RETHINKING THE PHONE-LIFE BALANCE
#DeleteFacebook may be catching on
but quitting isn’t easy. But some professionals have found ways to own the
phone rather than let it run their lives
On the Metro, in a bar or midconversation with your spouse, do
you sneak a peek at your phone? And by the time you look up, 15 minutes have
passed and the conversation has drifted as the other party is also tapping away
furiously. Scrolling your phone screen even as you read this? Welcome to the club.
A recent Motorola study on phone-life balance says 65% of
Indians in the 16-65 age group feel the phone is their best friend while 47%
would much rather spend time with phone than with the one they love. Around 57%
feel compelled to perpetually check phones, and 77% are so emotionally
dependent that they panic if they think they have lost their smartphone. The
study was conducted among 4,418 smartphone users aged 16-65 in the US, Brazil,
France and India.
There’s no counter to the argument that the mobile phone has
become an extension of the self. Ironically, it is also true that browsing,
chatting, social media networking and 24x7 alerts thrown up by smartphones are
cutting into the work and “me-time” of professionals and businessmen alike.
Saugata Gupta, MD & CEO of Marico, never switches off his
mobile phone. For the past 10 years or so, he has never been “out of office”,
so to speak. He takes two or three short breaks during the year with his family
and on these holidays, he gets up an hour earlier so he can respond to a few
important mails and make some calls. The rest of the day, he checks his mails
only once an hour.
However, a few business leaders feel a holiday is synonymous
with going on a digital detox. “In my view, a mobile detox is more important
than heading to a health spa,” says Harsh Goenka, chairman of RPG Enterprises
who makes it a point to check his phone only once or twice a day on holidays.
At work, he says, he keeps his phone on silent mode in his pocket during
meetings. At night, the phone is strictly outside the bedroom.
Prabir Jha, president and global chief people officer of Cipla,
is digitally unavailable once he leaves office. “My post-office hours are
switch off times. Music, humour, conversations, reading, cooking...anything but
office! And my weekend siestas are my turbochargers,” says Jha.
Some organisations too are recognising the disruptive effect
technology has had on personal lives. Many line managers now do not insist on
immediate responses to emails during weekends and holidays. “We recognise that
different people have different time preferences for reflections and emails in
a globalised work eco-system. However, we (at Cipla) do not expect an immediate
response. That takes a lot of the pressure off,” says Jha.
Jha has managed what most Indians don’t — phone-life balance. Dr
Nancy Etcoff, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, which partnered
in the Motorala study, says it’s time to honestly assess how smartphones are
affecting our lives.. “Smartphone use can become misuse when it stops enhancing
lives and instead diverts our focus from the people and the activities we
value,’’ she says. It is one step from there, she adds, for misuse to become
addiction.
Etcoff says the smartphone industry itself should work towards
weaning off users. ‘Time Well Spent’, a non-profit initiative of design
ethicist Tristan Harris, is a baby step in this direction. Harris, who quit
Google to work full-time on reforming the “attention economy”, has founded the
Center for Humane Technology and is currently working on “ethical persuasion”
of technology companies to create less addictive apps and help steer users away
from screens. Even Mark Zuckerberg welcomed the idea and said time well spent
would be a design goal for Facebook. Technology, he says, should be “on our
team to help us live, feel, think and act freely”.
And that includes the freedom not to immediately look this up on
your phone.
Namrata Singh & Himanshi Dhawan
TOI 1APR18
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