Does Your iPhone Run Your Life?

Here’s a thought provoking opinion piece at Good, about the importance of maintaining balance in our all-too-connected world.

While we do think it’s important to be aware of developments in the world around us (obviously, since we publish this website), we join Sam Graham-Felsen in his quest to remain in touch without becoming obsessed.

Like Graham-Felsen, we’ve learned a little compromise with technology is good for the soul. For example:

We write our “To Do” lists down on paper, which forces us to prioritize. If it doesn’t fit on the paper, it doesn’t go on the list.

We don’t use our smart phone for emails. If we’re not at the computer, we’re not getting mail. But that’s okay, because it means when we are someplace else, we are fully committed to being someplace else.

We visit Facebook once a day, at most. Frankly, we could cut that down to once a week. All our real friends have our phone numbers and our email addresses.

We never opt for automatic email alerts. If we could opt out of paper junk mail, we’d do it in a heartbeat. Why opt in to electronic junk mail?

Social media, smart phones, the Internet . . . we think it’s all great. In moderation. But far too many people seem to be obsessed, or (dare we say) addicted.

So how about you? Are you in control of how you spend your time, or are you a slave to your devices?