You and I have never met and yet we have so much in common. We get distracted on the internet and in just a few clicks, we are down a time-wasting rabbit hole. We can click on that new email notification or on a link to an article embedded in another article we are reading.
We try to stay focused but those emails piling up in our inbox start pulling us away. We get a notification from one of our breaking news alerts and suddenly we are three or four pages away from the page we originally intended to read or the project we were working on.
Then there is social media. You didn’t intend to get lost in your Facebook feed or from it to random articles that you clicked on. Like me, you had the best intentions. You only wanted to share some really cool article or video you had seen. Yet curiosity got the best of you like it did me. You went back on your Facebook feed to see what people thought of that really cool article and then you got sucked in. Twenty minutes later you realized that you now only have ten minutes to do whatever it is you had wanted to do in this last precious thirty minutes you gave yourself.
I have previously provided some great strategies to try to minimize how often this happens, but think of it as a practice. Let’s face it, Internet marketers know how our own brains work far better than we do. They purposely place links and other alluring information in places where we are likely to click. A Mindfulness practice can also help you to flex your focus muscle and be less likely to be lured away from what you intended to do when you got on your device. Limit the time you spend on your device to 30 to 45 minute installments and then build in wandering breaks where you can randomly click away for 15 minutes.
Now that the Trump Administration has loosened regulations so that Internet Service Providers can sell your search history and mine, we may find out that indeed, we did just click on the same page. Who knows how else we might click?
Originally published at medium.com