Random Observation/Comment #345: Everything is fighting for our attention nowadays. Sometimes, we just need to unplug and unwind.
We’re all addicted to instant gratification. That Facebook “like” or email “reply” is a dose of hormones that makes us feel important, wanted, and heard. But how much instant gratification is too much? What if we made our connection to the digital world as an addiction whenever we look to feel that excitement of answering something immediately, or the urgency of sharing something most people don’t even care about? Even what I’m writing now is just my random thoughts on the subject that I hope will engage others to think and discuss in their own circles (which I doubt happens).
The scary thing about this observation is that all large corporations and marketing experts are aware that we have a limited attention span and we’re addicted to the attention. We only have so many hours in a day and we can only process so much information, so companies are literally fighting for the more important notification and more catchy headline to engage us into taking interest in their products.
As we become bombarded by these pulls, it is our job to sift through the junk and find out what is important to us. There are the:
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Priority people’s posts (facebook friend’s posts),
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Interesting channel videos (youtube subscriptions),
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News updates in our given interests to stay current (news site aggregator subscriptions), and
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Random posts that spark our interests (reddit or stumbleupon).
Which of these do you follow every day? I hate to admit it, but for me, it’s all of them. I sync my accounts to my phone and my world is a series of pushed notifications that keep me updated in real-time. Why? When i’m on vacation without internet, do I really miss out on anything substantially important? Well, maybe I have a ton of GIFs to go through when I get back so i can laugh at animals being cute and mean at the same time, but those are all just for pure joy. The knowledge at our fingertips is an addiction, and it’s making the world very desensitized. We binge on so much information we can’t possibly process and then we sleep it off to a new clean slate of continuous absorption.
This is bad, but there are ways to free up some clutter.
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Unsubscribe to crappy email digests. Just stop. When have you ever bought that groupon coupon because they had a better deal on house cleaning, massages, or yoga deals?
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Unlike pages that post crap. Pages in FB were genius because it allowed companies/people to easily post into people’s personalized news feeds. Most of the time, these are the same as advertisements. Sometimes, they’re funny.
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Follow people that post important stories. There are a good number of my friends that post specific useful stories in niches. I read these links much more frequently because I trust my friends will not waste my time. Well, maybe I’ll click it anyway because it’s funny.
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Control yourself when you’re using reddit or stumbleupon. These are the two most addictive things in the world. You can just sit there and scroll down or click to keep seeing hilarious stuff over and over again. …Everything in moderation…
It’s never a bad thing to revisit the distractions in your life. Yes, life is not about being productive all the time, but if you have something you’ve always wanted to do and you keep saying “I don’t have time to do it”, you can probably save time by making a few changes. Cutting out a few seconds per task will give you that extra time to do something fun… or do nothing at all.
~See Lemons Free