Photo by Alicia Cermak

Technology can be a harsh mistress, a sultry siren wooing you into total electronic nirvana. That’s why in the information age it’s increasingly more important to unplug for a while and reconnect with the real world.

Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Office Yoga - even with a highly ergonomic keyboard sitting in front of a computer all day can take its toll. Give office yoga a try.

2) Go On A Hike - with Everytrail you can look up some seriously serene locations for hiking, biking, and other activities. Its integration with Google maps will make computer geeks feel at home planning a trip.

3) Learn An Instrument - with all the free resources out there it can be fun and easy to pick up an instrument. I recommend the guitar. Also, learning the guitar has the dual benefit of also making you better at Guitar Hero.

4) Start A Book Club - before the Internet, people used to get information on a thin flexible medium called “paper.” Paper is actually made from trees, and is sometimes bound into a square package called a “book.” You can find resources here for starting and running book clubs.

5) Take In A Sporting Event - getting out of the house and socializing with fellow fans is the best way to enjoy a game and make new friends. I recommend ComedySportz. It’s the only sport that combines the athleticism of chess with the thrill of bowling.

Now get out there and enjoy the real world before its too late!

After a considerable amount of thinking and experimentation, I have reached a powerful conclusion. Gone are the days of tracking my life in various applications spread across various medium–the tool I have settled on is the conventional legal pad. It’s about the size of my laptop and much thinner, so it can ride with it in the bag, it needs no power, I don’t look like a loser using it on the bus, and in manageable doses, it’s easy enough to search. The last time I tried this, I imposed rules about how to take notes, schedule tasks, and recall information, even going so far as to limit certain pen colors to certain functions. This time, anything goes, and it’s working great.

My aunt, an attorney in Nashville, keeps a paper calendar and task list after similar electronic organizational woes. She does an amusing pantomime of the lawyers that use PDAs who sit in court trying to find a date that will work for the next hearing.

Ran across this quote this AM….

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he’s working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.

- James Michener

To me it seems pretty close to one of the keys to happiness - if you can be totally engaged in the present, doing the best you can do at the time (pursuing excellence), you lose the baggage of the past and are freed from fear / fantasies of the future.

During those moments when we are engaged and doing our best - aren’t we happy?