blogs/brentspodek

Rebbe Nachman, the great hasidic master, warned against ????? ???? - thieves of consciousness, which can lure our mind away in moments of prayer and meditation.

Writing in the 18th century, Rebbe Nachman was well aware of the ways in which we could lose our focus, but he never imagined that one day, we would pay exorbitant sums of money so we could carry devices in our pockets which would steal our attention away from everything.

There are the seductions of social media, but for me at least, it was email that was the real problem. Facebook and Twitter are endless cocktail party conversations, which like their real life counterparts are sometimes banal and sometimes quite insightful, but it was never much of a problem for me to tune them out.

Email, however, is real. It's work. It's responsibility. It demands a response.

There are alarmingly few activities which I have not interrupted in order to "take a sec and just respond to this one thing." Talking to my kids, talking to my wife, talking to my God. Lifting weights, cooking dinner, hiking, driving. The list goes on on and on.  

It's only recently that I really accepted that not only was inbox zero as elusive as nirvana, but my email was a hydra - for every email I deleted, two more sprung up to take its place, and the faster I responded, the faster replies came into me. It was a competition in which even if I won, I lost.

So, if you've sent me an email recently, you might realize I've taken a new approach.

I've taken email off of my phone, I've added a gmail extension which limits my access to two hours a day, and I've set up a way for folks to schedule appointments with me without 15 emails back and forth. Of these tweaks, taking email off my phone has been the most unequivocal success.

I've also set an auto response telling folks to call me if something is urgent, which means, I've been talking on the phone more, which has been a lovely, albeit slower way of working.

In our time, as in Rebbe Nachman's, we are the greatest thieves of our own consciousness. We embezzle our awareness and sell it for a pittance. For the first time in a while though, I feel I am getting the upper hand against my own thieves of consciousness.