UNPLUG Please

Here here Mark Glaser - thanks for your post on "needing to unplug."

He writes: but maybe there are times — especially now as the weather warms up — when we should take a technology vacation and totally unplug. MAYBE? Look at the rest of the world, the one outside Silicon Valley - people unplug all the time. I've been beginning to wonder whether people are capable of unplugging here.

Recently, I had an Un-Tech Party, where the rules were 'no tech-talk whatsoever.' Not only could people not get through the evening without technology coming up, but some declined to come because they didn't think they could make it 'through the night.'

Obsessive. Sad. Call it what you will. I call it alarming.

He references Turn It Off by Gil Gordon, which came out in 2001, who suggests that we divide our hours into three zones - 100% involvement in work, 60% involvement, and 0%.

Gordon says, “One of the reasons I think a lot of people are working the kinds of hours they are and checking their emails on vacations (and all the other stuff) is that perhaps they have forgotten how to do nothing.” I'm not sure that we have forgotten, I think its more fear-based at a subliminal level.

What if we 'do shut down?' What will we miss? Will we return to 500 emails the next day and not be on 'top of it all?' It's not uncommon for me to call a client from a dinner party or a client to call me from their kid's soccer game.

Mark writes about a trip Evan Orensky took to NYC with his wife, where he vouched to remain unplugged. The miner story hit and he felt that he couldn't get accurate information from mainstream press, i.e., TV and the New York Times, i.e., TV reported that 12 of the 13 miners were dead and that one was in critical condition and the New York Times was reporting that 12 were alive and 1 was dead.

He felt an urgency to get to a computer to find out all the information the media left out of the story. And did. My thought was - why did we need to know the granular details so urgently? Could this level of detail not wait?

Could perhaps a human discussion about something 'in-the-moment' outweigh it, just for a few days, or god forbid a week or more? He felt that there was too much to learn in the world to be comfortable in cutting himself off. I think that there's too much to learn in the world to not be cut off from time-to-time.

We listen differently when we're cut off, look at people in a different way; we even interact at another level. It's hard to get to that point however UNTIL you cut off. Having a conversation with someone in Silicon Valley takes a little getting used to......I cautiously wait and wonder when the person will be distracted by their phone, Treo, or Blackberry, or when I call them in their office, sometimes I can hear them IMing or responding to email in the background.

I'm the master of multi-tasking. I've been known to have a phone on each ear in my corporate days and sometimes even now. And it took moving to Africa to truly become unplugged for more than a year. What a great reminder. I had not forgotten how to do nothing at all, but unplugging forces me to remember just how much more enhanced my life experience is when I am.

Balance baby balance. UNPLUG please. Trust me, you'll become more interesting and certainly more human.