Yes, Let’s Do Lunch

October 25, 2011 Comments off

 

Are you guilty? Are you one of the growing number of employees who lunch at their desks or go without if you’ve forgotten to brown-bag it?

 

According to a recent study by Aviva Health, Health of the Workplace, you’re not alone. Thirty percent of employees surveyed said they were likely to skip a regular lunch break. Aviva found that almost 15 percent of employees skipped meals entirely because of stressful workloads, while 25 percent said their decision to take lunch or not depended on whether they had the time.

 

Many  of us would have fallen in with the 30th percentile, those who skipped lunch in order to complete their work. If you’re like these workers, you rarely take yourself away from your desk for a leisurely meal break. You probably feel virtuous about it, too, since skipping lunch seems to have become part of the new American work ethic. But skipping lunch isn’t good for you– and it isn’t good for your employer either.

From a health perspective, it’s important to refuel with a nutritious lunch, especially in the midst of a stressful day. When we’re stressed, we get an adrenaline rush that may mask our hunger pangs, but our body still craves food. Without midday nourishment, our body experiences dropping glucose levels. Glucose is something our cells (including those all-important gray cells) need in order to function properly. Eventually, skipping lunch will slow one’s metabolism, which may explain why we find ourselves stifling yawns at three in the afternoon.

But more importantly, taking a lunch break forces us to Unplug and Reconnect. The very act of getting up and walking away from our computers helps us recharge our batteries. Sometimes, when we give ourselves a brief respite, we find that our problem-solving skills grow stronger, that our creative juices start to flow again. A workload that seemed insurmountable before lunch seems more manageable once we’ve walked away from it for a while.

If you’re an employer who hopes for an energized workforce, encourage your employees to take lunch. If you’re an employee who’s tempted to skip lunch, step back and repeat: Let’s do lunch.

 

Cute ‘iPad Baby’ Provokes Thoughts about Reading

October 18, 2011 Comments off

In a video making the rounds on YouTube, a toddler is seen trying – and failing – to manipulate the pages of a magazine as if it were an iPad instead of a stack of printed pages. Frustrated in her attempts to make images move, she pushes the magazine away.

Adorable, right?

Well, maybe not. How valuable can it be for a baby to learn that mom’s iPad, with its flashy moving images, is way cooler than the printed page? If children learn to read by being read to by their parents and by mimicking parental behavior – which they do – what is this child learning?

Reading experts say even the youngest of babies benefit when their parents or other adults read to them aloud from a book. By being read to, a baby learns about communication and about important concepts such as numbers and letters, and colors and shapes. Reading also builds critical listening, memory, and vocabulary skills. Indeed, the very act of participating in reading at an early age is what creates lifelong readers. When parent and baby share a book, the baby is usually encouraged to join in the activity by turning pages and following text from left to right. This is behavior that will serve them well when they begin to read on their own.

So yes, it’s cute to see the iPad baby grapple with the pages of a magazine. But it would be really neat if the next frame of the YouTube video showed a parent picking up the magazine the child has pushed away to show her how cool words and pictures can be – even when they only move in our imaginations.

 

Unplugged

October 10, 2011 Comments off

The second-place winner in Unplug & Reconnect’s essay contest, Lori Quiller of Alabama, writes about discovering sights and sounds around her after she unplugs from technology in this essay titled “Unplugged.”

 

By Lori Quiller

 

I’m definitely an iPod girl. It’s like my wallet, cell phone, checkbook and credit card – I never leave home without it.

Music is soothing, or it can rev you up during the lull of the day. It can push out the minutia of not-so-white noise that can so quickly envelope and drown you when you are least expecting it. But, it can also be the blanket covering up some of the most beautiful sounds of our world that we have learned to tune out.

Where I work requires me to walk three blocks from a parking deck, down a hill, crossing busy intersections, and navigating vehicles filled with hurried drivers. But, there’s so much more.

When my iPod’s hard drive and battery died, I quickly ordered a new one thinking I just couldn’t survive without this little device I’d grown so accustomed to for the last seven years. (No, it wasn’t old. The tech at The Apple Store smiled graciously when he carefully chose the words, “well loved,” when he described my poor, ailing little iPod that was about to be retired.)

There were several days in which I walked those three blocks each morning and afternoon bare-eared! Gasp! Not knowing how long I was going to survive without my tunes, I constantly tracked the shipping logs to find out how long before the replacement would be at my doorstep.

Then, I began to notice things I hadn’t before. First was walking past the construction site outside my parking deck. There was a chorus of mechanical tunes inside the structure. Metal on metal. Welding. Ringing. A loud pinging from deep inside. I slowed my pace. That’s when I noticed the loose manhole cover in front of the bank. I stepped on it, and it cracked like a cymbal.

I was quickly reminded of an episode of Sex and the City when Carrie dated a jazz musician who tried to get her to listen to the sounds of the street as they walked. That episode was playing out in my head, and I was in the middle of it!

The vehicles whirring past me, trying to make the next light, then squealing to a halt at the last second. Children at the daycare laughing and giggling while playing outside on the jungle gyms and in the sandlots. Birds calling to each other as they flew over my head playing their own version of “Tag! You’re it!” The sound of the light breeze tangling in the trees followed me down to the building where I worked. Finally, the thump, whirr, thump, whirr, thump, whirr of the rotating glass door entrance of the building.

It took just more than a week for my new iPod to make it to my home, but I have a confession. While I still take it wherever I go, there are days in which the sounds of the city are just are as beautiful as anything I have loaded into my tunes. It’s a different way of plugging in.

 

A Farewell to Steve Jobs

October 6, 2011 Comments off

At the taping of the “Today” show this morning, host Matt Lauer asked members of the audience to hold up their Apple products in tribute to Apple founder Steve Jobs. Almost everyone gathered outside NBC’s New York studio raised their hands, proudly waving iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Yesterday, Jobs, the man responsible for introducing these well-designed, user-friendly gadgets to the world, died following a seven-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.

In his life and especially after his death, the Apple and Pixar Films founder has been lauded as a visionary on a par with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Since launching the first Macintosh personal computer in the garage of his parents’ suburban California home, Jobs has helped to change our relationship with technology. Along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, he introduced smartly designed personal computers that were less intimidating and more intuitive to operate. One woman, speaking of her first “Mac,” told an interviewer, “I didn’t know whether to turn it on or hug it.”  Later, Jobs found a way to popularize digitized music with the introduction of the iPod. His iPhone allowed us to carry miniature computers in the palms of our hands.

At Unplug and Reconnect, our concern is that sometimes we become too preoccupied with technologies such as those introduced by Apple – to the detriment of the people and events that are meaningful in our lives. It’s then we need to achieve a new balance in our lives.

Jobs’ Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak might agree. In an interview a few years ago, he lamented the complete dependence on technology that many possess and wondered if there should be a 12-step program to help cure technology addiction.

“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,” said Wozniak. “We can’t turn off our Internet. We can’t turn off our smart phones. We can’t turn off our computers.”

But that’s not to say we don’t appreciate the technologies introduced by Jobs. The iPhone, iPad and iPhone certainly make our lives easier, our work more efficient and productive, our spare time more entertaining. One can only imagine where Jobs’ creative genius would have taken the world next.

As we like to say, “Love Technology . . . Love People More.”

Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.

 

Forest Foursome

October 4, 2011 6 comments

Unplug and Reconnect presents the winning essay in our Essay Contest. In his essay, journalist Patrick Ross of Alexandria, Va., describes a family vacation in the Shenandoah wilderness.

Edward Abbey spent a summer alone in Arches National Park, later chronicling his adventure in Desert Solitaire. A tattered copy of that book accompanied me off the grid this August. I wasn’t alone; I was with my wife and two teenage children. And I wasn’t in a desert; we were in the dense forest of Shenandoah National Park. But like Abbey, I learned the value of disconnection from technology, and  the rewards of reconnection with people.

Cooking hot dogs over a fire, listening to the hoots of an unseen barred owl, trying to pick out constellations through the tree canopy of chestnut and red oak. Thank you, U.S. Park Service, for the lack of cell phone towers near our camp site, for not stringing fiber-optic cables to bring us a wi-fi network. It’s easier to unplug from the grid when there’s no temptation of an outlet.

We learned that one night when, weary of our own cooking, we trekked to a park lodge. My daughter quickly discovered a signal on her cell phone. As we stood in a majestic lobby with a picture-window view to the west, she faced east, responding to queries about her absence posted on her Facebook wall. My son responded likewise to a queue of texts. My wife tempted fate by checking her work email, quickly becoming ensnarled in a crisis she was powerless to address.

I resisted. Pulling up a rocking chair, I took in the show as the sun set over the Shenandoah Valley. To my left an older man stared at his Mac laptop screen, to my right a young woman’s face was aglow from her iPad. The sun was unconcerned, continuing to set despite being ignored. I basked in the warmth of superiority, dismissive of these humans Abbey referred to as tool-builders. They were oblivious of my condescension as well.

I had witnessed that dawn in a folding chair, a modest fire in front of me, Desert Solitaire in my left hand. I had bonded with Abbey, sharing his offense at the “petty tyranny” of technology. I lumped my smartphone in with his list of “automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones…  what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day.”

Upon returning home I was hesitant to reconnect. I feared drowning in a digital flash flood, a less fatal form of the real danger Abbey faced on a Glen Canyon rafting trip. As it happened, Hurricane Irene made the decision for me, knocking out our power. My phone’s battery was dead from a week’s worth of idleness, and I had no way of knowing how my Eastern Seaboard friends were faring.

Abbey celebrates his independence in Desert Solitaire, yet most of his narrative tells of his interaction with others — Park Service colleagues, a cowboy he guides steer with, his companion on that Glen Canyon rafting adventure. He admits that “Aloneness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society.” It’s worth noting that he concludes the book’s Author’s Introduction with the following sign-off: “E.A., April 1967, Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.” He’s recalling fondly his time off the grid in a place nearly at the center of it.

Technology, despite what Abbey wrote, is not an oppressor. I can choose when to make use of my “utterly useless crap” and when to disengage, at least when the grid is still pulsing with electrons. And the society he longed for, that each of us longs for, is one we create. The grid permits connection to a larger society, and I welcome that. But that connection still doesn’t compare with a society of loved ones, face-to-face, lit not by the glow of a screen but by the flickers of a fire.

Photo: Shenandoah Sunset by Marisa Ross

 

 

 

 

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