They'd none of them be missed

For my first-ever investment in a start-up, I participated in a crowd-funding campaign by a young woman in London who’s on a mission to get people to be more mindful in their use of digital tech.

I first came across Anastasia Dedyukhina through her 2016 TEDx talk, “Could you live without a smartphone?” The video is well worth your time.

My mobile phone is not actually grafted onto my body, but she had me at the line about using sat-nav even when I know the way. So when, about six months later, I heard she was raising money to publish her book Homo Distractus, I threw a few tenners at her Indiegogo campaign, which got me on the list to receive a copy when it’s published (hard copy, not ebook) and signed up for her #DigitalDetox daily challenge for the month of January.

Through that, each day this month I get a link to a video with an idea of one thing to do that will help break people’s addiction to their devices, with a glimpse at the science behind that suggestion. So far, they’ve included things like make room for boredom (whenever you’re feeling bored, don’t reach for something to entertain yourself; just step into it, bruh), incorporate physical breaks into the day, get into nature and cut out online multitasking (by only having one application or browser tab open at a time).

That last one stopped me in my tracks, because at any given time on my work computer I’ve got two browsers and three windows (with a minimum of three, four and four tabs, respectively), and Outlook, Excel and Word open, so I can hop from one thing to another. And, in fairness, my work requires that I very frequent web research for the documents I write, so it would be cumbersome indeed for me to close things down and have to wait to reopen each one before diving into the work. That would detrain my line of thought by an order of magnitude over my current focus level, so I think I’m going to have to pass this one over.

However, this is the one that I want to shoot into the sky with fireworks, and tattoo on some people’s foreheads:

Way, way too many people are so eager to slap something up on Facebook and Twitter before they even know what the hell the content is—just so they can be first. (Whether or not they actually are.) They’re utterly mindless and they clutter my timeline with crap, so they deserve a permanent time-out from all social media, no doubt about it.

But I’ve got an addendum to Anastasia’s suggestion: people who reply or comment on a post, when they clearly have not read either the posting (beyond the headline) or the material it links to, should skip the time-out and slide straight to hell, with their Windows XP desktop computer shoved up their butt. (As an aside, it's been my observation that the people who do this are more likely than not to be asses in other areas, including being the hero of every story they tell, and being self-anointed experts in every subject that arises in a discussion.) For a while I baited one malefactor whose ignorance and ego rendered them oblivious to what was going on, but I got tired, and now I just ignore them.

If they just dried up and blew away, it would certainly make the world a better place, but they seem to have infinite staying power. So ignoring them is my suggestion of the day. Consider it a kind of #nitwitdetox challenge.