Distractions on Manuel Bernhardt

Smartphone Detox

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 20:04:41 +0100

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Someone (not Einstein)

Smartphones are addictive and highly distracting. Their mere presence reduces cognitive ability. I tried getting rid of mine - or at least of its intensive usage - many times over and have failed. Here’s my attempt at another shot, inspired by this article.

Day 1 (27.03.21)

Attempting to setup my old Ericsson T28s, which stores all contacts on the SIM card. iOS doesn’t allow to copy contacts to a SIM card anymore, so I found an old Android phone and connected it with my Google account to synchronize contacts. Tried 3 different SIM tooling apps but none of them manages to copy contacts over the SIM card. After a bit of research it turns out that most SIM cards issued by operators these days are read-only.

Disciplines for getting out of the stream

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:38:34 +0100

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” – John Lennon

But what if you’re not making plans. Or if all the plans you are making are more reactions to address short-term goals, needs or issues, rather than stepping back and looking at the general direction you’re headed?

I think this easily happens to most of us. When caught up in daily chores without the time to think - really think - it is very difficult to go meta and ask yourself about what it is that you really want. Add to this the plethora of interruptions and distractions we’re subjected to these days thanks to the attention economy and you get yourself a state of “constant drifting in a stream”. If you also have kids, replace “stream” with “torrent”.

How I stopped reading the news and feel much better now

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:12:30 +0200

Over the past years, we have been given the access of increasingly more and more information. Not only are we given the opportunity to get nearly real-time information about all the terrorist attacks, accidents, revolutions and other events happening around the world, but with the evolution of mobile services, we get access to this information just everwhere.

Like Tim Berners-Lee points out in his last TED talk, there is an even greater potential to the world wide web - the interlinking of raw data, and not just documents, making it possible to get a new kind of understanding of the world.