Digital Detoxing

We Must Cultivate Our Garden: Growing Onions in the Age of AI

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 05:37:39 -0700

Voltaire’s line from Candide: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (“We must cultivate our garden”) has always felt wise. But in this era of relentless digital transformation, it feels like a survival strategy.

Don't worry if you don't have a garden. A tip below that may help.

Here’s a photo of my onion patch. It’s not perfect by any means. There are weeds. And bugs, that one of my hens, Brownie, loves to eat. But this little plot keeps me grounded in a world that’s moving at breakneck speed.

Some thoughts from my veg patch:

🌱 I’m Pro-Tech. But I Still Need Dirt Under My Nails.

I work with generative AI (yes I ran this article through it to get feedback). I’m optimistic about the future.
But even I feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Tech should serve us, not steamroll us. Growing veg is how I hit pause, recalibrate, and remind myself I’m not just an input-output machine.

🧠 AI Should Make Us More Human, Not Less

We’ve been hectored by hustle culture and productivity gurus to work like robots.
Ironically, as machines get better at being machines, we should reclaim our humanity.
Gardening is deeply human: it’s slow, sensory, seasonal. If someone claims to have “disrupted” the onion, run a mile.

🏋️ Physical Health Without the Narcissism

Gardening burns calories, builds strength, and counts as moderate-intensity exercise (CDC, 2020).
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How to ignore your boss

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 10:09:30 -0800

Digital Detoxing featured in Wired discussing how to focus and get on with your work when working remotely: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/remote-work-job-time-management

Group chats making you anxious?

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 03:20:04 -0700

Group Chats Making You Anxious? Us, Too. Here's How To Manage Them

How do you stay connected when it just feels too much? Digital Detoxing contributed to this article in the Huffington Post.

Digital Detoxing on BBC Scotland

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 09:00:21 -0700

Martin Talks of Digital Detoxing joining the discussion about managing our digital habit on BBC Radio Scotland.

Digital Culture eats Digital Transformation for breakfast

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 03:39:13 -0700

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, said that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. He said this in the context of culture enabling a sustainable point of difference between organisations. Strategy can be replicated, but not culture. But a similar sentiment can be applied to the much used phrase ‘digital transformation’. The term ‘digital transformation’ is interpreted in a variety of ways, but one common definition is ’the use of digital technologies to improve the people, process and products of an organisation'. It sounds cold, impersonal and rather like a software upgrade. But we can’t yet push out a software upgrade to people. Changing the way people operate is a much more complex process. And without it there can be no true digital transformation. Digital transformation is about people not about technology. You can come up with a great digital slogan, have a launch party and you can put in place state of the art technology and systems, but if you don’t change the hearts and minds of your people, then you will not enjoy any positive transformative effect of digital in your organisation.

So what is ‘digital culture’? Digital culture is much more than technology. Digital culture can be defined as a mindset, a set of beliefs, a way of life. Bigger than technology, it incorporates the belief that we can do better if we are more collaborative, connected, adaptive, flexible, transparent, data driven, customer centric and agile. It is a belief that we can get things wrong sometimes, but if we work together and take an iterative approach we can create solutions for our problems and seize our opportunities. These are a challenging set of beliefs, They challenge the mentality of ‘the way we do things round here’, the ‘let’s keep milking the cash cows' and the ‘peddle harder’.

To create a digital culture, there is no silver bullet. No one size fits all. Hence Peter Drucker’s assertion that the right culture creates competitive advantage....Read More

The game has only just begun for the human race.

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 05:01:25 -0700

So artificial intelligence has triumphed over human intelligence. Deepmind’s AlphaGo program has beaten human champion, Lee Sedol, at Go. AlphaGo won 4:1 in the 5 match series. Game over for the human race...?

The news that a computer program has beaten the world champion of one of human civilisation's oldest board games is indeed startling. Go is a fiendishly complex strategy game whose origins can be traced back over 3000 years in China. So has the ancient civilisation of Humankind had its day, to be replaced by a smarter, even more ruthless empire?

Possibly.

AlphaGo’s feat is impressive. It comes in a line of such triumphs of machine over man that include Deep Blue beating Gary Kasporov at chess, Watson beating the reigning champions of Jeopardy and Deepmind’s wins last year over some Atari arcade games. The capacity of these technologies to absorb, analyse and action based on huge data sets is undeniable and getting stronger. These feats are not just limited to games. Artificial Intelligence is being widely used in logistics, manufacturing and, of course, the military. Self-driving cars are being tested on public roads, drones are delivering packages in record times and 3D printers are producing complex moving structures. The Internet of Things is spreading its tentacles across the world. Sensors are being scattered across cities, embedded in buildings and even people. The name, Go, literally means ‘encircling game’. We are being steadily encircled by technology.

Possibly not.

Watson is now being used in healthcare and has been proven to provide more accurate diagnoses of cancer than healthcare professionals. So artificial intelligence has the power to solve complex human issues. And AlphaGo's ability to tackle a highly complex game like Go shows its ability to look “globally” across a board. This raises the possibility of artificial intelligence finding world solutions that humans don’t...Read More

I am 50, but I still might outlive you.

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 08:09:27 -0800

Today is my 50th birthday. 50! Wow! It feels like a major milestone. You might be thinking, that’s really old… but I still might outlive you. Have I got a magic formula? A secret concoction of drugs? A patent pending on some new technology? Am I a religious zealot? No. But I will share the secret with you, right now, for nothing.

So, how long should we be expecting to live in the first place? It is predicted by the NHS, by 2030, UK life expectancy will have reached the late 80s. It’s also been predicted that today's children are likely to live to 120 and work until they're 100. Even if they do, I could still outlive them.

How come? Going by the NHS’s calculation, it would seem I have 30 years left. You might calculate that you have many more. Especially if you are younger, healthier and fitter than me. But I could still outlive you. It’s not about how busy, active, careful, rich, successful or well connected you are.

We need to look at things rather differently.

Most people exist on some form of auto-pilot - just going through the motions of getting up, going to work, coming home and sleeping - waiting for the weekend to have fun. In other words, people are driven by daily routines. Indeed, it has been calculated that most people are only truly conscious and engaged in their lives for two hours a day. The book ‘Mindfulness, Finding Peace in a Frantic World’ includes this calculation: ‘If you are thirty years old, then with a life expectancy of around eighty, you have fifty years left. But if you are only truly conscious and aware of every moment for perhaps two out of sixteen hours a day (which is not unreasonable), your life expectancy is only another six years and three months.’ On that basis, you’ll spend an awful lot longer staring at your TV, PC or smartphone than truly living.

So here’s how you massively increase your life expectancy.

You switch off the auto-pilot.

Here’s a few ideas I’ll be putting...Read More

Never smile at a crocodile

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:00:00 -0700

A new discovery was announced this week about crocodiles. It is a terrifying thought that crocodiles never fully sleep. There is always one half of their brain active keeping an eye out for anything that might catch them out. Apparently it’s called ‘unihemispheric sleep’. But what is more terrifying for employers and managers is that a good proportion of their own staff are capable of sitting in their office with only half their brain functioning keeping an eye out for anyone catching them out.

There are big statistics available to tell us that absenteeism costs UK business a huge sum – £1.24 bn annually. But ‘presenteeism’: showing up for work but not being engaged with what you do, costs business 6 times that amount.

It is time to truly engage people in what they do. Help them to perform at their best. Not let them pass their days at work in some zombie like state. Here are 6 ways to address this:

Mindfulness is all about helping people be present in the moment. Not thinking about before or after; about could have happened or might happen; and not just functioning in auto-pilot. A mindfulness course in your business can return a seriously impressive ROI. And mindfulness is not just limited to meditation. There are a series of mindfulness techniques that employees will feel comfortable using, however open-plan their office may be.
Physical and virtual working conditions really impact performance. It seems sometimes that we have returned to Victorian working conditions with lines of workers tied to their stations, surrounded by noise. And online communications haven’t always helped, with people preferring the non-human methods like email rather than a conversation.
Give your staff time even if you feel like you don’t have any. Emailing is not managing. Take the time to talk with your staff face-to-face to give and receive...Read More

Great responsibility for young people's wellbeing lies with tech companies

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 08:36:57 -0700

Trust is a hugely valuable asset to businesses. It is not a fluffy, inessential ‘nice to have’. It is clearly reflected on the bottom line. VW have, of course found this out very recently. But a string of other industries have also had to face up to their responsibilities, from tobacco and gambling, to alcohol and the food industries. Regrettably these sectors have largely been forced to do so by regulators. But what about the tech companies? The hardware and software firms that produce products and services designed to keep us glued to screens? In the technology gold rush, have responsibilities been ignored by companies? The implications are as yet not fully known, but the evidence is building. There is an opportunity for enlightened companies to address this issue now before trust is badly damaged and profits negatively affected. If they don’t do so, it won’t be long before policy makers make them.

James Lloyd, Director of the Strategic Society Centre (SSC) in London, at the launch event of the Screened Out report stated that policy makers and technology industry heads alike need to be equipping young people with the skills to positively navigate the digital world sooner rather than later.

The evidence for this call to act was presented in detail by Dr Cara Brooker from the University of Essex. This was based on the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, which since 2009 has gained continuous insights from 4,899 young people aged 11-15. It shows us that use of social websites and computer games for between 1-3 hours on an average school day...Read More

Digital Distraction

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 01:47:56 -0700

The cognitive cost of distraction

When you multi-task, production of the stress hormone cortisol and the fight or flight hormone adrenaline increases, which over-stimulates your brain, makes you feel more anxious and uses up a lot of energy. Also, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for concentration, ironically, has a novelty bias, and so loves getting side-tracked by new stimuli like emails, texts and notifications.

One experiment found that knowing you have an unread email in your inbox while you are trying to concentrate on a task can reduce your IQ by ten points. It’s been shown that the cognitive losses from multi-tasking are worse than the losses from pot smoking.

What can you do about it?

Staying calm and focused in our modern world is becoming increasingly difficult. There are many time management and personal development approaches to tackle this, but our team of experts has developed a range of specific activities to meet the challenge posed by what Time Magazine calls ‘the age of distraction’.

One of the tools we deploy is mindfulness, adopted by the likes of Adobe, Apple, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Google Intel, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Distraction giving way to focus

One of the key service we offer is training your concentration, which makes it much easier to stay on task.

Fewer days off work

Transport for London recently carried out a mindfulness programme that resulted in days off sick due to...Read More