Contemplate Your Email

François Berger for The Chronicle

H ave you seen the YouTube video of the woman falling in the fountain? As she strides purposefully through the shopping mall, texting all the while, she trips over the edge of the fountain, tumbles in, and, without missing a beat, emerges from the water and walks away. (YouTube is filled with such incidents; just search for “texting while walking.”)

Our digital devices are both powerful and powerfully distracting. Indeed, their positive and their problematic aspects seem to arise from the same source. For what makes these tools so powerful is how they allow us to connect: to extend ourselves across space and time, to project ourselves beyond our immediate circumstances. And the more often we are somewhere else (texting with a distant friend, say), the more likely we are to end up in the fountain, literally or figuratively. The greater the range of opportunities to extend ourselves, the more challenging it becomes to choose where to focus our attention.

What can we do to use our devices and apps to both their best advantage and ours, and to understand when to use them and when to abstain? I have been investigating those questions for decades, not only as a technologist and a researcher but also as a meditator. I have long had a daily practice of sitting and attending to my breathing. This simple, ancient practice has many benefits, including the cultivation of greater attention, or mindfulness. Twenty years ago, while still a technology researcher in Silicon Valley, I began to suspect that mindfulness might offer a partial antidote to the acceleration, distraction, and overload I increasingly sensed in my own life and in the larger culture.

Since joining the faculty of the University of Washington’s Information School, I have explored this idea through research and teaching. Any activity conducted with greater concentration — even email or Facebook — can bring us into greater balance, inviting calmness and clarity. Ten years ago, I created a course called “Information and Contemplation,” which asks students to closely observe their use of tech and to make healthy and effective changes based on those observations. At the heart of the course (and of the book I recently published, Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives) is a series of five exercises that give students explicit guidance in how to do this.

The first exercise, “Observing Email,” involves six steps:

1. Conduct one or more email sessions.

2. Observe what you are doing and feeling.

3. Log what you are observing.

4. Summarize your observations.

5. Formulate personal guidelines.

6. Share and discuss with fellow students and with me.

Over the course of a week, I invite students to use email as they normally do (step 1), but with a slight twist (step 2): They should also pay attention to what’s happening in their mind and body while they’re using email. To help them understand what that means, I teach them a simple self-observational practice, which I call the “Mindful Check-In.”

The Mindful Check-In invites them to notice their breathing (is it shallow or deep, fast or slow?), their body (what is their posture? where do they feel sensation or the lack of it?), their emotional state (are they feeling up or down, excited, bored, anxious?), and the quality of their attention (highly focused or scattered?). Paying attention in that way while engaging with email allows them to see how various aspects of their email practice make them feel. What happens when they first lay eyes on their inbox, or when they see certain messages arrive? What do they experience when they decide to check email?

I then ask students to keep a log of those observations (step 3), write a summary reflection (step 4), and propose changes they would make based on their discoveries (step 5). Crucially, they then share their reflections and guidelines with the class (step 6), so we can discuss and compare the insights that have emerged.

W hat do students discover when they perform this exercise? One of the most common discoveries is how much often-unconscious emotions determine what they do — for example, how often they are motivated to check email out of anxiety and boredom. Discovering what underlies their online habits opens up a space of choice, the possibility of behaving differently. As one student commented, “If I took a second to ask myself, ‘Why am I checking my email right now?’ I would save myself a lot of unnecessary stress and annoyance.”

By strengthening their self-observational abilities, students begin to notice how they habitually respond to distractions and interruptions, whether external (the arrival of a text message) or internal (a moment of anxiety or discomfort in the body). That allows them to assess the wisdom of their habitual choices. They might ask themselves whether they really need to check email now, or if this is the right moment to switch from email to Facebook.

But how to decide? Students begin to discover that intention plays a central role. If they’re clear about what they are trying to accomplish, then when choices arise — and, crucially, when they notice these choices! — they can make an informed decision. But they need to be clear about their intention and ask themselves what they want to accomplish and how they can best do so.

Four more exercises follow: “Focused Email” asks students not just to observe their current email behavior but also to try practicing in a more focused, intentional way. “Observing Multitasking” invites them to observe their habitual method of task-switching, and “Focused Multitasking” invites them to try a more focused, intentional method. (Yes, it can be done.) Finally, “Mindful Unplugging” invites them to abstain from one or more devices or apps for a minimum of 24 hours and to observe the effects on mind and body.

Together these exercises help students recognize and evaluate their online habits and strategies, and, through self-reflection and group discussion, to establish guidelines for more-effective approaches. Students thus make their own discoveries. My role is to help create the conditions that will foster honest, careful observation and reflection.

The key to all of this, students discover, is intentional, attentional choice. Cultivating choice means discovering or recovering a sense of agency, of control, over their online lives. “Be mindful and make your decisions,” one student says. “Don’t let your decisions make you.”

The practical benefits of this approach are clear. But there seems to be a moral dimension to the learning as well. As another student so beautifully put it: “Being able to direct your attention and choose what to pay attention to is, I believe, an essential coping mechanism to deal with all of these new voices, all these new things that are demanding our attention. When we are mindful, we choose to pay attention to what is explicitly important to us; being mindful begins to reveal our values in a way wandering lost through the digital landscape can never do.”

David M. Levy is a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School. This essay was adapted from his new book, Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives (Yale University Press).