Tech-life balance

p.9
From time to time, a new technology emerges that turns the world upside down.
Before writing appeared, all thinking lived in the head. Civilized people prided themselves on their ability to reason and remember. Then writing appeared and the situation changed. There was no longer any need to keep all the information in one’s head. People could now build on others’ ideas in a completely different way, which allowed them to gain insight into and understand specific problems at far deeper levels. In this way, text changed the way we think.
But not everyone agreed. The great Greek philosopher Socrates loudly denounced writing as harmful. To him, written language meant the end of memory. He thought that once there was no need to remember, the mind would decline.
Attention spans drop, and constant stimulation causes stress and anxiety to overflow. We end up feeling distance from reality, and even from ourselves.
That’s the state we’re in. An exciting new world is unfolding before our eyes, but as I write this, we are not ready to face that world.
Now is the time to learn how to make life bloom. There’s no one more qualified to guide us in that than Taino Bende. Bende has thought about this subject deeply for a long time, and this book is the result.
All change starts somewhere. Usually in something small. You may feel that the present situation and present challenges are hard to bear, but you don’t have to feel that way. Use this book as a reference. Try things, learn, try again. In a life full of chaos, this book was a great help to me in finding myself.
Socrates couldn’t stop written language, and history barely remembers his warning, but I am convinced that what Socrates said back then carries weight. Because no matter how much positive change writing brought, there was also something we lost.



p.33
Some of you may have heard that it takes exactly 21 days to form a habit. Unfortunately, that’s misinformation.
Recent research suggests the average time required to establish a new behavior pattern is 66 days. Of course, it could take longer or shorter than that.
In a study of about 10,000 people aged 15 to 64, four out of five people who changed their digital habits reported overall improvements in well-being. The main obstacle that those who didn’t feel the effects encountered was the difficulty of sticking to the change. To keep a new habit you need willpower, but you also need to prepare in order to succeed.


p.41
We work more than ever before, but we get less done than ever. The reason we “feel” busy is because we’re processing every bit of information that comes our way. We trade emails in the middle of meetings. We move (apparently) seamlessly between private information shared on chat and social media and work documents and communications. We spend the whole day busily, often dragging ourselves home worn out by the end of it, but many of us don’t really know what we accomplished.
This feeling of being busy should not be mistaken for productivity. Research shows that constantly working in a busy state not only stresses you out but also hits your productivity.

p.56
“After using black-and-white mode for two days, the number of times I compulsively checked my phone dropped by an astonishing amount. Maybe slightly degrading the phone’s performance is one of the ways to break our obsession with the phone. As it turns out, we are simple animals that get excited by flashy colors.”
— Nick Bilton, technology columnist for The New York Times and self-described smartphone addict