Practice Your Gratitudes
I told you yesterday about how much I like using the BestSelf Journal. One of my favorite features is the morning and evening gratitudes. It is just three lines to write on after a prompt - “This morning/evening I am grateful for…”
Living with gratitude has made a big difference in my relationship with data and technology. I don’t have any evidence to cite or even articles to reference. I’ve only got my personal experience but I feel really strongly about it. It is so easy to take technology for granted or to underappreciate the possibilities available because of technology. We can easily slip into thinking that technology is supposed to be a flawless support system that requires very little investment from us and should be doing magical things for our benefit. But all technology available now is an expression of one or more people thinking that there was something better than what existed before.
It may be hard to feel this in the moment when your computer stops working or your CRM has inaccurate data or your LMS can’t handle grading rubrics the way you like them. But we had a whole host of other issues when we were doing everything with paper and had to repeat a lot of manual tasks over and over again. Most important to me is that those manual, repetitive tasks were taking time away from doing the things that require way more humanity.
I’m not saying that working in technology doesn’t require a level of humanity - to do it really well, it requires a DEEP amount of humanity. But often doing the manual, repetitive tasks at work does not require the bulk of your humanity, and it shouldn’t take up a lot of your valuable time. I am overcome with gratitude for anything that gets mission-driven people working on the things that they do best and having an impact on the world. Technology can do this at a pace and scale unlike many other tools at our disposal.
What does this mean for shutting down your computer? Remember, success with technology is 90% mindset, 10% technical. If we are ending the day with a ton of frustration and anger at our technology or systems, that can prevent us from shutting down the computer. You might be surprised to hear that - wouldn’t you think that a person might take all that emotion and just “say goodnight” and shut down their work? I haven’t met a single person yet who has told me they do that (of course I’m sure they are out there somewhere, just not in my circles).
I don’t think I need to provide you with a bunch of links to learn more about gratitude practices - there are a million and one ways to live into gratitude. As a practice, I try to write down three things I’m grateful for every morning and every night. And I can say for certain that this has played a major part in helping me appreciate the challenges and the opportunities of technology, and helped me turn it off at night.
