Cambridge Virtual Summer Festival of Learning: “Working and Living Onscreen”
Hello Everyone — for those of you that had a chance to attend my talk “Working and Living on Screen: Digital Wellbeing and Productivity” as part of the Cambridge Virtual Summer Festival of Learning, here are some links that I wanted to share in case you might find them helpful.
On Digital Distractions
I talked about how nowadays we might be more inundated by digital distractions than ever before — not all distractions are necessarily bad of course, but how can we help manage our distractions when we are trying to focus?
Here’s another blog post I’ve done, with 5 quick tips you might want to check out: “How Do We Manage Digital Distractions?”via the FERSA Cambridge blog
And here’s another blog post with some psychological insights on digital distraction management that I recommend: “Conquering Digital Distraction” via Harvard Business Review
Infinite scroll (something you might have encountered when using apps such as Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc.) is something that I find particularly tricky to deal with. Here’s an eye-opening article on the inventor of infinite scroll:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-m-so-sorry-says-inventor-of-endless-online-scrolling-9lrv59mdk
Zoom Fatigue
Zoom fatigue is definitely a real thing and don’t worry, it’s not just you. But what can we do about it?
(unrelated note: apparently there are a lot of cats on Zoom)
Schedule Digital Breaks
I really like the Freedom App, and here’s a blog post I did on how to use Freedom for helping counter our digital distractions:
And, taking breaks away from our screens by spending about 15 minutes a day outside in nature can truly do us some good. From a recent study: “Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing” via Nature
Time Self Audit
How much time are we spending online? And where is our time going? One thing I recommend is doing a bit of self-experimentation and finding out how much times you’re spending working, or distracted just to give yourself a glimpse of what your habits are.
RescueTime is a great tool to get you started. For now, forget about scores and goals — use this as a way to see where your time is going, and then decide for yourself what is and isn’t working for you:
For those of you that use Android devices, Google has some very interesting tools worth checking out (click on the image below for more on Google Digital Wellbeing):
And their Google Digital Wellbeing Experiments are kind of fun as well!
About
I run the ThinkLab at the University of Cambridge, and research digital habits, productivity, and wellbeing.
