24/6

The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

Tiffany Shlain

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781982116880
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

Winner of the Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award
Entrepreneur 's 12 Productivity and Time-Management Books to Read "I'm won over to a day with people, not screens….I tried Shlain's idea. I highly recommend it." — The New York Times
"Tiffany Shlain is a modern-day prophet, brilliant and incredibly funny in equal measure... 24/6 is timeless and timely wisdom." —Angela Duckworth, #1 New York Times bestselling author This "wise, wonderful work" ( Publishers Weekly starred review) demonstrates how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul. Do you wish you had more time to do what you love, think deeply, and focus on the people and things that matter most? By giving up screens one day a week for over a decade, Internet pioneer and renowned filmmaker Tiffany Shlain and her family have gained more time, productivity, connection, and presence. Shlain takes us on a thought-provoking and entertaining journey through time and technology, introducing a strategy for flourishing in our 24/7 world. Drawn from the ancient ritual of Shabbat, living 24/6 can work for anyone from any background. With humor and wisdom, Shlain shares her story, offering the accessible lessons she has learned and providing a blueprint for how to do it yourself. "Bolstered with fascinating and germane facts about neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and the history of the concept of a day of rest" ( Publishers Weekly ), 24/6 makes the case for incorporating this weekly reset into our 24/7 lives, issuing a call to rebalance ourselves and our society.

PART I:

A DAY DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER DAYS

1

Why I Went 24/6

In 2008, Ken and I found out I was pregnant with our second child after multiple miscarriages. That same week, my father was diagnosed with stage-four brain cancer and given nine months to live. For the next nine months, all I thought about was life and death.

My father and I were incredibly close. We spoke every day, and although I saw him through more realistic eyes as I got older, most of my life I viewed him as a combination of Superman, Einstein, Willy Wonka, and Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof.

During the period when he was dying, there were times when he had only one lucid hour a day. When I went to visit him, I would turn my phone off completely. I needed to protect a space and time around us to focus on him and the moments we had left.

This made me think a lot about how little time we actually have. One of my favorite quotes by author Annie Dillard is: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I was spending too much of my days looking at screens. I no longer wanted to spend every waking moment being sucked into the digital vortex.

It’s stunning how sickness and death can jolt priorities into alignment. Those nine months were painful yet illuminating. I was fully awake and present—both to my father’s dying and this new life growing inside of me.

In May 2009, my father died, and Ken’s and my second daughter was born. These events seemed to unfold in slow motion and in deeply saturated colors and emotions. I described the colliding of these two profound moments as a six-word memoir:

Father’s funeral. Daughter’s birth. Flowers everywhere.

At my father’s funeral, over and over people told me: “Your father made me feel like the most important person in the room.” “He was so present.” “He always looked in my eyes when we spoke.”

I remember growing up, how he never answered the landline when it rang at dinnertime. “Who has the nerve to call during dinnertime?” he would say. “Family time is sacred.” To him, interrupting the family meal was an assault on the most important event of the day. The fact that his death occurred just as our smartphones began to take over all our waking hours is more than just significant; to me, it felt like that’s when “being present” died—for all of us.

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My father was the reason I met Ken. On a rainy night in 1997, my father was giving a reading of his book Art & Physics at an art gallery in San Francisco. A dashing man walked through the door of the gallery with a dog-eared copy and said to my father, “Hello, Dr. Shlain, my name is Ken Goldberg. I’m a professor at UC Berkeley, and I loved your book.”

I can imagine the mental checklist going through my father’s head:

1) Goldberg, Jewish: Check.

2) Professor, smart: Check.

3) Loves my book: Check!

Without missing a beat, my father walked Ken over to me, asking, “Have you met my daughter Tiffany?” We fell in love instantly.

Ken introduced me to the idea of Shabbat as a weekly break from work. Most Jews I knew did not observe Shabbat, or if they did, it was just candles, blessings, and a nice meal on Friday night. I remember so clearly being shocked when he said, “I don’t work on Saturdays; it’s Shabbat. I need a day off.” I was impressed. It struck me as profound and sexy. I was drawn to how much this ancient Jewish wisdom guided him.

During our first ten years together, Ken and I were focused on creating a life and a family, and also on our careers. This meant we were really busy—and on our screens a lot. But that was a time when screens were mostly stationary. Until smartphones were released around 2007, we couldn’t plug in anywhere, anytime. (It’s hard to remember how different things were.) Back then, it was pretty much just flip phones and the Palm Pilot. Remember those original models with a screen and cool little pull-out stylus that let you both make a call and keep a calendar? The Palm Pilot was a huge leap from the oversize bricks that came before. And that was nothing compared to the moment when that device turned into a computer + a mobile phone + access to the Web. Now, everyone was online all the time.

I clearly remember the night we took the iPhone plunge in 2007. I tried to convey to Ken why I worried that smartphones might be a detriment to our relationship. But, of course, we opened our white Pandora’s boxes from Apple and started mainlining data, texts, emails, and calls like everyone else. We could bring our screens with us everywhere, and we did. We now had these intoxicating, compelling devices in our pockets, ready for a hit of distraction, entertainment, or escape at any moment.

And like everyone else, we got addicted. Researchers have compared the sense of technological dependency—the feeling that we must be accessible and responsive at any time—to that of drugs and alcohol. It’s all because of the hormone dopamine, which is related to mood, attention, and desire. When you find something that feels good, dopamine makes you want more of it. I recently heard the term “digital obesity.” Yes, I get it. Too much of anything can be detrimental to your health and well-being.

When you’re up late, clicking from website to website, or compulsively texting or emailing, it’s reinforcing dopamine-induced loops. And just as we’ve discovered the hard way when we have too much sugar or too much alcohol, we can also have too much information: literally TMI. But back when the iPhone first came out, we couldn’t imagine how much it would encroach on our lives. We thought we could stop scrolling and clicking whenever we wanted to.

Unfortunately, that’s not how human brains work. Within a year of its release, everyone around me seemed addicted to their smartphones. My attention span got shorter. I felt distracted all the time. I was more available to everyone and connected to everything, but not in a meaningful way. This was at the time of my father’s health crisis, and I was doing a lot of thinking about thinking. Specifically, I was thinking about the brain, and how it responds when it’s attacked or in an unhealthy situation.

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My father, Leonard Shlain, was a surgeon and writer whose work focused on the brain. At the time of his illness—which, in a painful irony, was brain cancer—he was working on his last book, Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius. He finished the book days before he died. Attention and mindfulness would be important to anyone in that situation, but to him—an author who had spent a lot of time considering the evolution of the brain and communication—they were especially so.

A short time after my father’s death in 2009, an organization that Ken and I belong to called Reboot asked us to participate in a collective day to rethink the Sabbath for our modern age called the National Day of Unplugging. For the occasion, the two of us rewrote Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a modern takedown of our tech-addicted society (“I saw the best minds of our generation distracted by texting, tweeting, emailing!”). At that point, Ken and I had been doing partial versions of Shabbat, but those screens always pulled us in and out of being together. The abridged form just wasn’t enough.

We were ready for something bigger. While Reboot’s plan was for one full day offline annually, the experience made us feel so good and present that we decided to continue the practice weekly. We called it our “Technology Shabbat” because we combined a screen-free twenty-four hours with some Shabbat rituals, like a special Friday-night meal with family and friends. We had no idea how many years we would continue this weekly Tech Shabbat ritual or how much it would change our lives.

We also had no idea ten years ago how crazy everyone would become with their screen obsessions. Our 24/7 society is a fire hose of media, news, emails, tweets, posts, likes, texts, pings, notifications, and buzzes. We all need a break. This weekly boundary we created around our life not only reconnected us but also enriched our time and space.

I mean this literally. For many, and definitely our family, the day means treating the house and nature like a sacred space. In his seminal book, The Sabbath, the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “The seventh day is a palace in time that we build” (italics mine). We have to create it, brick by brick, detail by detail. There is the specialness of how we set the table. We invite over friends, family, or new people we want to know better. We perform our own version of the Shabbat rituals. I have always loved the line from author Stephen R. Covey, “I think the most significant work we’ll do in our whole life, in our whole world is done within the four walls of our home.”

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Here’s what our house is like Friday evenings as we prepare to close the door on the network and the nonstop world. The smells of rosemary, garlic, onions, chicken, and baking challah fill the house. All the piles of papers and books and laptops that normally lay claim to the kitchen table are put away, and the table is set with a tablecloth, candles, and freshly cut flowers. Before the guests arrive, everything gets powered down. The whole night is like a slow exhalation to end the week.

If you’re imagining one of those perfect families that eats dinner together every night, that’s not us. Ken and I both need to travel for work, and we tag-team when he’s teaching late or I am working long hours on a film. In reality, we all eat together as a family two to three nights during the week. After all the weekday craziness, this grounding Friday-night dinner resets and frames our week for our family.

It takes a little bit to adjust. Sometimes on Friday night, I have the phantom-limb sensation of reaching for a smartphone that isn’t there, to look something up or check email. So I keep paper and a black Sharpie out on the kitchen counter and jot down whatever combination of to-dos, reminders, questions, or ideas that tumble from my head. Then I feel set free, with a full twenty-four hours of time and space to think and be. In this palace, we’re walled off from distractions, temptations, pings, and obligations. We laugh more. We’re looser. More engaged.

The sleep of Friday night is the most delicious deep sleep of the week. We usually go to bed shortly after our friends and family leave. There are no Siren screens to seduce us.

Because we have gone to bed early and slept well, Ken and I wake up early, before the kids. We enjoy a leisurely morning over coffee, reading, and writing in journals.

Saturday morning, I’m prepared. I’ve already printed out the schedule the day before and placed it next to a coffee-stained sheet of phone numbers on the counter that used to just live on my cell phone. Friends and family know they will not be able to text, email, Facebook, or FaceTime with us for twenty-four hours; if they need to get in touch, they’ll have to call the landline or come by the house.

Your schedule may be more structured, and that can work, too. Some people say, “We have so many events on Saturday, how would I coordinate with people?” My answer is to print out a schedule and make a plan on Friday afternoon. It’s amazing how we were all able to survive prior to smartphones. When we do have a plan with others, we just pick a time and place to meet, and then we meet them, without all the text exchanges: I’m running late. I’m parking. 2 mins away. Do we really need that blow-by-blow account of everyone’s journey? We usually say “We’ll be there” or “We’ll be a little late.”

With some advance planning it’s easy to go phone-free, even if your Saturdays are busy, as ours sometimes are when the girls both have soccer games. Not taking our phones actually makes these days feel less hectic, too, because we stick to set plans, we’re not being interrupted, and we can focus on what we’re doing in the moment.

What if people need to get in touch with us in case of an emergency? We have a landline for just that purpose. (And in all the years we have been practicing this ritual, really only our family members call on that line, and mostly, it doesn’t ring at all.)

What about the emails, the voice mails, the texts that pile up? They’ll still be there the next day, and in ten years, I’ve hardly ever missed something important because I took twenty-four hours to recharge and respond. Alerting people in your life and at work that you’re taking a day off to rest and recover is a positive example to set.

What if your work is too important to take a day off? Remember that well-being is important, too, and that you can’t do your best work if you don’t take care of yourself.

What if you can’t afford to take the day off? A weekly day off may not be possible right now. When you do get time away from work, even if it’s every few weeks or less often, give yourself a true rest by not spending it on screens.

When people first learn about our Tech Shabbat, their reaction is usually one of disbelief—You can do that?—as if we need permission. It’s incredibly freeing to realize you have the power to turn it all off.

Some people say to me, “My teenage kids would never do it.” But you are the parent. You can make anything happen. Parenting is about modeling behavior. Insisting that there will be one day a week without devices and knowing that we will have more authentic connection with one another without screens, more time to just be and think in a different way, delivers a powerful message. And whether our kids realize it or not, they need that time offline, too.

If you are single or child-free, just think how much you’d prefer your Saturday as a day focused on friends, relationships, health, and hobbies rather than wondering what you might have missed or stressing about work. I recall how meaningful it was to Ken as a single young adult.

If you don’t think you can get your partner to agree because they’re glued to their phone, this is pretty hard evidence that they need to unplug more than anyone. I will share strategies to get them on board. Once they are, I doubt they’ll want to go back.

The point is, you can come up with a lot of reasons not to try it. But I’ve found that there are many more compelling reasons why you should. Things will come up, and you’ll need to make adjustments; life can be messy and we are all only human. However, what you gain by having this practice in your life is transformative. Our Tech Shabbat is a force field of protection that gives us the strength, resilience, perspective, and energy for the other six days. It lets us achieve the balance we need to live in both the online world and real life. It is our favorite day, and we look forward to it all week.

That’s how it goes every week. Of course, there are times each year when we can’t pull it off (work or family travel, a big deadline), but that rarely happens. When it does, it makes me feel unmoored. I’m more “orthodox” and almost never break the tradition; Ken, who hates strict rules, will bend it more, because that’s what works best for him. You’ll find your own balance.

A person has an average of thirty thousand days on this earth. I discovered the power of practicing Tech Shabbat around fifteen thousand days into my journey. I’m so glad I did. Wherever you are on your path, it’s never too late. Living 24/6 brings back balance, resets your focus, and gives you the space to think about how you want to live your life.

So even though it may never feel like a good time to start unplugging, now is the best time. Let’s get started by considering the origins of a day of rest.

2

A Brief History of a Day of Rest

The arrival of digital technology has completely changed how we view time, how we structure it, and, often, how we have lost control of it. In the process we’ve created a culture where we’re almost never fully off duty, and even leisure time, when it must be carefully staged for Instagram, can be exhausting. We need to reclaim our time off. As history shows, few things are more important.

When the day of rest originated, it changed the world. It began several thousand years ago when an ancient desert tribe, the Hebrews, started observing a weekly day of rest they called Shabbat, or Sabb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: A Day Different from All Other Days
• Part II: Being on 24/7
• Part III: Making 24/6 Happen
• Part IV: Keeping Tech Human
• Part V: The Science of Unplugging
• Part VI: The Big Picture
• Part VII: It’s Easier Than You Think: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright