24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

You become skilled at any work—carpentry, music, or gardening—by practicing. Tech Shabbat gives you the opportunity to practice whatever it is you want to get better at, even if it’s just being.

Tell your boss and coworkers. I highly recommend framing it as, I’ll be more productive, more creative, happier, and more efficient if I go offline for twenty-four hours.

The default mode network can take us to magical places. But we also have to get things accomplished, and when we do, the brain’s other primary process takes over. This is called the task positive network, and it switches on whenever you’re focused on a project. While the default mode network gets activated when we let our minds wander, the task pos

being much of a workout, but there’s lots of muscle memory involved there, too. Tech Shabbat helps break that. It gives you a chance to interrupt the muscle memory loop of reaching for your phone.

In addition to a chief executive officer (CEO), for example, what if corporations appointed a chief ethics officer and a chief empathy officer, who can act as thoughtful, conscious brakes, so that the leadership has the time to consider the impact of developing technologies and their effects on diverse populations, one, five, ten years out. What go

A person has an average of thirty thousand days on this earth. I discovered the power of practicing Tech Shabbat around fifteen thousand days into my journey.

Even the term “soft skills” sells them short, contrasting them with “hard skills,” whose name suggests they are more difficult to master and that they are also more important and indispensable. But to be good at empathy

Søren Kierkegaard put it: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

If you meditate, you’ve felt your brain switch over. When you start, you’re still in default mode network, and your thoughts are all over the place. But as you push those stray thoughts aside and begin to focus, the task positive network kicks in.