Confession – I’m what you would call a Hyper Connected person. I’m constantly connected to my Note 4 mobile phone, I check my mail on a regular basis at least once an hour, my phone constantly beeps with Instant messages and information being delivered directly to my device.

Professional tend to describe Hyper Connectivity as a state called FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. According to wikipedia, FOMO is:

Fear of missing out or FoMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”.[2] This social angst [3] is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.[2] FoMO is also defined as a fear of regret,[4] which may lead to a compulsive concern that one might miss an opportunity for social interaction, a novel experience, profitable investment or other satisfying event.[2] In other words, FoMO perpetuates the fear of having made the wrong decision on how to spend time, as “you can imagine how things could be different”.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

Now, Hyper Connectivity has its associated costs to your life – You are constantly at anybody’s reach, if you are sometimes out of reach – people take it as being rude and eventually, it starts hitting your health and productivity.

So, about 2 weeks ago, I started my own little social experiment – and I decided that everybody on my contact list should be part of this experiment. I’ve done the almost obscene thing to do, I’ve turned my mobile device notifications off. No more SMS beeping, WhatsAPP groups are now muted, e-Mail no longer beeps like crazy.

Initially, for the first two days, I thought I was going mad. My phone was quite, suddenly, I was fully capable of doing the work and having the life I wanted. I was able to concentrate on my tasks, apart from a phone call here and there, I was fully capable of actually getting stuff done – without being interrupted every 15 minutes. Can you imagine living your life in 15 minute intervals? that was the story of my life for the past 5  years.

One of the amazing results of this experiment was that the feeling of “rudeness” was purely in my head only. When people sent me an email, or a text, and I didn’t respond within 30 seconds, or even 30 minutes, people acknowledged as: “ok, he’s probably busy and will return the minute he can”. That had two very interesting impacts: first, when I did reply, I spent enough time thinking about what was asked from me, and I was able to respond in a highly comprehensive manner. The second one was, and that was the shocking bit, I was conversing less by email and text, as things became clearer.

Imagine this, I “communicate less” and “converse more” – amazing!

It also made me realise something else – really productive people aren’t hyper connected, they are hyper engaged. The are fully engaged with what they do, not with the means of communications. The engage their tasks in a dedicated manner, able to focus completely on one task – and getting it done the right way. I also noticed that some of the people on my contact list, the highly successful ones, actually take a fairly lengthy time to respond – not because the are rude – it is because they are respectful. They respect themselves by allowing themselves the time to focus, and they respect their colleagues by focusing on their requirements in a devoted and centred manner.

If like me, you are Hyper Connected, I urge you to try and disconnect for a bit – it will change your world and perspective on how to get things done.