The Internet Giveth, and the Internet Taketh Away

October 29 is National Internet Day, and it’s worth taking a look at how the Internet can both help you improve your productivity, and also significantly reduce productivity in the workplace.

How the Internet giveth in terms of better productivity

When I first started working in New York City, I worked at a private bank. I originally started in Compliance, but I didn’t like it (and neither did the private bankers I worked with.) Later on my boss was a trust and estates lawyer who was a muni bond trader in the 1960s.

He told me how they calculated the bond prices back in those days: taping a sheet of graph paper onto the conference table and working the calculations out in pencil on the graph paper. By the time I was working with him, we had computer spreadsheets to run calculations. 

In the late 2000s, just before the Great Recession, I worked for a fixed income software company who developed software to run those bond calculations. In the 2020s you can just go on the Internet and get a price. 

I distinctly remember doing financial plans back in the 1990s: you’d assume a growth rate of 6% for the whole portfolio and run the calculations that way in the spreadsheet.

Now you can also use the “series of tubes” (IYKYK) to get some retirement planning done. Depending on the site you can get scenario simulations run to give you a probability of whether you’ll be able to afford the lifestyle you want in retirement. 

It takes just a few minutes to run a 30-year projection, considering the probable rates of return on each asset in the portfolio. Even if you’re running planning software, you can download real-time prices and update your portfolios with just a click of your mouse.

And of course, these days you have access to a lot of information through your mouse click. You can find out the true lyrics to “Blinded by the Light” or discover how to thoroughly clean your toilet or listen to new bands you might like, keep track of authors you love to see when their next book is coming out, order for carryout so you don’t have to go to the restaurant and wait while they’re making you food, and so much more.

The Internet has helped business owners, especially solopreneurs, immensely in terms of reach and business systems. No longer do you just serve your local community as a CPA, but you can build a business wherever you want as long as you have a license in those states or provinces or whatever. 

You can target advertising to exactly the demographic (where they live, how many kids they have) and psychographic (what colors and patterns they like, what kind of car they drive) of your ideal client.

You can download apps or software that track your spending and run tax reports for you. You’ve got a customer relationship management system (CRM) so you’re not relying on a spreadsheet. Inventory systems that warn you when you’re running low on a component of the product you manufacture. Invoicing your clients. 

Creating calendars where people can book time with you as a meet-and-greet or client time that allows them with one click to put the meeting on their own calendar and get a reminder before the meeting happens. A calendar where you determine what times of day and what days you’re able to see clients and prospects. A phone service that takes messages or transfers calls to your cellphone at certain times of the day. 

These types of software and apps remove repetitive or time-wasting back-and-forth discussions from your plate. That way you can focus on the important things that move your business forward, like the actual calls you have with prospects or the work you do for your clients.

How the Internet taketh away and makes it harder to be productive

It’s so easy to get the Internet in your pocket, and apps and software developers use the concept of variable rewards to keep you pressing that lever (looking at your phone) for dopamine hits.

As a result, business owners are distracted and unable to focus on the important, mission-critical tasks that are necessary for a thriving business. They might work longer hours to try to compensate, which is how they end up burned out and miserable.

The arrival of the Internet seems to have severely compressed attention spans as well. You used to have a few minutes to make an impression on a potential client, and now you’ve got a few seconds. People are used to ingesting sound bites, which give them high-level information but they don’t get the nuance or the gray areas of a topic. 

Shorter attention spans make it harder to enjoy long-form reading, which encourages critical thinking. Many business challenges are complex and nuanced, and by allowing the Internet to reduce attention spans, we’re losing out on the critical thinking that’s necessary for modern business.

It’s also become much easier to fold oneself into a bubble of your own beliefs, whether those beliefs are true or not. This means people are more likely to accept stories as fact without having the analytical ability to see whether or not it’s true. This not only increases polarization, but affects relationship building as well.

Having the Internet and entertainment so easily available in our own homes and pockets means that people spend more time holed up by themselves or with their immediate families, instead of being involved in their communities. People, especially kids, don’t get as much physical activity as they used to, and the human body really does benefit from more movement, not less. 

Too much internet also means less time socializing, which is why people report feeling lonelier. The human brain doesn’t recognize “social” media as social interaction, so liking and engaging on posts may affect the site’s algorithm but doesn’t affect your brain’s need for social interaction.

All this leads to a lack of perspective. Remember that when it comes to the news, the adage has always been “if it bleeds, it leads.” You can turn on any news channel and see all the horrible things going on in the world, which might make you think the world is a horrible place or it's much worse than it used to be, especially since [insert president you don’t like] took office. 

But the truth is that violence is down and crime is down relative to previous years even in this century, and we have much less violent crime than we did hundreds of years ago. It’s just now all the bad stuff is right in your face all the time, and before the Internet we didn’t know about bad things happening in the world until afterward, for the most part.

Best practices for Internet productivity

Focus and intention are probably the two most important practices in productivity. So you need to make sure that the Internet is not interrupting your focus or distracting you when you’re doing deep work. And you’ll need to be intentional about when and how you access the Internet.

• To maximize productivity, remove apps and software from your phone. Then you’ll have to be in front of your computer/tablet/laptop in order to use them.

• If you’re having a hard time putting your phone away when you’re in deep work, or you’re really struggling with constantly looking at your phone, you actually might be better off with a “dumb” phone: one that doesn’t connect to the internet. You’ll still be able to make and take calls, but you’ll be forced to go to a certain spot if you want to get it, which will help you be intentional about accessing it.

• Likewise, if you find it too easy to go down the rabbit hole on social media, log out after each session so you have to log back in every time (and don't store your password on your browser). This provides a chance to think about whether you really want to get on, or whether there’s something more important.

• Sometimes, and I think this happens to every single one of us, we want to get on the Internet as a distraction. Maybe you got stuck on a problem, or you’ve come to the limits of your 60 to 90 minutes and you need a break, or maybe the task in front of you is so big it’s hard to know where to get started. Take a deep breath, walk around for 5 minutes, give yourself a change of scenery, and then sit back down and figure out what the issue is. If you just needed a break, you might be ready to go. If you got stuck or the task is too big, take some time to intentionally think about how you would solve it and what the first step to the first steps is. Sometimes you might need to ask for help - see if you can ask a real person instead of typing it in the search bar. Both you and the person you ask, if they’re knowledgeable, will benefit from this.

• Set aside a day a week, probably on the weekend, to stay off the internet. Go outside, get a massage, catch that new exhibit at the museum, go to an artistic class, enjoy the company of friends and loved ones.

Recap (tl;dr)

If you’re intentional about how and when you use the Internet, you can reap the benefits and minimize the disadvantages. There are some simple ways to get off the Internet and do things that are good for you and your mental and physical health (not to mention productivity.)

Still having difficulty with focus or don’t know how to handle the distractions you have to deal with that prevent you from doing your deep work? I can help. Go ahead and click here to set up your free consultation.

Image by Julian via Unsplash.