This week has felt three weeks long, the combination of lots of snow, lots of new connections to make, and endless avenues of opportunity to identify. All this without really leaving the house. My focus has been on trying to recognize when I’m getting antsy or tense. In my line of work, everything is tied to the clock: deadlines, turnaround times, deliverables, launch dates, pacing and campaign performance, and staying in constant communication with hundreds of clients and coworkers.
As I may have mentioned, there’s so much destruction in keeping your energy tied to other people’s energy. You’re much better off to work for others in the moment, and pre-planning what you hope to accomplish isn’t a terrible thing, but dwelling on the deadline when you’re not in a position to do anything about it is completely useless and detrimental to your health. Email is interesting, because it’s like a tennis match with no guarantee if or when someone will return your serve. It creates a loop hole in your positive defenses: maybe they hate me now, maybe they didn’t like what I typed, maybe they are working with someone else now.
It was out of this digital frost that I picked up the damn phone and booked 15 meetings for the next few weeks. Most are more than 100 miles from my desk, so that will give me built in time to plan, reflect upon, and anticipate some good feeling stuff.
Our inboxes can either house opportunity or tiny daggers. There are times when I catch myself actually watching the inbox for another task to come through. What the hell is up with that? What are we trying to prove, how quickly monkey slam button and get banana? My endless streams of connectivity, mostly digital, a few analog, and even fewer human and tactile, all have 2 sides: the value of the connection, and the illusion of connection which harbors profound disconnection and angst. It can be alternately inspiring and exhausting.
Think about your relationship with Facebook. Are you mostly there to contribute to your friends lives and maintain genuine correspondence, or is it approached through your ego: what are people saying about my photos, my witty status updates, etc. Couple this with the layer of public display of anything and everything, it gets kind of weird. Everything is getting reduced to soundbites, and I can tell because whenever someone writes a paragraph (either in their status or in a comment), it gets daunting to read without passing some sort of judgment: they are long winded, they should proofread, etc.
I’m not bagging on Facebook at all, because I could be considered an uber-user. Every once in a while I need to reevaluate its value in my life and productivity. Managing Hamell’s page is interesting because there are fans from all over the world and its fun getting to know them. Any of the people in my friend list, I’d much rather see them face to face and actually talk or laugh together. Sometimes it feels like we’d rather scroll and click than figure out our busy calendars to actually connect. Social networks are like collecting action figures of everyone you’ve ever known for that safe feeling you get in having them all in your pocket whenever you need access to them. It’s a 60GB iPod full of music you’ll never listen to again.
A couple friends of mine in Chicago made an interesting resolution: to give each other their login info for Facebook, access one another’s accounts and change the passwords, effectively blocking themselves access until a mutually agreed upon return date. It’s not a question of time for me, because life is too busy to spend too much time on Facebook. My interest is weeding out anything that blocks my flow of energy. Even if it’s a finite, small amount of time, is the time spent there just empty calories? As much as I’d like to, I can’t live on jerky and Cheetos.
It’s an interesting irony, because I’m recognizing that my level of success (financially, creatively, even spiritually) is tied to disseminating information across servers and wi-fi. Yet, there is a much larger potential for distraction, isolation and disconnection. These are vivid reminders that our happiness is tied to our perceived sense of freedom, and that negativity and resistance is just on the other side. The interweb frees us to do innumerable good things. The question is if we’re actually doing them, or just thinking about our next login.
