Pomodoro

 

On the book, Unplug: How to Break Up with Your Phone and Reclaim Your Life--essentially a how-to on how to distance oneself from a smartphone: leaving it at home, leaving it at the door when you come in, or simply getting rid of it. It’s a really old topic, perhaps going back to around 2010, and I might have blogged about it here. The new angle is that it helps us to have more conversations rather than connections. I recall the telephone days of having both. But you weren’t talking on the phone all the time, and some people were annoyed by people always calling them. Before answering machines, the phone would just ring, and you knew who was ringing, and you’d avoid it or turn the ringer off. Over the years, we’ve invented things to avoid conversations because of the interruptions they caused--answering machines and voicemail. I talked with my parents once a week--and it was only with my mother. My father wasn’t telephone chatty. Lots of people weren’t because they were indifferent to telephones. He didn’t feel disconnected; He knew there was a conversation once a week, and there wasn’t an issue of a lack of conversation or too much connection. There is probably a sweet spot of connection/conversation where there’s a satiation, and you’re not resorting to continuous snacking. But there’s also a hunger these days that wasn’t a thing in the past.

I have been experimenting with the Pomodoro technique of doing things in 25-minute intervals and setting a timer. You’re forced to make choices about what you want to spend time on, and you wouldn’t necessarily be making a choice to scroll, although that is a good way to keep it to 25 minutes. If you extend it to 50 or 75, then that’s a problem. Back in the day of telephone conversations, they could go on for sometimes several hours. But that could be a problem if you’re getting nothing done. You’re less lonely and more connected, but you could be doing that more than you should. Even the Pomodoro technique can become obsessive, although it is an effective one for avoiding the wasting of time on social media, doom-scrolling, or just dawdling, but you could set a timer to dawdle in 25-minute increments. Or you could skip the timer and just be aware of what you're spending hours on. That could be good if you spent 3 hours doing something and not touching a phone.