Tabula Rasa

I’m a Chrome girl.

Pretty loyal.

I have all the web sites I regularly use bookmarked in neat folders titled by subject matter. 

There's Health. Coaching. Writing. Resources. And more. 

(What can I say? I’m an organizer.)

But the other day, I was on a flight trying to connect to WiFi—and struggling—so I tried Safari. Safari sometimes works when a website is doing something funky in Chrome.

To my surprise, I found I had 215 tabs open.

215 tabs!

215 times I had gone to look something up and never closed the tab.  

It’s revealing to look at browsing history like this. It tells you a lot about where you and the world have been. There was that house we rented in Bar Harbor. A search for Calico Critters for my niece. Checking the upper summit forecast when getting ready for a hike. A story about Biden choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate. That obituary of a family friend who died from Covid. An article about YoYo Ma and the Meaning of Life. That time I looked up the history of the phrase “the dingo got your baby.”

There’s a lot of input and output going on here, people.

And suddenly, I realized, “This is where my brain leak is!”

Ever feel like the amount of information you digest in a day is over the top? That you might be taking in too much data, emotions, and experience for your mind and heart to handle? And you are sure there is a leak, but not sure exactly where?

This world can create one amped-up body and brain. All of this input and sitting in front of a computer or phone too much certainly isn’t good for clearing the decks.

Where might you have too many tabs open?

I know when I have the most open. It’s when I am two-thirds of the way through a workday of back-to-back virtual meetings that I start to enter that Zoom fog. To-do items swirl around on my ever-expanding list and I have dozens of different files piling up, all minimized on my screen. There's a lot of technological clutter there.

But how do we find the time to reset? How do I clear the decks and find that blank slate that I may be craving?

Conventional wisdom says that natural environments—especially green spaces—can replenish our nervous system. Being in nature takes us out of that over-alert mode and brings recovery.

Jay Shetty said on a recent podcast that people who take short breaks in nature improve their performance by 20 percent.

20 percent!

(Note: This means you might be able to work 1/5th less hard and still break even compared to where you are now!)

Yet I have many clients who say, I can’t find time to renew myself. I am exhausted at the end of every day. I literally collapse on the couch or in bed.

But Shetty’s advice is delightfully simple. And not very time-consuming. He said all you need are five minutes. Shetty says, once an hour, to think: Water, Walk, Window. 

1) Drink some water
2) Go for a brief walk outside
3) If you can’t get outside, at least look out the window at the furthest visible thing that you can see.

I like this, Water, Walk, Window. It seems doable. 

I used to work in an open-concept space office in an old mill building in Massachusetts. There was simply no privacy there. If you wanted to have a private conversation, you either had to reserve a conference room, or go outside. I had some of my most meaningful meetings while I walking around the parking lot under a blue sky, or on the green space.

So there's a simple idea for this crazy time we are in. But I would like to add one thing to Shetty’s Water, Walk, Window: one more W. 

Wave.

Take a sip of water, go for a brief walk, and look out the window. But then wave at someone you love. 

Or even someone you don't.