Four ways to fight tech loneliness
You are in a relationship with your technology - whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. You’ve gone on first dates, you’ve gotten married, you’ve gotten divorced, you have extended family to deal with, you had kids together, you took a break, you got back together, you went to couples therapy, you lost together, you won together, you’ve grown together, and you’ve grown apart.
I don’t think you can over-anthropomorphize the relationships that we have with our technology.
A positive relationship that you continue to work on and develop can leave you feeling accomplished and fulfilled. A negative relationship where you let the little annoyances and big grievances build up over time can leave you feeling resentful and angry. But given the isolation that has been thrust upon us all this year, perhaps the most destructive feeling that a negative tech relationship can leave you with is loneliness.
Let’s talk about tech and loneliness. We can start with the definition of regular old loneliness from social psychologists:
The gap between the social connections you would like to have and those you feel you experience.
So let’s define tech loneliness as:
The gap between the technology connections and support you would like to have and those you feel you experience.
THE GAP. The gap is so real. What we think our tech should be doing vs. what our tech is actually doing. What we want our data to look like vs. what it actually looks like. How we want to spend our time in our technology vs. what we actually have to do to make it work. I’ve seen this gap wear people down to the point that they throw up their hands and abandon their tech completely. It can just make you feel so lonely.
I’ve also seen people build the most beautiful bridges across these gaps and find the connections with their technology that make it work for them.
Just like any human relationship, this takes time and work. Sometimes it takes bringing in a third-party to help you bridge the gap (hi, let’s chat!!). If you are feeling lonely with your technology, here are a few simple steps you can take in building the successful relationship you want to have:
1. Align with each other on your values and your expectations.
A technology system should be working in service of the values of the organization and the people using it. Your relationship with your technology will be so much richer if you can draw the line from your technology and how you are using it to your mission (or your organization’s mission) and your impact. Ask yourself, why am I using this technology? Don’t stop at the more practical side of things (“I’m using my CRM so that I can track donations”), go deep (I’m using my CRM as part of my toolkit of building deep relationships with donors, communicating the story of my nonprofit effectively, and furthering our mission to end poverty”).
Sometimes there is frustration when our technology doesn’t seem to be holding up its end of the deal from above - like when you run a report of data about donors and the information in it doesn’t match what you know is true in the real world of your work. Luckily, much of the time this occurs when our expectations for what our tech should be doing are not aligned with what our tech thinks it should be doing. You may have experienced this when filtering a report in Salesforce or writing a formula in a spreadsheet. Checking the alignment of expectations in these instances can be really helpful for your relationship. Write down what you expect your tech to be doing, and then investigate what is happening and see if you can find the misalignment.
A classic example is when you run a report in your system (let’s pretend it is a report of all the students who have signed up for your after-school program this year) and it gives you 500 rows of data results, but you were only expecting about 10 or so. The tech system was expecting that you wanted a report of all students who had ever applied in any year, because that is how the report was made. So you’ll need to go tell that tech system making your report what it is you expect, and make sure it is the same thing the tech system expects to show you (in our example, all that is needed is a filter on the report to limit the results to students enrolled THIS YEAR).
2. Take a break from each other every once in a while.
When I teach spreadsheets (one of my absolute favorite pastimes, no joke) I always introduce the concept of the “I-hit-a-wall” limit (it is also my one simple trick for learning to love the art of the error message): When you hit a snag using Excel (or any other tech) like an error message or incorrect calculations, try to solve that snag for a set period of time. A good rule of thumb is to take only 15 minutes - that includes any google searching - and then STOP. Take a break, make some tea, play with your kids, or search YouTube for 90s hip hop music videos. Whatever you need to do to get away from the potential frustrations while you are still learning to make it work for you. Whenever you feel ready, go back to it, but remember to use your I-hit-a-wall-time-limit whenever you need it.
So it is great to walk away from a little argument with your tech and come back calmly to try to work things out. But that isn’t the only kind of break you both need. You’ve got to shut down your tech every once in a while to get a break from each other and from being on. You get to sleep at least some of the time, right? Your computer (and your email, your tabs, your to-do list) benefit from sleep, too. In fact, these breaks are so important to the health of our relationships with our tech that I made a 5-day Shut Down Your Computer Challenge to bring people together around the act of shutting down their computers!
3. Communicate from a place of empathy and gratitude.
No matter what science-fiction movie you’ve watched, there is absolutely no way for a computer program to “feel” things as mysterious and ethereal as empathy and gratitude. But it is still possible for us to build our relationship with our technology based on these foundations. Technology owes you everything - without you, it is completely devoid of meaning and purpose. Without you, it might as well not exist. But a computer software does its best to give you everything you need in a kind of show of gratitude. When you find that your technology is NOT working for you, try to see it from the tech’s perspective. It lives to please, not to frustrate. But there are times when it is like my 2-year old, desperately trying to communicate with you, but not possessing the same language skills to do so effectively. Hey - at least we don’t have to feed punch cards into a machine the size of a room like at the beginning of computing. We get the comfort of our homes and most of all we get the internet and all of its informational glory to help us work things out with our tech. So while the computer only exists to serve and support you, your relationship will get a lot easier if you take some time to see things from your tech’s perspective, appreciate the things it can do for you, and work together towards a shared goal.
4. Set the mood and make the right environment for love to flourish.
You might be surprised just how much “setting the mood” can help your relationship with your technology. This can be done in the physical space around you and your computer, as well as the digital space you both share. A comfortable chair, the right bluetooth mouse, a favorite coffee mug, a good light source, a power source, headphones, the right music, a pad and paper nearby...these are all things that make me a lot happier when I’m working on my computer, and make me a better work partner. And my computer and I both appreciate a clean hard drive, a desktop free from files sporting a great background image, only a short-list of programs that start-up with the computer, just one or two chrome tabs open, most apps/software/programs closed until I am actually using them. Having your tech set up in the way that helps you focus and work best is really helpful to a good relationship.
Give these four steps a try, and let me know how your relationship with your technology changes! The purpose is to close the gap between the technology connections and support you would like to have and those you actually have, which in turn should protect you from experiencing tech loneliness. Nobody needs any more isolation or loneliness - to be making our best impacts in the world we need more deep relationships with each other and with our technology.
