More Monday

According to wordpress, it’ll take on average six minutes for you to read this article. I hope you make it!

Recently I made my Box 13 cookbook-project manuscript available to beta readers. Some beta readers I know, some are complete strangers. One stranger responded with a couple of comments.

I won’t directly quote, because that would be rude to do so without permission. But the main comment they made, which makes me a bit worried, and also, honestly, annoyed, is that they are doubtful dramatic radio will survive much longer, even in countries outside of North America, where I believe it’s currently hanging on as a public-commercial enterprise, because, in large part, of today’s people’s supposedly poor attention spans.

Now, just like everyone else, I have previously read and heard numerous doom-opinions about how the ability to focus is vanishing. Usually the over-use of the internet and related technologies gets the blame. What surprised me here though, is this comment came from someone who volunteers to beta read, and therefore must have some interest in story-telling, and, we’re not talking about a three-day-long opera, or a three hour play or film, or a novel that takes a couple of hours to read, we’re talking, in the context of Box 13, about a less-than-half-hour show you can listen to while doing something else. Is asking someone to follow a story for half an hour while they walk their dog (or cook their dinner) too much?

I really don’t think so. Maybe I’m an optimist. But shouldn’t listening to audio fit right in with divided attention spans and the idea of multi-tasking?

On Sunday, I got drawn into a lengthy battle with my computer and printer in an attempt to achieve a simple thing – the printing out of a productivity chart.

Rather hilariously, it took me several hours of frustration to get the chart I’ll use for the next six weeks or so to keep me somewhat focused on various tasks and hopefully prevent me from spending too much time achieving little, and/or achieving little that is enjoyable. (No, I didn’t want the chart-list on my phone. I wanted it on paper, on my desk. And I eventually got it. Paper is a pretty neat technology itself, FYI)

Feeling cheated by the computer-printer-wifi technology people as they stole my Sunday morning (and my good mood for most of the day) I vowed that I would take Monday offline.

And I did.

I know that not everyone can take Monday offline, but I would challenge everyone to devote one day a week, at least every couple of weeks, to keeping your computers (and this includes your smartphone) off.

Particularly if you’re someone who believes attention spans are getting so short listening to something for half an hour is too much.

If you believe it’s the internet doing this to you, try turning the internet off.

Most of us actually do have a choice about this. And we should be exercising it.

I’ve been a bit lax in weekly days’ off recently, but it was really nice to get another one in. And I enjoyed the extra sneakiness of doing it on a Monday, the traditional “back to work” day when I “should have” been all over emails, messages, newsfeeds, etc. (Although, in my small town, businesses are often closed on Mondays so Monday is sort of a half-weekend-day for us anyway.)

I did get work done, just not online.

By the time the day was over, I had, among other things: walked down to the voting place and voted in the federal election, returned a nearly overdue item to the library, got a significant amount of yard-work done (I reached 10K steps on my dumb pedometer by the end of the day) thoroughly cleaned the kitchen and checked off another spring cleaning task, added a few lines to short story that’s been waiting for me to get back to it, read a significant chunk of a book from my book pile, stopped to enjoy the blossoming lilacs in my back yard, and did other work I can’t remember now. At one point I turned on my desktop computer , brought up my cookbook to get a recipe, wrote the recipe out by hand, and turned the computer off without connecting to anything online. It was amazing! It felt empowering. You can just ignore the temptation to check in on your trains running on rail nation. *ahem*

The recipe turned out pretty good again, too.

(I did check the news online in the evening because we were having a federal election on Monday, and you wanna know who your prime minister is, don’t you.)

As I was walking back from my morning voting (there was absolutely no line-up or waiting, apparently 8-ish in the morning is not popular as a voting time in my small town) I decided I would call this monday a “More Monday” – a Monday when I got “more” done. “More” than what could be done sitting at a computer or staring at a phone. Just now, before I started typing this little article (which I’m going to wrap up because we wouldn’t want it to be too long and demanding, would we?) I watched a guy walking his dog down the street.

Except he wasn’t walking his dog, he was doing something on his phone while the dog darted back and forth at the end of the leash and the guy walked on automatic down the street. I don’t think the guy was enjoying his walk, and I think the dog could have been having a better time too.

“More Monday” is, sometimes about doing all the chores you can, but it’s also for doing “more” than that. It’s also for the lilacs. You can have a bit of “More Monday” by simply leaving your phone at home and paying attention to the street. You might not see anything astounding, but you might see something you wouldn’t otherwise. I don’t think that guy knows there’s a fantastic stand of lilacs down on the corner, I don’t think he noticed how you can smell them from a block away (if you’re not all congested with seasonal allergies, *sigh*) And he missed out because of it. You might find having a “More Monday” will end up with you in a better, happier, more relaxed mood, as all the “noise” you’ll hear is the passing traffic – and you’ll be letting it pass you by, you don’t need to worry about it all the time. (Just… watch out for it when you’re on the street.)

The internet is cool. The internet lets me share this post with you. It lets me watch a documentary about a guy making bread in 1977 Beligum while I practice my French. But a day without the internet is cool too.

Le jour du pain pour un fermier en 1977

Happy May to all of you.