In this engaging and thoroughly researched book, Amy Blankson takes on the difficult task of evaluating how the incredible growth in technology can help or hinder us on our path to more happiness. She integrates it with almost a decade of her own experience as a top positive psychology leader and consultant, so the book is full of practical tools and life hacks that you can immediately pull into your life. I highly recommend you get a copy!
By digging into how technology integrates with all key components of the busy modern life -- our relationships, parenting, work and communities -- Amy gives some wonderful guidelines for when and how to embrace technology for our own good. And she gives us important guideposts to notice when technology is taking us to places that don’t support our happiness or the life we want to live.
Customized for you
Books written about technology often come from a black-and-white view that technology is either destroying society as we know it or making our lives into a modern utopia. Amy takes a much more thoughtful and nuanced approach. Throughout the book, she is sensitive to the fact that we all come to our happiness and technology use from different places, with different values and desires. Rather than be dogmatic, she provides the reader with ideas on how to optimize tools that fit for YOUR life and let go of the those technologies that don’t serve you.
The most valuable part for me
There is so much cool stuff here, I’m sure you will find your own favorite tools. The book helped me check in on my own technology habits and recognize how often I let my phone and my web use control me. I am too responsive to the constant pinging of my phone rather than choosing how I use technology. Here are some of Amy’s life hacks that I found most valuable:
• Turn off phone notifications. Getting an email, tweet or news headline is NEVER an emergency in my life. Yet my notifications mean I check my phone every time a new one comes in. In the three days since I shut those off, I’ve found I simply have more time for my work, my family and myself. And Amy shares the extensive research in the book about how these constant disruptions kill our productivity and hurt our relationships
• Hide your phone. “Wait. What? Hide my phone? But that’s my connection to everything.” OK, this one is a lot harder for me. But the couple times I’ve simply left it in another room in the house have been freeing. Just seeing my phone sitting on my desk calls to me to pick it up. This is especially true when I’m trying to do something challenging for me (like, say, writing this post...). It’s so much easier to stay focused when I don’t see the phone (and the endless distractions it can provide).
• Limit your email checks (or Facebook or newsfeed checks...). Amy recommends checking email just 3 times or less on weekend days. I want to try this, especially now that my notifications are off. The idea of being able to consolidate all those hours of email reading and responding could give me another hour or two to do the things I enjoy every day. And while she admits it would be harder for most of us to do this at work, she does suggest defining work periods for an hour or two where you step away from email to focus on important projects. That sounds pretty awesome to me!
And so much more
And there is SO MUCH MORE that Amy does with the book. She talks about how we can use technology to support developing new happiness habits. She lays out tons of great phone apps and websites that can help us foster more gratitude, take mindfulness breaks and connect more with the people around us. She discusses how we can use technology to better understand ourselves -- to track how we spend our time and energy, our sleep habits, our exercise and a million other things that help us know who we are and what we do.
She has a whole chapter on how we can set up technology in our homes and our workspaces to enable us to be happier, more productive and more connected to one another.
And all of this comes in a package that is full of entertaining and heart-warming stories that keep you engaged and wanting to learn more.
I highly recommend you get a copy of this book and take the time to give it a good read!
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Quick read about how setting boundaries, balancing & incorporating technologies to tackle daily personal and work challenges can lead to a better and happier life.
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Peter Martin
Rather disappointing.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2017