Do you need to go “Monk Mode”?
There are times when you just need to focus on the here and now, whether at work or more importantly when your workday work finishes and your mobile just keeps pinging.
Technology has become all invasive as it is instant with emails, Microsoft Teams and messages via any number of applications. Often people expect an instant response and may feel unimportant if they do not receive it. Conversely there becomes an expectation to be instantly responsive, no matter what you may be doing at that exact moment in time. Unfortunately, the problem will only get worse as AI is increasing the amount of content being pushed to us all.
Ultimately it doesn’t seem fair that Meta, who owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, employ hundreds of behavioural scientists to make their applications more stimulating and us humans are prone to distraction.
With the explosion of social media applications and platforms all vying for our attention, there is an ever-growing movement of people that are trying to resist the compulsion to continually check the latest message. Their approach has been nicknamed, “Monk Mode”, which involves dedicating your time to a task without technology and other distractions.
The term has gone viral on TikTok, where videos marked with the hashtag #monkmode now have more than 77 million views.
I guess this is ironic, in that I am informing you to go to yet another social media site to learn about how people are trying not to use technology.
However, there are a plethora of new applications able block content (Freedom, FocusMe, ColdTurkey, Forest to name a few) and they are using technology to push back against technology. The user can set the device to block certain criteria or times, which can also be locked so cannot be overridden if temptation strikes. Other features will allow the phone to ring, so you can still be contactable and does save you from turning off the phone completely. This sounds great, although with the amount of Mandrin speaking callers I receive these days maybe not be so great.
From a business point of view the French have been leading the way in this matter for some time. From the 1st January 2017 if you work for a French company with over 50 employees you have the ‘right to disconnect’ and it requires the company to establish hours when staff should not send or answer emails. The French currently have a 35-hour working week and supporters of the law say that employees who are expected to check and reply to their work emails out of hours are not being paid fairly for their overtime, and that the practice carries a risk of stress, burnout, sleep problems and relationship difficulties. So, they are certainly ahead in their thinking concerning the mental impact of always technically being ‘on’.
A useful Microsoft tip if you want to email work colleagues or customers out of hours and not interrupt the intended recipient after hours, try using the delay email delivery function. From the new email action, use the options tab, then delay delivery option where you can set the time and date you wish the email to actually be sent, ie) 9.00 am the next working day, then press send and the email will be queued in your outbox until the required time before it’s sent during office hours.
One thing is for sure, if you are young turning off your phone doesn’t appear to be an option which is terrifying and if you are older, as I am, it’s sometimes a relief to turn it off and concentrate on the task in hand, like swimming, reading, talking to loved ones and friends, sleeping or just because you want to live in the moment without interruption.
