Tidying Up
Updated on 07 Feb 2019 by Gianni permalink
Since I moved to Switzerland, I’ve noticed that the anxiety I feel around keeping up with other people’s lives (very specifically friends from North America) has drastically risen. While I was in California it was an occasional pang of “oh, I wonder what people are getting up to with their lives”, and now it’s become a dull throb of concern that I never get to communicate with the people I care so much about and spent so much time with in the last ~10 years.
Inspired by the very interesting discussion around Marie Kondo’s “the life-changing magic of tidying up” and the Netflix series “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo”, I sat down and read the book. While I can’t say there was much content on how to handle your personal relationships and interactions with others, the philosophy can certainly be extended that far. So I have spent some time thinking about what I want my relationship with technology to be. How will I insure that I feel joy when I sit down to relax, reconnect, or work?
I have some ideas about how I will accomplish this, starting with the sorts of things I want to make sure I can keep. This naturally has the consequence that there’s a lot that I will be discarding to make this transition. But not to worry, this isn’t going to be a sudden change. I plan on doing this slowly, and in phases. Ideally with some help to catch people who want to stay in touch, but don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late.
What I Want
So what is it that I want? I want to meaningfully communicate with the people I care about. I’m not sure what this looks like, and I don’t think there’s going to be a single size to fit everyone. I already do regularly scheduled video chat with some people, and others I’ve organized voice chat while we do something semi-constructive together. And for one or two people I write long form email updates, because scheduling in our lives is really difficult, and so video chat must be scheduled weeks/months in advance.
I would like to sit down and know ahead of time what I can do with my time, rather than wonder if I’m going to catch somenones attention and talk to them. Ideally this means that I can be really present with everyone, and give you my undivided attention, because I won’t be worried that I’ll miss an opportunity to talk to someone else. They’ll have their opportunity to talk when it works for both of us.
Thnigs to Avoid
While telling you what I want will certainly help me and you find time to communicate, and ways to do so. I want to be sure to include some pain points for me, so that I can actively engage your help in trying to get what I want. Mostly this can be boiled down to uncertainty.
I want to avoid games of tag, and continual attempts to catch someones attention. It’s pretty rotten when not only do I not manage to have a conversation with someone whose attention I was attempting to get, but it’s much worse for anyone that I was already interacting with. Split attention really sucks for everyone.
I want to avoid having to go looking for updates. I really want a very small number of places where I can go, and quickly see if there are updates from others. A good example would be email and RSS. I have one client that lets me know that either: I have a message or update; or I don’t. Not like Facebook, where someone I care about may have put content up, and it gets missed in a deluge of other content.
Going Forward
It’s likely that this manifests in me spending less time on chat clients, because the time I do spend will be very focused on certain people. And this will increase my reliance on email for organizing things. It’s also likely to manifest that I stop, or rarely use some clients. And possibly going so far as to disallow most people to be able to communicate with me in real time. This all might sound very bleak, and possibly disconnecting. I want to assure you that this is going to progress rather slowly, and I’m going to do my utmost to ensure that people who want to stay in contact with me will be able to do so. And it shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise!
Help
There are a few things I believe will be helpful for me to make this transition. In the short term: I’m going to abandon my facebook feed, and explicitly declare that I want to hear from you in email! This includes some slightly more mundane conversations about what you’ve been doing, and asks to schedule more real-time communication.
I would also like to enlist your help to disseminate this message. Not all of the people I want to keep in touch with have Facebook, not all of them are subscribed to my newsletter. And that’s not even counting people that want to keep in touch with me, that I have forgotten about. I’m sorry! TT_TT
If you can think of someone that should get this, but maybe hasn’t, please let me know! I’d like to make sure I have up to date contact info for everyone! And while I can see who has subscribed to the newsletter, it’s occasionally very difficult to tie an email address back to a person (looking at you 15 year-old Gianni).