Disconnect and Go Back to the Basics

Dis­con­nect and Go Back to the Basics

“Sen­sory over­load.” We’ve all heard that phrase. It has become a cliched part of our ver­nac­u­lar. For instance, when dead­lines and activ­i­ties at work start to make us feel fraz­zled, we tell our col­leagues, half-jokingly, “I can’t hang in. I’m on sen­sory over­load here.”

The phe­nom­e­non is being stud­ied by the experts and every day, it seems, there is another news story about the impact that tech­nol­ogy and all of the com­mu­nica­tive devices we use every day are hav­ing upon us. We are all con­nected to each other per­pet­u­ally through our cell phones, black­ber­ries, com­put­ers, etc. But are we really con­nect­ing with other human beings in a mean­ing­ful fash­ion or just super­fi­cially? That’s a ques­tion for the soci­ol­o­gists to answer in years to come.

For me, the ques­tion has become, am I really con­nected with my inter­nal self? Some days the hon­est answer is “no.”

So this past week, feel­ing a big case of sen­sory over­load which was, I’m sure, inspired in part by the stom­ach flu that slowed me down con­sid­er­ably for five days, I did some­thing I haven’t done in ages. I actu­ally got out a pad of paper and a pen. Remem­ber those items?

As I sat at my desk hold­ing one of my favorite gel pens and look­ing at the blank sheet of paper, I thought to myself, “Wow, how long has it been since I have done this?” And I real­ized that I couldn’t remember.

Some of you may be laugh­ing. But the truth is that, since get­ting a lap­top com­puter, I haven’t used pen and paper in any form other than to write a sticky note, check or greet­ing card. All of the writ­ing that I have done in recent years has been using a com­puter, includ­ing tak­ing notes in meet­ings. My neigh­bors and I even exchange e-mails because, given our hec­tic sched­ules, we rarely see each other in per­son other than when one or both of us is pulling into or back­ing out of their garage and we wave at each other.

Nor­mally, I sit down at my desk and my hands imme­di­ately get into posi­tion on the key­board or mouse. And then my eyes start tak­ing in all of the infor­ma­tion splashed across the screen. If you are like me, you prob­a­bly have a zil­lion win­dows open all at the same time. These days, the idea of hav­ing just one web­site open at a time is laugh­able since every browser has the abil­ity to open tabs. If you’re like me, you most likely have at least a dozen open at any given moment. Some­times, I open them and by the time I get around to actu­ally click­ing on the tab, I can’t remem­ber where I found the link to that site or why I wanted to view it. (Senior moments … sigh.)

So as I looked at the pad of paper and ran my hands over the blank page, it was rather like see­ing a long lost friend that I had for­got­ten about until run­ning into him on the street. And as I sat there work­ing, tak­ing notes, jot­ting down ideas, for­mu­lat­ing sen­tences with pen in hand, the mus­cle move­ments buried some­where in the recesses of my brain became famil­iar again.

It took a few min­utes, but I got back into the groove of work­ing this way and found it sur­pris­ingly refresh­ing. The thing I noticed most is that I was intently focused on what I was writ­ing because I was not dis­tracted by e-mail noti­fi­ca­tions or a graphic in a browser tab or on a web­site page remind­ing me to do some­thing else. I did not expe­ri­ence any sen­sory over­load for the sig­nif­i­cant period of time that I spent work­ing in this way. Mer­ci­fully, the phone did not ring and I turned off the sound on my com­puter so I wouldn’t know that e-mails were com­ing in.

It was an extremely pro­duc­tive exer­cise and it reminded me that for writ­ers, some­times the best thing we can do is the sim­plest: Dis­con­nect and go back to the basics.

If you are feel­ing over­whelmed, stressed, unable to focus because of all the infor­ma­tion being con­tin­u­ously lobbed at you or just plain fed up by all of the tech­nol­ogy vying for your atten­tion, give the most sim­ple and inex­pen­sive cure a try: Turn all of those devices off for a bit, includ­ing the phone (if you can), and just sit down with a blank page and your favorite pen.

I think you might be pleas­antly sur­prised, as I was, at how quickly and delight­fully your psy­che recalls the way life used to be before we all became slaves to the tech­nol­ogy avail­able to us. Your cre­ative energy may be renewed using this tech­nique, thereby inform­ing and inspir­ing your writ­ing. You may be stunned by your own cre­ative, crit­i­cal or ana­lyt­i­cal thinking.

Be sure to leave a com­ment and let us know what tech­niques work best for you!

Orig­i­nally pub­lished at Write Stuff.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writing

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