Digital Detox Is a Fantasy. Do This Instead.

tech.hindustantimes.com:

When news broke that Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff had taken a 10-day “digital detox” vacation in French Polynesia, the internet ate it up. We couldn't, it seems, stop scrolling about how one very wealthy man stopped scrolling.

Stories like this seize our imaginations for several reasons. One is that the merely well-off tend to obsess about the habits of the super-rich, whether we find them admirable or hypocritical. Another is the appeal of the quick fix, whether it is Dry January, a spend-nothing challenge or a digital sabbatical.

But I suspect the story truly caught fire because, deep down, most of us are jealous. Ten days without digital devices? Must be nice. (Especially when the company you run is considering layoffs.)

In reality, the features of the modern workplace make it feel impossible to disconnect to a Benioffian extent. As work communications have spread from email to tools such as Slack and texting, it has become tougher to break away — the once-reliable out-of-office message is of little use when you're trying to pause notifications on so many different channels. (You're lucky if even one colleague notices that you've set your status to a palm-tree emoji. )

According to a survey by Okta, large companies now use more than 200 apps on average. Too often, we're left alone to decide how to manage the onslaught. A 2019 scholarly review argued that the rise of the digital detox as a concept “illuminate[s] the rise of a self-regulation society, where individuals are expected to take personal responsibility for managing the risks and pressures” of forces they didn't create.

Our screens are ever-more integrated into our leisure lives as well. It's tough to imagine a vacation without my