Technology can be addictive. Its ability to let you do things easily (or relatively easily) and make your life easy has never been easier. Things like playing games with friends, staying in the loop on the latest news, and watching videos in the palm of our hands. It can be tricky to walk away from, and depending on how deeply you rely on your technology, it can actually be challenging to put your phone down. That being said, it is possible. There are about two weeks a year when I like to separate myself from my technology as much as possible. Granted, it’s not 100%, and I still have some tech with me, but when I walk away from my 100% tech life, I do try to take some things with me so I don’t go into complete tech withdrawal. When I step back from my tech, I do like to have a few things to hang on to, simply because of convenience more than anything else.

1. A way to communicate – It doesn’t matter if you have barrels of friends and family or just one special person in your life. You need to be able to reach out to them. Humans, by thier very nature, are a community, and so being able to talk (Text, e-mail, etc.) to your personal network is something we all need. To be clear, it doesn’t matter what the method is. I text with a few people every single day, and keeping in touch is something we all need. When I walk away from my tech, I try to keep my texting ability as much as possible, so that if something happens that people really need me for, they can text me.
2. A way to put your thoughts down – I think about things all the time. Sometimes I come across really good thoughts, and I like being able to write them down. There are also times when I’m attending talks, listening to podcasts, or even watching TV, when someone will say something and I’ll think to myself, “That is an excellent line,” and I like to write it down somewhere. For me, writing down thoughts, ideas, and random one-liners is so helpful. I like using my reMarkable so much; it’s an excellent system for getting everything down. I find that when I walk away from my tech, I try to spend some time working on a “big idea” that I can really dig into, and to make sure I capture it properly, I really have to write it down.
3. A way to keep your information safe – In today’s world, we all have data that we need to manage. It doesn’t matter if you are a student just getting into high school, or a senior executive who’s been working at a company for over 20 years. We all have data to manage, and part of that management process is keeping it safe. There are a few different options for doing this. You could keep all of our data on a cloud server. This is beneficial because you can access your data from any internet-connected device. It’s less secure because… well… you can access it from any internet-connected device. If your security isn’t set up correctly, someone else will be able to access your data as well. A more secure option would be to save all your data on a USB drive, but to access it at any time, you would have to carry the USB drive wherever you go, and that (at least for me) feels cumbersome.

For the tech naysayers who are hoping that this turns into an anti-technology blog, calm down, that’s not what’s happening here. Even as a technologist, I recognize that sometimes you need to throttle back on how much you use your tech. Stepping away from the full force of your technology can be a good thing, but the trick, as always, is to balance it in moderation. While I know that most of the things on my list are things that could be done in an analogue fashion (paper notebook, file cabinet, and call someone), but the important thing when you’re taking a break from your tech is to make sure you have some level of consistency with your tech, no matter what level you are using it at. That way, no matter what you do, throttle up or down, you will be able to function in roughly the same fashion.

What tech is critical for you to use?