that have arrived since I checked email on my smart phone before I left home. My eye goes immediately to the header of a troubling message. It’s the second reminder (or is it the third?) of a task I’d agreed to complete a week ago and have been putting off.
Barely aware of the anxiety this has provoked in me and without any conscious intent, I’ve suddenly opened a Web browser and begun to scan the New York Times online. Gee, I wonder whether there’s any interesting news, I’m thinking to myself. Oh yes, a new data breach at a major American corporation, more violence in the Middle East . . . After a couple of minutes of scrolling and skimming, I catch myself in this act of procrastination, chiding myself for allowing myself to be diverted. I really ought to respond to my colleague’s message, I tell myself guiltily. And so I open her message and begin to read through it, seriously this time (as opposed to last week, when I’d merely skimmed it).
But before I’ve gotten through the first paragraph, on the periphery of my awareness I hear a beep and see the visual signal alerting me to the arrival of a new email message. I glance at the header long enough to identify the recipient and the subject matter and decide that I can let it slide for now. I return to my colleague’s message.
I’ve just started rereading the first paragraph when my cell phone rings. Fumbling in my backpack to find it, I glance at the screen to see that it’s from my wife, whom I just saw twenty minutes ago. My first thought is to wonder whether everything is all right. I’d better find out, I think, and answer the call. She’s contacting me, I learn, to ask me to add one more item to the grocery list for the shopping I’ll be doing on my way home that evening. Geez, I think, couldn’t she just have texted me or sent me email, rather than interrupting me like this? Doesn’t she know how busy I am? She knows me well enough, of course, to pick up on the hint of tension in my voice as I tell her I’ll take care of it. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “I’m just trying to get some work done,” I say somewhat testily. “Look, I’m sorry,” she says, “I’ll talk to you later.”
Once again I return to reading the email message I’ve been avoiding for a week, and this time I’m able to read it through to completion.
Clearly my morning hasn’t begun all that well. I had set out with a clear intention, to work on a book chapter, and was ready to do just that. But now, after just a few minutes of seemingly minor activity, I still haven’t begun, and have even lost some of my enthusiasm and my composure. Not only have I allowed myself to be distracted by other events, but I’m a bit stressed out, which is reflected in my posture (a bit slunk down) and my shallow, rapid breathing.
Reflecting on What Happened
So what just happened? Nothing much, really: a cascade of small reactions, building one upon the other. Asked to summarize these first few moments of my workday, I might say something like, “Well, I read an email message I’d been avoiding and took a call from my wife about the grocery shopping.” But what’s missing from this description is the complex work I was continually doing from moment to moment to decide what to pay attention to next and for how long, and how to handle the different emotions that were arising in the process. Making a different set of minor choices might have set my day off on a very different course.
Let’s begin by noticing how I was regularly shifting my task focus: from my colleague’s email message to the New York Times Web site, then back to my colleague’s message, then to the newly arriving email message, to my cell phone, and so on. Each of these shifts represented a decision on my part, about which task to pay attention to next and thus what to do next. Some of these decisions were under my conscious control—they represented strategic decisions based on my intention at the moment. Thus, I chose to shift back from the New York Times to my colleague’s message because my intention was to stop avoiding it—to stop procrastinating. Once I’d seen that the incoming phone call was from my wife, I consciously chose to answer it. And once the call had ended, I consciously chose to return to my colleague’s message and to read it all the way through.
Some of my decisions, however, were unconscious, or were at best semiconscious. They were more like habitual, knee-jerk reactions than willed decisions. I switched over to the New York Times Web site and began scanning it before I realized what I was doing. I switched there in spite of my intention to engage with my colleague’s message. When my cell phone rang, I reached for it largely out of unconscious habit, a Pavlovian response to the sound of the ring. And as a result of this cascade of decisions and reactions, I completely lost sight of my original intention, to do some writing and editing.
Let’s also notice how my emotional reactions played a part in how I deployed my attention, and thus how the action unfolded. What led me to open my email first thing, despite my intention to begin working on the book? I felt anxious about what might be waiting for me there—hence the impulse “just to check.” This combined with the difficulty I often experience when I first sit down to write, a kind of performance anxiety, and led me to divert my attention elsewhere. Anxiety was also at work, along with a dose of guilt, when I switched to the New York Times Web site upon seeing my colleague’s reminder message. At some level I felt “get me out of here,” and I took off in search of something more interesting—another act of avoidance and escape. (Other people might use Facebook or Twitter in this way, but my go-to distractions are generally email and the news.) I also experienced some distress when I felt that my wife’s phone call was unnecessarily disruptive. But my annoyance at her call was compounded by the challenging emotions I was already feeling. Thus, driven by largely unconscious emotional reactions, I bounced around among various apps, Web sites, and devices. None of these behaviors caused any real damage, but they weren’t particularly skillful or productive either.
My body, too, was a participant in this little online drama. (How could it not have been, since it was the vehicle through which my actions were being performed?) It was registering and reflecting the quality of my experience, as bodies inevitably do, including the effects of my largely unrecognized emotional reactions. My collapsed posture and shallow breathing at the end were indicators of the stress I was now feeling. And had I been more observant of my body’s reactions while these events were unfolding—the catch in my breath when I first saw my colleague’s message or the tightening of my throat and shoulders when I talked with my wife—I might have had a better chance of recognizing how I was reacting and steered a different course.
Anxiety, guilt, annoyance, collapsed posture, and shallow breathing: All these states of mind and body were reflections of what was going on for me in these few minutes of online activity. And they were also determinants of that activity, leading me to respond in ways that weren’t always helpful. Had I been able to exercise greater self-awareness—noticing, for example, the anxiety over my colleague’s message and deciding not to switch over to the New York Times—I might have avoided more of the unnecessary and unhelpful detours I took. I might have steered a more conscious and effective course through the field of choices that arose.
To be sure, there is nothing exceptional in this small sequence of actions and reactions—certainly it has none of the dramatic power of the woman falling into the fountain. But that is exactly the point. We are all continually making moment-to-moment microdecisions like these, both online and offline, about what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and how to manage the thoughts and feelings, the bodily movements, postures, and breathing that inevitably accompany these decisions. And it is from the accumulation of such microdecisions that the fabric of our days is woven. The productivity and character of my day will now partly depend on what has just happened—on what I have and haven’t done, and how I now feel about it. And it will also depend on the decisions I make from this moment on (whether to return to writing or to my colleague’s long overdue request), as well as on the quality of engagement (the state of my mind and my body) that I bring to whatever I choose to do.
And what about you? How do you decide what to pay attention to, and when? Are you aware of the decisions you are making and your basis for making them? How do your emotional reactions shape your choices? How does the state of your body reflect and influence these choices? And overall, when are the choices you are making, consciously or unconsciously, in the service of your intentions and your best interests, and when aren’t they? These are the kinds of questions I will be encouraging you to explore in the pages ahead as you inquire into the quality and character of your online life.
You won’t need to engage in the minutely detailed, moment-to-moment observation that I’ve just illustrated—unless you’re drawn to this level of careful analysis, as I am. But you will need to tune your eye and your mind to observe more closely what you are doing, and how you feel while doing it. This may initially seem strange or even uncomfortable. We’re not used to observing in this way, least of all when we’re online. It hasn’t occurred to us that we might examine our habits of body and mind, or that there might be much value in doing so. Mostly we are charging (and sometimes limping) forward, just trying to keep up with the volume of our work and the pace of our lives.
But once we observe and reflect, we can begin to see the kinds of choices we habitually make and why we make them. We are then in a position to evaluate these patterns. And it is a small step further to imagine alternative ways of behaving and to develop personal guidelines.
Overview of the Exercises
The route to this learning is through a sequence of five exercises. Exercises 1 and 2 (in Chapters 4 and 5) ask you to engage with a single application, email—or, if you prefer, Facebook or texting. Exercise 1 (observing email) directs you simply to observe your current practice, paying attention to what is happening in your mind and body at different points in order to become more familiar with your current habits and what lies behind them. Exercise 2 (focused email) asks you to try something new: to use email (or Facebook or texting) in a more focused way than perhaps you normally do and to observe what happens. It asks you to experiment with a method that engages and strengthens your task focus.
In Exercises 3 and 4 (in Chapters 6 and 7), you move from exploring a single application to multitasking: switching among multiple tasks, devices, and applications. Exercise 3 (observing multitasking) is once again purely observational: you will simply pay attention to your current multitasking habits and patterns and to your experience while you are thus engaged. Exercise 4 (focused multitasking) then asks you to experiment with multitasking in a more task-focused way and to notice the effects, both on the quality of your results and on your sense of well-being.
Exercise 5 (in Chapter 8) directs you to abstain from one or more of your digital practices—to unplug from certain applications or devices of your own choosing and to notice the effects of this unplugging on your mind and body.
Each of the exercises follows the same six-part structure:
Step 1: You perform the primary practice (attending to your email, Facebook, or texting; engaging in multitasking; or unplugging from one or more apps or devices).
Step 2: You observe what you are doing and feeling, paying special attention to what is happening in your mind and body as you engage in your primary practice.
Step 3: You log what you are observing, maintaining a written record of what you have been noticing.
Step 4: You consolidate your observations, reviewing your log and summarizing what you’ve been noticing.
Step 5: You formulate personal guidelines, making use of your consolidated observations to propose changes to your primary practice.
Step 6: You share and discuss your discoveries with others, learning more about your practice (as well as other people’s practices) in the process.
While you are free to pick and choose among the exercises, I strongly suggest that you begin with Chapter 4, Observing Email, which is designed as the entryway to the whole sequence. (Or, if you decide not to start here, I recommend that you read through Chapter 4 before tackling any of the others.) This is always the first exercise I offer in my course and it has two main purposes. One, of course, is to help you learn more about whatever digital practice you’ve decided to explore. The other is to help familiarize you with the method of self-observation that you will be using in all the exercises. In addition, it is in this chapter that I give the most detailed explanation of the six-step structure that is common to all the exercises.
Taking Charge of Our Online Lives
In performing these exercises, people regularly discover that they can take greater charge of their online lives. They come to see how they’ve allowed their online activities to be governed by unexamined rules and expectations, as well as unconscious habits. And they realize that they actually have much greater choice in the matter. Some things they can change. But even when they can’t change certain external conditions (such as the amount of email they receive), they still have the possibility of changing their reaction to or their relationship with these conditions. This is the power that bringing greater attention, or mindfulness, to our lives offers us. Diane, one of my students, who had come back to school after working in the tech industry, sums it up this way:
What mindfulness really is to me is the ability to direct your attention where you want it to go—to have a choice. . . . The idea that “mindfulness” is really a word for choosing what to pay attention to is incredibly empowering. In a world where we are surrounded by advertisements, sales pitches, the biggest, best, and brightest promises of happiness and fulfillment that money can buy, not to mention the near constant information overload of emails, status updates, tweets, photo albums, Netflix queues, RSS feeds, playing whack-a-mole with phone notifications . . . Sometimes you just want to check out, right? I wish I could say that we could get away, but I don’t think that as a society we can, or even that we should. Technology is an equalizer, and gives voice to those who previously did not have one. In its most ideal state, the Internet is truly democratic, but that means that the world just got a lot noisier because so many more voices are now being heard. Being able to direct your attention, and choose what to pay attention to, is, I believe, an essential coping mechanism to deal with all of these new voices, all these new things that are demanding our attention. When we are mindful we choose to pay attention to what is explicitly important to us; being mindful begins to reveal our values in a way wandering lost through the digital landscape can never do.