So, a few years ago I heard an interesting rumor. Apparently, the head of a large pet food company would go into the annual shareholder's meeting with can of dog food. And he would eat the can of dog food. And this was his way of convincing them that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for their pets. This strategy is now known as "dogfooding," and it's a common strategy in the business world. It doesn't mean everyone goes in and eats dog food, but businesspeople will use their own products to demonstrate that they feel -- that they're confident in them. Now, this is a widespread practice, but I think what's really interesting is when you find exceptions to this rule, when you find cases of businesses or people in businesses who don't use their own products. Turns out there's one industry where this happens in a common way, in a pretty regular way, and that is the screen-based tech industry.
幾年前,我聽到了一個有趣的謠言。 似乎是,有一家大型 寵物食品公司的經理 帶著一罐狗食去參加 年度股東大會。 然後他吃掉那罐狗食。 這是他以此說服股東, 如果這狗食對他而言夠好, 那對他們的寵物一定也夠好。 這個策略現在被稱為 「使用自家產品」,(吃狗食) 是商業界常用的策略。 這策略不表示每個人 都得要試吃狗食, 而是商人要使用他們自己的產品, 來展現他們對於該產品 有足夠的信心。 現在,這是一個十分普遍的做法, 但是我認為真正有趣的 是找到這個規則的例外, 就是當你找到企業或企業中的人 不使用自家產品的案例。 結果是有一個產業經常有這種現象, 且發生頻率很高。 那就是以螢幕為基礎的科技產業。
So, in 2010, Steve Jobs, when he was releasing the iPad, described the iPad as a device that was "extraordinary." "The best browsing experience you've ever had; way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone. It's an incredible experience." A couple of months later, he was approached by a journalist from the New York Times, and they had a long phone call. At the end of the call, the journalist threw in a question that seemed like a sort of softball. He said to him, "Your kids must love the iPad." There's an obvious answer to this, but what Jobs said really staggered the journalist. He was very surprised, because he said, "They haven't used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home."
當史帝夫·賈伯斯 在 2010 年發表 iPad 時, 他將 iPad 描述是 一個「超凡」的裝置。 「你不曾擁有過的最佳瀏覽體驗; 遠勝過筆記型電腦, 遠勝過智慧型手機。 它是一種不可思議的經驗。」 幾個月後,一位 紐約時報的記者採訪了他, 他們在電話上談了很久。 在通話結束前, 那位記者問了一個問題, 感覺不痛不癢問題。 記者對他說:「你的孩子 肯定非常喜愛 iPad。」 這個問題的答案不言可喻, 但是賈伯斯的回答卻讓記者很吃驚。 記者非常訝異, 因為賈伯斯說: 「他們還沒用過 iPad。 我們限制孩子在家中 使用電子產品。」
This is a very common thing in the tech world. In fact, there's a school quite near Silicon Valley called the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, and they don't introduce screens until the eighth grade. What's really interesting about the school is that 75 percent of the kids who go there have parents who are high-level Silicon Valley tech execs. So when I heard about this, I thought it was interesting and surprising, and it pushed me to consider what screens were doing to me and to my family and the people I loved, and to people at large.
在科技世界中,這非常常見。 事實上,離矽谷很近的一所學校 叫做半島華德福學校。 他們不會讓學生 在八年級以前接觸到螢幕。 這間學校真正有趣的一點是, 75% 學生的家長 是矽谷的高階技術主管。 所以當我聽到這件事, 我覺得它非常有趣也令人驚訝。 它促使我開始思考螢幕 對我、我的家人、我愛的人、 以及對所有人有什麼影響。
So for the last five years, as a professor of business and psychology, I've been studying the effect of screens on our lives. And I want to start by just focusing on how much time they take from us, and then we can talk about what that time looks like. What I'm showing you here is the average 24-hour workday at three different points in history: 2007 -- 10 years ago -- 2015 and then data that I collected, actually, only last week. And a lot of things haven't changed all that much. We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half to eight hours a day; some people say that's declined slightly, but it hasn't changed much. We work eight-and-a-half to nine hours a day. We engage in survival activities -- these are things like eating and bathing and looking after kids -- about three hours a day.
所以,在過去五年, 身為一個商業和心理學教授, 我一直在研究螢幕對 我們的生活所產生的影響。 我想先談談 我們在螢幕上花多少時間, 接著我們可以再談談 那些時間的狀況。 我在這裡呈現給各位看的 是三個不同時間點的 一般 24 小時工作日: 2007 年,十年前── 2015 年, 以及我上週才收集的目前資料。 很多東西的變化不大。 我們每天大約睡 7.5 到 8 小時; 有些人說這數字稍微下降了, 但變化不大。 我們每天工作 8.5 到 9 小時。 我們從事的維生活動── 像吃飯、洗澡、照顧小孩── 每天大約 3 小時。
That leaves this white space. That's our personal time. That space is incredibly important to us. That's the space where we do things that make us individuals. That's where hobbies happen, where we have close relationships, where we really think about our lives, where we get creative, where we zoom back and try to work out whether our lives have been meaningful. We get some of that from work as well, but when people look back on their lives and wonder what their lives have been like at the end of their lives, you look at the last things they say -- they are talking about those moments that happen in that white personal space. So it's sacred; it's important to us.
剩下的是白色的這段, 那是我們的個人時間。 這段時間對我們來說極重要。 我們用這段時間做一些 使我們獨特的事。 我們用這段時間 進行嗜好,建立親密關係, 真正思考我們的人生,產生創意, 思考反省 我們的人生是否過得有意義。 我們在工作中有時也做這些, 但當人們在人生的盡頭, 回顧他們的人生, 好奇他們的人生是怎樣的, 他們最後說什麼── 他們會談到的是在 白色個人時間內發生的事。 所以那是很神聖的, 對我們很重要的。
Now, what I'm going to do is show you how much of that space is taken up by screens across time. In 2007, this much. That was the year that Apple introduced the first iPhone. Eight years later, this much. Now, this much. That's how much time we spend of that free time in front of our screens. This yellow area, this thin sliver, is where the magic happens. That's where your humanity lives. And right now, it's in a very small box.
我接下來要給各位看的, 在歷史的不同時間點, 有多少個人時間被螢幕給佔據。 在 2007 年, 有這麼多。 這是蘋果推出第一支 iPhone 的那一年。 8 年後, 這麼多。 現在,這麼多。 那就是我們在螢幕前面 所花的閒瑕時間。 很狹窄的這個黃色區段, 就是魔力發生的時候。 你的人性存在於這裡。 現在,這個區塊非常小。
So what do we do about this? Well, the first question is: What does that red space look like? Now, of course, screens are miraculous in a lot of ways. I live in New York, a lot of my family lives in Australia, and I have a one-year-old son. The way I've been able to introduce them to him is with screens. I couldn't have done that 15 or 20 years ago in quite the same way. So there's a lot of good that comes from them.
所以我們要如何處理這狀況? 第一個問題是: 紅色區段是怎樣的? 當然,現在的螢幕 在許多方面都是很神奇的。 我住在紐約, 我有許多家人住在澳洲, 我有一個一歲的兒子, 我透過螢幕把家人介紹給兒子。 15 或 20 年前我就無法如此做。 所以螢幕的確帶來很多好處。
One thing you can do is ask yourself: What goes on during that time? How enriching are the apps that we're using? And some are enriching. If you stop people while they're using them and say, "Tell us how you feel right now," they say they feel pretty good about these apps -- those that focus on relaxation, exercise, weather, reading, education and health. They spend an average of nine minutes a day on each of these. These apps make them much less happy. About half the people, when you interrupt them and say, "How do you feel?" say they don't feel good about using them. What's interesting about these -- dating, social networking, gaming, entertainment, news, web browsing -- people spend 27 minutes a day on each of these. We're spending three times longer on the apps that don't make us happy. That doesn't seem very wise.
你可以做的一件事是,問問自己: 在那段時間發生了什麼事? 我們在使用的應用程式有多充實? 有些是很充實。 如果你在別人使用應用程式時 阻止他們,並說: 「告訴我們,你現在感覺如何?」 他們說他們對於 這些應用程式感覺很好── 這些主要是放鬆、 運動、天氣、閱讀、 教育、及健康的應用程式。 對上述每一項,他們平均 一天會花上 9 分鐘。 這些應用程式 則讓他們覺得比較不快樂。 當你打斷人們並問: 「你感覺如何?」 有一半的人會說他們對於使用 這些應用程式的感覺並不好。 有趣的是,這些是── 約會、社交網路、遊戲、 娛樂、新聞、 網路瀏覽的應用程式── 這些每一項就會佔用到人們 一天中的 27 分鐘。 我們花 3 倍長的時間在 不能讓我們快樂的應用程式上。 這看起來不是很明智。
One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it's time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. And -- think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. The same with magazines, books -- you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you'd have a week until the next one came. There were stopping cues everywhere. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on.
我們花這麼多時間 在這些讓我們不快樂的 應用程式的原因之一是, 這些應用程式奪走了 我們的停止提示。 在二十世紀,停止提示還處處可見。 我們所做的每件事當中都有。 基本上,停止提示就是一個信號, 說:該是繼續前進的時候了, 去做點新鮮事、不同的事。 想想看報紙,當你看到最後, 你會把報紙折起來,放到一旁。 雜誌、書籍都一樣: 你看到一個章節的結束, 它會提示性地問你是否要繼續。 看電視上的節目,節目終究會結束, 你得要再等一週才會有下一集。 停止提示在過去處處可見。 但我們現今消費媒體的方式 就像是完全沒有停止提示一樣。 新聞饋給滔滔不絕, 什麼都是無限的: 推特、臉書、Instagram、 電子郵件、文字訊息、新聞。 當你真的去查看各種其他來源, 你可以無止境地持續下去。
So, we can get a cue about what to do from Western Europe, where they seem to have a number of pretty good ideas in the workplace. Here's one example. This is a Dutch design firm. And what they've done is rigged the desks to the ceiling. And at 6pm every day, it doesn't matter who you're emailing or what you're doing, the desks rise to the ceiling.
關於要怎麼做,我們可以 從西歐得到一個提示, 在西歐的工作場所 似乎有許多很好的點子。 這裡有一個例子。 這是一間荷蘭的設計公司。 他們的做法是把桌子 用繩鎖吊在天花板上, 每天下午六點, 不論你在寫電子郵件給誰、 不論你在做什麼事, 桌子就會升到天花板上。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
(Applause)
(掌聲)
Four days a week, the space turns into a yoga studio, one day a week, into a dance club. It's really up to you which ones you stick around for. But this is a great stopping rule, because it means at the end of the day, everything stops, there's no way to work. At Daimler, the German car company, they've got another great strategy. When you go on vacation, instead of saying, "This person's on vacation, they'll get back to you eventually," they say, "This person's on vacation, so we've deleted your email. This person will never see the email you just sent."
一週中有四天, 這個空間會轉為瑜伽教室; 一週中有一天,轉為跳舞俱樂部。 由你決定你哪天想留下來。 這是一個很棒的停止規則, 因為它意味著,在一天結束時, 一切要停下來,絕對不做工作。 德國汽車公司戴姆勒 有另一個很棒的策略。 當你去渡假時, 他們不是說:「這個人去渡假了, 他們最終會回覆您的。」 而是說:「這個人去渡假了, 所以我們已刪除了你的電子郵件。 這個人永遠不會看到 你剛剛寄來的電子郵件。」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
"You can email back in a couple of weeks, or you can email someone else."
「您可以幾週後再來信, 或是您也可以寫給別人。」
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
And so --
所以──
(Applause)
(掌聲)
You can imagine what that's like. You go on vacation, and you're actually on vacation. The people who work at this company feel that they actually get a break from work.
你可以想像那樣的狀況, 你去渡假,而你也真正在渡假。 在這間公司工作的人會覺得 他們真的能從工作中休息一下。
But of course, that doesn't tell us much about what we should do at home in our own lives, so I want to make some suggestions. It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm, I'm going to not use my phone. The problem is, 5 and 6pm looks different on different days. I think a far better strategy is to say, I do certain things every day, there are certain occasions that happen every day, like eating dinner. Sometimes I'll be alone, sometimes with other people, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes at home, but the rule that I've adopted is: I will never use my phone at the table. It's far away, as far away as possible. Because we're really bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together.
但,當然,這並沒有告訴我們, 對於我們自己在家時的人生, 要如何做是好, 所以我想做些建議。 說我在下午五點到六點間 不會用手機是很容易的, 問題是,在不一樣的日子裡, 五點和六點看起來也不太一樣。 我認為,更好的策略是說, 我每天會做某些事情, 有些場合是每天都會發生的, 比如吃晚餐。 有時,我會獨自一人, 有時,我會和別人在一起, 有時,我會在餐館中, 有時,我會在家, 但我採用的規則是這條: 我絕對不會在餐桌上用手機。 它離我很遠, 盡可以越遠越好。 因為我們真的很不擅長拒絕誘惑。 但當你有了這條停止提示: 「每當晚餐開始時, 我的手機就會放得遠遠的。」 你就能夠避免所有誘惑。
At first, it hurts. I had massive FOMO.
一開始,會很痛。 我有嚴重的錯失恐懼症。
(Laughter)
(笑聲)
I struggled.
我會掙扎。
But what happens is, you get used to it. You overcome the withdrawal the same way you would from a drug, and what happens is, life becomes more colorful, richer, more interesting -- you have better conversations. You really connect with the people who are there with you. I think it's a fantastic strategy, and we know it works, because when people do this -- and I've tracked a lot of people who have tried this -- it expands. They feel so good about it, they start doing it for the first hour of the day in the morning. They start putting their phones on airplane mode on the weekend. That way, your phone remains a camera, but it's no longer a phone. It's a really powerful idea, and we know people feel much better about their lives when they do this.
但你會漸漸習慣它。 你克服退縮的方式和克服毒品一樣, 結果會是,人生 變得更多采多姿、更豐富、 更有意思── 你會有更好的對話, 你真正與在你身邊的人連結。 我認為這是個極棒的策略, 我們知道它可行, 因為當人們這麼做── 我追縱過很多嘗試這麼做的人── 它會擴展。 他們對此感覺十分良好, 讓他們開始在早晨起床後的 第一個小時就這麼做。 他們開始在週末 將手機的飛安模式開啟。 這麼做,手機會有照相功能, 但就不再是手機了。 這是個效力強大的點子, 我們知道當人們這麼做時, 他們對自己人生的感覺就更好了。
So what's the take home here? Screens are miraculous; I've already said that, and I feel that it's true. But the way we use them is a lot like driving down a really fast, long road, and you're in a car where the accelerator is mashed to the floor, it's kind of hard to reach the brake pedal. You've got a choice. You can either glide by, past, say, the beautiful ocean scenes and take snaps out the window -- that's the easy thing to do -- or you can go out of your way to move the car to the side of the road, to push that brake pedal, to get out, take off your shoes and socks, take a couple of steps onto the sand, feel what the sand feels like under your feet, walk to the ocean, and let the ocean lap at your ankles. Your life will be richer and more meaningful because you breathe in that experience, and because you've left your phone in the car.
所以我們從中學到什麼重點? 螢幕很不簡單,我已經說過這點了, 且我認為真的是如此。 但我們使用螢幕的方式, 就如同在一條 又快又長的道路上開車, 車的油門一踩到底, 很難去踩煞車。 你有個選擇, 比如你可以選擇 從美麗的海景旁邊滑過, 從窗戶拍照──那很容易辦到── 或是你可以選擇特別把車移到路邊, 踩下煞車, 走下車, 脫掉你的鞋子和襪子, 在沙子上走幾步, 感受一下腳下沙子的感覺, 走向海洋, 讓海洋圍繞著你的腳踝。 你的人生會更豐富、更有意義, 因為你呼吸著那經驗, 也因為你把手機留在車上。
Thank you.
謝謝各位。
(Applause)
(掌聲)