Whether it’s trying your luck to win Olympic tickets for next year, preparing a keynote slideshow for a client, testing out the new Situationalist App, we really are living in the ‘Always On’ mode.

Besides feeling and being connected, one of the reasons we may find ourselves constantly switched on is to satisfy our insatiable appetite for speed and keeping (or looking?) busy.

If you find yourself running around doing too many things at once, thinking about the next thing you need to do, while you are currently doing the thing you are doing, just know it’s OK to..

SLOW DOWN

One of our designers, now completely refreshed, wrote “..I’ve had a much needed dose of greenery and fresh air and unplugged from e-mails for a couple of days! It was great!…No skype/phone calls/e-mails/texts/tweets/likes/pokes etc allowed!”

For sometime, Douglast Rushkoff has been urging us to obey a new commandment for the conceptual age: ‘Thou shall not be Always On.’ Breathe. Real air.  Or the consequences could be as severe as iPaditis. We all know that unplugging and disconnecting from digital life is something we should do but indeed being (hyper) connected, we rationalize, just feels natural. The prescription? It does not mean we all need to take up Chi Running, nor does it mean that we need to toss our smartphones off the nearest bridge. It means that until our digital life is totally and absolutely embedded into our existence (and if that sounds scary then let’s not let it) – we can spend our time plugged in wisely.  Rushkoff, who himself is about to unplug and tuck himself away to write another book captures the essence of what all this social media malarkey really means:

“…[Social Media} offers us the ability to play an active, conscious role in the development of our networked human future: from distributed communications networks impervious to the censorship of corporate or government regimes to new modes of value creation and exchange, or new open source democratic participation to collective consciousness and expression.”

So let’s get moving.