There are a few easy signs. On a Saturday or Sunday, when you are not working, place your pads, smartphones, notebooks, etc in a drawer and see if you can easily spend the whole day without them. How often do you think about them?
How frequently do you check your email? Can you complete two or three full tasks before checking your email? Or do you have the overwhelming urge to check your email in between tasks (and even during tasks)?
Another sign of addiction is receiving many emails about nothing. Emails marketing other services, not doing any communication but using email as a newsfeed of some kind…
Anyway, if you are addicted to the dopamine rush of checking your Facebook or email account, take a break, have a kit kat 🙂
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More on emails:
Have you recently tried not logging into your Facebook account for a few weeks?
All of a sudden you start receiving lots of emails from Facebook, each containing status updates from one of your ‘friends’. Trying to tempt you into logging right back in and seeing what you have missed.
Same thing with Groupon, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. Are we so scared to miss something?
Part of Facebook success is there email followups, as they sucked users into their system, these days it is old hat and average consumers receive too much ‘communications’ from everyone… Jumping on the bandwagon now, with mass emails, is a bad, very bad, idea. Ask Groupon that is quickly becoming one of the most hated services and surely they will not survive on the long term, because of mass email.
Email is for communication, not for marketing or use as notification or news updates. There are just too many different services and when using all of it for email updates, one cannot get anything else done… So eventually everyone figures out for themselves that mass notifications is evil and bad.
Can you believe that here are still spammers that think you need to know that they have a special on lawn fertilizer, 500 miles from your home?
Are people really that greedy that they would mass market via email in the hope of generating business? Yes, and yes, people are extremely stupid, myself included, inctill we become clever, then we are very clever 🙂