It’s 2018. Contemplating a Digital Detox?

If you felt as though you were more “connected” than ever last year, you’re not alone. An average of 98 trillion (yes, trillion) emails were sent last year. And that’s not including the over 8.3 trillion text messages we got in between. We had slide decks sent alongside cat memes and lunch reminders sent in with quarterly results. 2017 was a deluge of email and constant pinging in chat. When that didn’t work, a text was dispatched. All of this noise was blaring while we were trying to get meaningful work done.

If you’re like me, the thought has probably crossed your mind at some point during this year’s resolution season — could it be time for a digital detox? A break from the noise. A way to reset. After all, we seem to have more communication channels and tools than we know what to do with. We’ll commit to leaving that chat channel, declaring email bankruptcy, breaking free from Twitter, and putting our phone on Do Not Disturb!

Why haven’t I thought of this before? It’s simple, really. While I can scrap my personal Instagram account, I can’t unsubscribe from work email threads or delete all of my chat channels and hope for the best. Our teams are relying on us, our clients want to hear from us, and our projects aren’t going to finish themselves. The truth is, we can’t (responsibly) disconnect.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t separate the signal of work from the workplace noise. This year, we’ll have even more information streams battling for our attention at work. Though we can’t realistically shut it all off, we can change the way we process information via the tools we rely on to help us break through the noise and safeguard our productivity. This year, my answer to the digital detox dilemma is to have one place to communicate. One place to read, save, search, and share across all channels in a simple and smart way.

Umuse gives us one information stream to help us sift through the noise and prioritize what matters. That note from your boss gets a little more love than that cat gif from your coworker. In short, you get a simple way to process all of your information so you can get to what matters, quickly. While we can’t control message volume in 2018, we can control what we do with it.

Here’s hoping that this time next year, a digital detox is far from our minds. Instead, we’ve found a way to make work, work for us. We’ll cheers to that!