The Happy Medium in the Digital World

Always connected to the Internet

Last month, more than 30 million mobile phone users found out that they could not get access to their data service. Customers were outraged at no longer being immediately able to obtain all they information they needed at their fingertips. But of course 5 years ago, this wouldn’t have had quite the same impact. The outage at the O2 network lasted almost 24 hours and was a fierce reminder of how dependent we are on being connected. 

On the other side of the equation, not everyone has the digital skills necessary, and there are unfortunately those who don’t have access to the Internet at all. It has been proven that people are £544 worse off for not being online, and if we continue to do nothing to help those develop digital skills our economy will be affected by £22 million by 2028 (visit Good Things Foundation for more information and how to help).

So is there a happy medium where we aren’t constantly relying on being connected, but we have the digital skills necessary? Digital skills are highly important with the Internet pretty much embedded into our lives. But more and more people are finding interest in how to restrict your Internet usage, and ensure you are gaining value for the time you do spend connected. 

Mindfulness for the digital age

Enter the world of Digital Mindfulness. Mindfulness is stopping and focusing on yourself, your thoughts and your feelings at the present moment in order to improve your mental wellbeing. Digital mindfulness takes this up a notch, so you can be fully aware of what you are doing in the digital environment, and how you can use your time online more effectively.

At Surevine, of course we have a variety of digital skills being a cyber security company. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t mindful of how we are connected to one another. As a company that works remotely, it is highly important to filter out what isn’t necessary through the ways that we communicate. That means no more email (unless we have to), and instead we use the tools that we create ourselves such as chat and document management. And then we wrap them up neatly so our clients can use them too (have a look at what else we do here). If you’re getting a sense of deja vu, we have blogged about this before.

So the answer is yes. We can find the happy medium, and Surevine are trying to do their bit to ensure those people that work for Surevine are fulfilling their potential in the digital environment. You just need to take a step back and look at what you’re doing online, so that when something happens like the network crashes, it’s not the end of the world.