Pockets of Freedom

My normal days begin at 4:00 am, and I’m often awake earlier than that. Several of my friends think I’m crazy. Considering I go to bed after 10:00 pm most nights, I don’t have much of a counter-argument to the crazy theory.

I’m not here to brag about how much I get done in an 18-hour day. Truth is, I waste a lot of time. At regular intervals, I find myself squandering away an hour or more scrolling through social media without any object in mind. For a time, I removed all social media apps from my phone, but found myself bored again and reinstalled them.

Rinse and repeat.

There’s a bit of buzz right now about replacing doom-scrolling with microlearning. At the Association for Talent Development, they define microlearning as something that “enhances learning and performance in the most efficient and effective manner possible through short pieces of content.”

Phrasing there makes it sound like microlearning is the most efficient and effective manner available for learning. It’s not a valid assumption, but serves to drive their point home. Truth is, there’s not a one-size-fits-most way to learn.

But this isn’t just about learning in place of doom-scrolling either.

I’m consistently inconsistent at keeping a daily planner.

In the illustration, I give the appearance of having every minute of the day planned out. There’s a lot of opportunity in there, however — opportunities to make better use of the time I’ve been given.

I’m not advocating the message of efficiency gurus. Many of them try to portray themselves as not actual humans, but machines making the highest and best use of every minute of every day.

As actual humans, allowing ourselves a modest amount of unstructured downtime is critical to mental health. This downtime necessarily includes good, wholesome entertainment and recreational activities. You don’t have to be a psychologist or brain scientist to experience and understand the great effects of just moving your body.

Among all the work, community, family, and personal obligations and commitments, there are pockets of freedom where opportunity exists for a little bit of self-improvement.

How many of us, when we’re standing in line in the grocery story, whip out our phone like Clint Eastwood in a gun fight, and proceed to scroll through social media without really even paying attention to what we’re seeing? Likely more often than any of us would care to admit.

If you’re old enough to remember life before cell phones, you might recall the experience of standing in line with *gasp* nothing to do but. . .wait in line.

In long lines (Disneyland, anyone?), there used to be opportunity to connect with the people in front of and behind you. Now, everyone’s staring into the void of digital meaninglessness.

Okay, I’ll be fair. I know there are lots of people out there who aren’t engaging in the mind-numbing pointlessness of LankyBox or watching cat videos.

In fact, that brings me to my point (you’re welcome). Let’s revisit the grocery store scene. What if, while standing in line at the grocery story, phone in hand, you take a moment to connect with another person in a meaningful way.

What if, instead of zombie-scrolling, you stopped on a post and shared an actual thought with the creator. Maybe you see someone highlight something their child accomplished. Rather than a quick response like “so cute” or “way to go”, you take a moment to craft something with heart. Even better, make it a direct message with heart, not something the rest of the world even sees.

“Hey {friend}, I saw your post on that really amazing-looking banana bread you made. It looked delicious. Would you mind sharing the recipe with me?”

I wrote that little example with all 10 fingers so it only took about 30 seconds, but I’ve seen how my daughters text and I guarantee you they could generate that message with their thumbs every bit as fast as I typed it here.

The amount of effort required to do something like that for someone else is staggeringly little. If I traded 15 minutes of mindless scrolling to send a thoughtful message to 3 to 5 people, think about how much better things would be my relationships.

There are, of course, also things to learn in these seams of opportunity. You can read a page of a book on your phone while standing in line or tap out a quick thought in a journaling app.

Let me repeat: I’m not advocating an attempt at wholesale productivity. What I am advocating is trading a bit of time used in low quality pursuits for the pursuit of connections of a much higher value.