As the back-to-school season kicks off, BITE asks industry leaders what they are committed to unlearning. Rob Conibear, Managing Director at Jung von Matt London, is unlearning a screen-first approach to technology, to make it work better for us.

As everyone swings back into the office - energetically or otherwise - and tries to use September as a time to forge ahead, making up for lost time in August, I’m also taking this opportunity to unlearn my unhealthy relationship with the tech that now surrounds us, daily.

Adjusting to the pandemic and associated new ways of working meant rapidly adopting some habits; some of which, with hindsight, were not altogether positive. Admittedly, these behaviours helped keep things moving during that challenging time, but I can see a much more productive and enjoyable future by unlearning some of these now rather than entrenching them further.

Set clear boundaries

First up, separating professional and personal time. Remote working has the real danger of becoming synonymous with working everywhere, all the time. “I’m more productive when I work from home,” shouldn’t be followed with, “because I can be half in work until 10pm.” I am actively unlearning this blurring of spaces and boundaries, so I can engage properly in both my ‘work mode’ and my ‘non-work mode’, rather than sitting somewhere in an unfulfilling middle, feeling pulled in too many directions at once. It isn’t good for the blood pressure and it isn’t good for the focus, or creativity, either.

Keeping WhatsApp for personal chats only and putting the laptop in a drawer when I’m not at work helps; as does going into the office more often. I don’t want my home to feel like work.

Make meetings count

Unlearning screen time etiquette is important, too. I’ll throw this right out there: I miss conference calls. They were far more productive than video calls for 90% of meetings. When I am listening to a conversation properly I can contribute much more than when I am trying to look at seven different people at once.

My screen time doubled with remote work and it didn’t help productivity; it hampered it. So I’d like to unlearn the screen etiquette of the past few years and establish a new relationship with screentime. As part of this, internal meetings can be voice only, and I encourage people to take a walk outside during some meetings, to help them focus and think. It’s perfectly acceptable, in my view, to keep videocalls for client meetings only.

Prioritise tasks, not platforms

Unlearning multi-platform messaging is another priority for me this back-to-school season; a season in which I will be prioritising tasks rather than platforms. Ever started an email and then got sidetracked into chat messages, and from there into reviewing a document, only to discover over an hour later that you never finished the original important email?

Whenever a new piece of collaborative tech is introduced everyone hopes it might be the answer to making things simpler, only to find it is yet another channel to manage alongside all the previous ones. As an agency, we also try to adopt clients’ tech channels to work more seamlessly with them. That can mean messaging on emails, Google Chat, Slack, Teams and Whatsapp at the same time. This only works if you can unlearn the need to check all those channels all the time.

If an alien landed in an office today, they might feel it safe to assume that computers here are the decision makers, with people there simply to move the information between them. It’s the wrong way round, and rather sad.

All that said, here are some of six things I’d like to experiment with as a priority, to ‘unlearn’ bad habits:

• ‘Normalising’ internal remote meetings as voice only by default.
• Allocating one meeting per week as a walking meeting, either in person or on our respective headphones.
• Keeping WhatsApp separate as a non-work channel, other than for shoots.
• Focusing on one thing at a time.
• Working through some problems on paper rather than on screen.
• Putting work for review in the office physically on the wall, so we can concentrate on the work and not the notifications. Discussing ideas, writing notes on them, connecting the dots and even giving out high fives flows more easily when you physically gather around it.

In short, it’s time to unlearn our relationship with tech and make it work better for us; time to take a human-first rather than a screen-first approach. So, this month I’m encouraging my team to think about how they can spend less time inputting into devices and more time thinking about opportunities.