Keeping Sane in a Noisy World 3 – Blog Post #493 by Asrar Qureshi

Keeping Sane in a Noisy World 3 – Blog Post #493 by Asrar Qureshi

Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans Blog Post #493. Pharma Veterans welcomes sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Continued from Previous……

In this last part, we look at the suggestions about our topic, ‘Keeping Sane in a Noisy World’.

It is imperative that we keep sane, it is clear that the world is becoming noisier by the day, and it is understood that the solutions are neither simple nor straightforward. We also know that we can control our own behaviors but cannot control others. Our focus, therefore, will be on our own actions.

Reduce Screen Time

New phones have the provision to calculate and inform about the time spent on watching phone screen. Please go to settings and set up this feature. It will keep showing screen time every week or whenever you set it to. It will not control screen time, but it will keep informing. You can judge yourself whether you are doing it excessively or within reasonable limits.

Where is most of the Screen time spent?  Of course, on social media. Social media keeps buzzing all day. Most common are WhatsApp messages, followed by Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram, depending upon the person. 

A general reduction in screen time will have indirect compulsion to reduce use of social media. More time is spent on social media as compared to any other activity, and it will greatly help to set a limit on screen time hours.

Fix Viewing Slots

Unless you are running business through Facebook, you are not required to keep returning to it every few minutes. The overall viewing slots should be fixed. This is also highly recommended for office emails. An email would be rarely an emergency and therefore it is not critical to keep reading emails all the time. A better option is to fix time slots for reading and replying to emails. For example, one can handle the emails first thing in the morning, and maybe every 2-3 hours thereafter. In this way, emails would get better attention and time will be spared to do more important things. Another lateral benefit will be that your readers will be saved from hurriedly written emails with mistakes.

Social Media viewing and posting slots fixation is easier. There is nothing official about it and it should preferably be done at leisure, rather than as a compulsion.

Reduce Number of Friends/ People you Follow/ CCs

The time-tested proverb ‘A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed’ is still valid. Among the entire lot of social media friends, the real friends are a tiny fraction. The rest are not even acquaintances, and most of them you may never even have met. There is no logic in following every move they make and every post they put on social media. Review your ‘Friends’ list and the list of ‘People you Follow’ on Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. Rationalizing this burden will significantly reduce social media load and the time it consumes. 

Email communication is fraught with unnecessary copies to irrelevant people. Stopping this practice will reduce burden on your time and others’ time. 

Refocus List of Interests

Many sites ask you to define your topics of interest so that you could be sent materials accordingly. The list is usually long, and it is easy to check many options. This leads to a large number of mails delivered to your inbox every day. The bulk keeps accumulating till it is unmanageable. If you are facing this issue, the solution is simple: go back to options, review topics of interest and reduce these seriously. 

Some topics of interest, such as Entertainment, Fashion, Technology have so much going on that their onslaught becomes overwhelming. The time is always in short supply and cannot be wasted on things which take lot of time but deliver little value.

Keeps Emotions Under Wraps

The last suggestion is to keep emotions under control. So much rage is flying across all social media, it is appalling. From small disagreement to serious conflict, and from light objection to offensive abuse, the social media is rife with undesirable emotions. The rule is that your personal freedom ends where my personal freedom starts, but this has been completely forgotten on social media. The personal affairs and lives of people are the subject of unwarranted scrutiny, vicious comments, abusive remarks, personal attacks, and character assassination. In fact, this practice has become common and is being done on all forums.

Problem with emotional outbursts is that it blocks the logical and rational view of sender and receiver both. The exchange heats up quickly and the offensiveness keeps spiraling. A point comes soon when the parties to this exchange get so much entangled, they cannot find the way out, and it keeps going and growing.

Keeping emotions in check has several advantages. It saves time, saves relationships, saves energy, and saves sanity, to name a few.

SUM UP

‘Keeping Sane in a Noisy World’ may not be easy, but it is doable. For our own sanity, we need to consider above suggestions, and even more. The loss is primarily individual, which then becomes collective for the society. 

Concluded.

Disclaimer. Most pictures in these blogs are taken from Google Images which does not show anyone’s copyright claim. However, if any such claim is presented, we shall remove the image with suitable regrets.