Are you familiar with comments on social media apps that go along these lines?
“How did I get to this side of Youtube?”
“I was just googling up O.J Simpson, and now I’ve seen the 10 episodes of the people vs O.J Simpson on Netflix and right now, I’m watching the confessions of Mark Fuhrman”
“This is me going down the rabbit hole of world wars”
Here’s a short but true life story:
I was reviewing the merge request of a colleague at work, but I needed clarity on some parts of the work. I reached out to the colleague on Slack. I could see that I had the notification of unread messages on Slack. I was curious to know what messages they were. The messages were on the random channel, but I checked them out anyway. It was a tweet link about Slack’s postmortem report of their last downtime. I wanted to read this, and I clicked. I’m no longer on Slack, I am now on Twitter. Oh! there’s a medium link to the article, but wait a minute, why is Will Smith trending on Twitter? is he safe? did something happen to him? Next thing, I’m going through tweets about the word Entanglement. I googled the words “define entanglement” to be sure I know what that meant. I saw something about Jada Smith — Will’s wife, and I clicked on her profile. There’s a section on the Google page called “Movies and TV Shows” and there was Nutty Professor. I thought to myself “Was Jada in Nutty Professor?”…. Next, I’m on Youtube watching her part in Nutty Professor, and I went through the comment section, and here’s a comment sitting there:
The Cleveland Show brought me here
The Cleveland Show brought the commenter there. What got me there went as far back as a simple Slack message that had nothing to do with the Nutty Professor movie. This is a rabbit hole.
If you are a curious cat like me, you understand what I’m talking about. The internet is indeed a web. It’s a deep mesh of networks intertwined, devices joined to themselves. The model of the internet is a big ball of light. It’s beyond network. It’s wild. It’s a bunch of hyperlinks like doors leading to another door, and then to the next. It’s an almost perfect model of the world, and it is a wide web!
And if you not that curious, you should be able to relate with the opening comments in this write up. Sometimes we travel so far on this wide web to the point where we ask ourselves how we got to the current place where we are.
The internet is information super highway, it is a lair for the inquisitive mind. We can travel so far and wide that we find ourselves falling endlessly in the wonderland.
This is not always fun, for the following reasons:
- We get distracted from the thing we really want to do. We may forget why we started digging for information in the first place.
- We may waste time on things that are not useful to us.
- A rabbit hole can lead you anywhere, including uncomfortable places.
- It can affect your emotions and subsequently, your behaviour. For example, you can become anxious or depressed when you come across a disturbing graphic content on the web.
- It can affect productivity. This is the biggest challenge this rabbit hole poses. A lot of people work today with the internet as part of their daily work. An innocent check-in on your twitter page could lead you to a rabbit hole if you are not careful.
What can you do about it?
- You need an internal sensor or some kind of alert that shouts when you are drilling down the rabbit hole. This is more of a conscious effort and it leads to the next point.
- Recognise and admit that you are in a rabbit hole already. You can say it aloud — “this is a rabbit hole, and I need to get out of it”. I usually say to myself… “Matt, snap out of this, get out bro! move it bro!”
- Use a Pomodoro tool like “Be Focused” to control your time. Pomodoros let you have a short 5 minute and 15 minutes break to stretch, take tea or do something random on the web. The tool also helps you to get back to what you were doing before you were interrupted.
Author’s side note:
I guess you were either on Twitter or Linkedin a moment ago.
I hope this article in itself is not another rabbit hole for You? If you were doing something important, get back to it now. Puhleease!!!!
Otherwise, if want to share your internet rabbit hole story, drop in the comment section, give this article some claps, and do share with someone who needs it.
