From time to time, it is helpful to disappear from the scene for a day or two or more. The chaos of battle could be mind numbing if it is never interrupted by seasons of calm. The sustained noise of war has such an effect on the mind that isn’t good for your wellbeing. It helps to block out this noise from time to time in order to preserve your sanity. Aside that, it also helps to be untraceable for a while, to lose your tail, to vanish from the scene and leave more questions than answers. You achieve this through the power of offline. We have over-explored the power of the internet to the exclusion of the power of not being on it. In warfare, there could be as much power in your absence as there is in your presence; not being seen is as much a strategy as being seen.
Take a day off cyberspace, take all your personal devices offline and quieten your mind, pull your thoughts together and sharpen your focus. If you have a dumb phone, this could be a good time to use it, otherwise just turn of all your connections on your smart devices—WiFi, hotspots, mobile data—for the duration of your offline period. In cyberspace, to varying degrees, you double as both the hunter and the hunted; in whatever capacity you disappear from the scene it keeps the other side guessing, if you disappear as the hunted, it gets the hunter wondering, and if you disappear as the hunter, it gives the hunted a false sense of safety—it works either way. The more randomness you can add to your offline practice, the more unpredictability it adds to your pattern and strategy, and all this is in addition to the fact that when you get back online you return with more focus and clarity for effective warfare.
Now if you’re an adept internet user, one of the things that will keep you from exploring the power of offline is FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. You would consider a thousand and one things that you would miss out on if you go offline for 24 hours, but what I discovered is that many of the FOMO considerations are not mission-essential; they are mostly the 80% distractions that have occupied the engagement time and space of average users. I have discovered that when you schedule an offline, the vital organs hardly surfer, the 20% non-negotiable mission-essential functions are hardly ever hit by the blow. But if you still struggle with FOMO, then I would recommend a staggered implementation. Schedule an offline for just 3 hours and then come back and check your vital organs; has any been damaged? On a different day schedule a 6-hour offline and then come back and check your vital organs; any damaged? Do it again for 10 hours on a different day, and then 12, and go on that way till you hit a 24-hour offline. I bet you will find your vital organs intact, and the exercise will give you better control of your engagement on the battlefield, it will heighten your focus and give you the power to ignore more CATs that prowl around. Commit to applying this strategy and you will be amazed at the enormous benefits that are locked in the power of offline.
Marching Orders
- Schedule an offline to both help sharpen your focus and add randomness to your usage patterns.
- During your offline, stick to phone calls and SMS as your primary means of communication.
- After your offline, identify what virtual weight you can safely shed. You will progressively discover that some things are not as indispensible as they appeared at first.
- As usual, sound the battle cry to those around you—“At times the best thing you can do with the internet is turn it off.”