HAVE WE REACHED PEAK DISTRACTION?

If we thought we had a tech addiction problem before, what comes after you throw a pandemic, social isolation and constant working from home into the mix? Nathalie Marquez Courtney explores work, productivity and life after lockdown.

How to manage WFH blurred boundaries and tech burnout

What does burnout look like?

Before all this – *gestures vaguely* – I used to imagine someone in a sharp work outfit, falling asleep at their desk in the wee hours, their office the only light in a giant high rise in the city. There are strewn cups of coffee, Post-it notes, paperwork and blinking devices.

I didn’t imagine it looked like my own home in the suburbs: my half-emptied dishwasher, a never-ending laundry pile that gets half-heartedly attacked in between video calls and snack prep. I’m not sure any of us did.

While we all wryly quipped, “Where would we be without Zoom?” when the pandemic started, the question is quickly becoming “Where are we now, with it?” Technology has allowed us to hold onto some semblance of normalcy, but in the process has become knitted even more tightly into the fabric of our daily lives. The stressed, reactive way we’ve had to cope this past year means we haven’t had a chance to really consider the role we want it to play.

Hopping on the hamster wheel

Somehow, the tech tools designed to help support a flexible “work anywhere” lifestyle (touted by digital nomads lying on beaches in Bali, laptops in hand) have combined into a murky toxic cocktail that leaves us feeling always on, always available and yet more unproductive than ever.

“We were very reactive rather than proactive in how we went into all this, and many people are still reacting,” says psychologist and coach Niamh Hannan, founder of Mindworks (mindworks.ie). “It’s like we just moved hamster wheels – we were knocked out of our normal hamster wheel and quickly jumped onto another and started running, and haven’t stopped to assess what’s working and what isn’t.”

The bad habits that crept in last March – working through lunch and into the evenings, eroding all boundaries between work and home, never truly “switching off” – still linger, leading to rapidly increasing levels of anxiety. “We’re seeing a lot of people struggling with mental health difficulties who had never struggled before,” Niamh notes.

“A lot of initial optimism about working from home quickly evaporated as the practicalities of WFH emerged,” says James Cuffe, a lecturer and anthropologist at University College Cork. “What we have now is certainly not going to be the status quo. Trying to maintain boundaries between public and private lives – sometimes not possible if your kid comes barging in during a meeting – is one of the bigger disadvantages.”

Our digital future It’s also becoming clear that the answer doesn’t lie in digital detoxes or expensive “unplugged” weekends away (when such things return). “As a society, we are currently in a transition period from the physically intimate world to an augmented world,” says James. “Our grandparents would know the names of birds and trees; are we as good?

I can name more mobile apps than I can trees, but in which way am I closer to the world? Our world is changing, depending on how we know it.”

For most, chucking our phones away and becoming luddites simply isn’t the answer – and so we have to find ways of more mindfully engaging with all the technology that is rapidly becoming part of our everyday. “We need to consider the potential longer-term impact, pre-empt how they might alter your experience and whether that is in fact beneficial to you,” says James. “We currently speak of online and offline worlds, or the real and virtual. Ultimately, this is not how things will be, and our contemporary on/off reality will morph into an always on but augmented physical reality, never quite offline, never solely online.”

Society’s rapid canter towards our impending augmented future means it’s never been more important to really sit and consider how technology is integrated into your life and if it’s there in a deliberate, conscious way.

Of course, getting a handle on late-night emailing, doomscrolling and other unhealthy habits is harder right now, when technology is all we have to connect us with the rest of the world. “If you’re finding yourself constantly checking your phone, this can be seen, in a way, as a search for connection,” says Niamh. “It’s been harder than ever for us to connect with other people. We’re lonely this past year.”

From peak distraction to peak performance So how do we begin to claw ourselves out of this mess? The solution is twofold: by both becoming more aware of how technology affects us, and becoming more engaged and present when we aren’t online, we can begin to work towards that most noble of goals – balance.

Almost every work app you interact with is designed to keep you in “doing” mode; to help you be more productive, and few have any built-in ability to encourage us to take breaks or switch off. “These platforms allow us to have more meetings, with more people, at any time, but this perception of efficiency doesn’t allow for needed downtime between meetings or reflections upon meetings and people,” says James. This is part of why online meetings are widely considered to be more tiring than in-person ones.

But the more we use them and the less we step away, the less effective they – and we – become.

Finding ways to engage in “being” mode – whether it’s regular mindfulness exercises, a walk in between (virtual) meetings, a craft activity you dip in and out of – helps nourish and replenish you. “When we spend more time in being mode, everything good comes from that place,” says Niamh. “That’s where we’re more creative. That’s where we’re good at coming up with solutions and problem-solving. That’s where we come into a positive space.”

Tech support Have you found yourself angrily typing out a curt response to an email or impulsively firing off a less-than-warm reply to a Slack message? A major shortcoming of the communication tools we engage with is the problematic nature of our online presence. Yes, the technology is impressive and we’ve likely never been more grateful for it, but it’s important to remember that something is lost when not meeting face to face, as generations before us have done. Zoom might be able to give you a funny background, but it can’t help you read the room, the atmosphere, the social cues, or pick up on body language changes.

James explains that when we are used to thinking of technology as a tool, it can be frustrating when the “tool” – or the human at the other end of it – doesn’t do what we want it to. One of the dangers of constant connectivity, with little time to engage in the “real” world, is that we start to perceive people – whose identities these days have become “an assemblage of texts, project responsibilities and funny emojis” – as mere extensions of these tools, and so treat them with less patience, grace and empathy than we might if they were real flesh-and-blood people in front of us.

“On Zoom, we become on or off, exist from the shoulders up, and are often muted,” notes James, who says we’re more likely to veer towards the dictatorial and away from the collaborative when communicating and working online. “It is very common to see rapid escalation of tensions via email, less so during a video call and less so again in a face to face meeting where the full embodiment of our fellows is apparent.

The virtual environment is not an extension of ourselves but an alteration of ourselves.”

The productivity-focused hype that surrounds these tools can also leave us feeling like we’re underperforming if we’re not, say, managing to clear our inbox or struggling with the number of calls we’ve scheduled. “One of my great concerns is that resilience being peddled alongside productivity and self-improvement as necessary aspirations to live by will gain in power,” says James. “I’m not saying that in normal everyday life these traits are bad things, but the discourse surrounding them can have very negative effects.”

“We are social creatures embedded in culture,” he continues. “If there are problems in wider society, they will manifest physically and mentally in the individual. It’s disingenuous to say a person needs to take responsibility for a normal healthy reaction and to instead develop resilience when society is inherently unequal and unfair.”

Sometimes we need to be sad, and sometimes we need to be angry, and now more than ever we should allow ourselves the freedom to simply feel those feelings, instead of sucking it up and lining up another call. “Feeling down or depressed is a very normal reaction to a pandemic lockdown. We shouldn’t be made feel guilty about not learning a new language or a new instrument while kids are screaming in the background and the dogs want a walk,” James adds.

After all, we’re not robots – at least not yet.