I am far from claiming that video games corrupt the souls of children and infest the brains of adults, and making teenagers crave for ever more violence and immune to empathy. I’ll leave that part to activists such as Jack Thompson. Yet, I do think that video games are harmful, but not in the way they are regularly portrayed in the media.

The video game industry is bigger than the movie industry already, so this topic is much less “geeky” than you may think. However, today’s video games have little to do with the kind of games I grew up with as a kid. I enjoyed Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country and other games, but for the challenge they provided. Before full-motion video, elaborate animated sequences and orchestral soundtracks were standard, games were about testing and improving your skills. This was also a big part of the motivation to keep playing. Some games were notoriously difficult, like Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, but they were entertaining nonetheless.

People seem to joke that they are addicted to gossip, the news, sports, the Internet, or their phone. They don’t think it’s serious because there is no real harm. Unlike drinking until the early morning and waking up with a hangover, spending the night checking updates of all your favorite blogs doesn’t seem to have any negative physical consequences.

I do think that there are some, but that’s not the topic of this article. Instead, I want to talk about what to do if you think that your “addictions” aren’t so funny anymore and you’ve realized that they make you much less productive or social than you otherwise would be. I couldn’t give you a plausible reason if you were able to restrict yourself to at most 30 minutes of distractions a day, but if it is much more than that, then you may want to think about it. Also, I don’t claim any kind of elitism with regards to the medium. Spending eight hours a day perusing the New York Times is hardly better than roaming some phantasy landscapes in World of Warcraft or losing yourself in online discussions.

Do you occasionally take the bus or the train? If so, then you’ve probably noticed that attention deficit disorder seems to be a rather widespread phenomenon. While it was not uncommon to see someone read a book on public transport until some years ago, these days they all stare into their tablets and smart phones, playing inane games or checking their Facebook accounts. Of course, in their world, they have to be “connected” all the time.

Imagine you take out too much cash from your account. My bank charges around 17.5% for this service, which is of course obscene. But let’s say that I really, really have to have the latest Apple Macbook and withdraw 2.000 Euros. After one year, I’d owe the bank already 2.350 Euros, and after five years this sum would have grown to roughly 4.480 Euros. This is because you pay interest on interest. (For matters of comparison, the simple interest would merely have amounted to 1750 Euros after five years.) If you don’t own a bank, then compound interest on debt is not the most pleasant thing in the world.

Email can be a great tool to greatly simplify communication, but often it’s hard to say whether it is actually a tool we use instead of an enemy we have to keep at bay. You probably know what I mean if you have ever come back from a two or three week vacation and were greeted by several hundred unread messages in your inbox. I actually was in such a situation this spring, and here is how I dealt with it. 

Unfortunately, I hardly ever kept my inbox clean to begin with, letting several dozen emails accumulate and spend time on them whenever I felt like it. But I didn’t often feel like it. Weeks later, the count was suddenly over 200 and I was wondering how I’ll ever be able to fix this situation. After having dealt with those messaged that seemed to demand my attention the most, there were still many more left than I wanted to reply to.

While email has tremendously changed how we communicate, it also contributed to our lives becoming much more fast-paced. You used to wait one or two weeks for a reply to a letter. These days it may take a few hours or, if it was just a quick note, mere minutes until you have gotten a response. You would be justified if you felt that things get done a lot quicker nowadays. This is slightly misleading, however, because there is also infinitely much more noise in communication. Even a moderate number of emails can be overwhelming, and while we are sending emails back and forth, new ones just keep coming in. However, there are some good strategies for stemming the flood.

If you are like most people, then you don’t structure your days much. Instead of actively planning how you are going to spend your time, you are more likely to merely react to impulses and directions you receive from your environment. You respond to emails, answer phone calls, and consider memos. 

It depends on your profession how much autonomy you have about your work. So, if your task is to patrol a large corporate parking lot for eight hours straight, then you simply follow a routine someone else designed for you. If you are a receptionist, you follow a certain set of rules as well, and may be closely observed, too. In many jobs, though, you won’t get micromanaged a lot. As long as you get your stuff done, your superiors will be happy. How you do it is your choice. The same is obviously true for entrepreneurs, artists, and freelancers. In the end, only your results matter. 

Two big groups of people have problems getting a lot done. One is people with very busy lives. Obviously, if you work ten hours a day and commute another two hours, there isn’t much room for anything else. However, the other group are people with seemingly too much spare time, which often is just a lack of structure. 

When I was working with business owners, freelancers, or even graduate students, they often mentioned that even though usually nobody tells them what to do, and as long as they meet their deadlines, all is fine anyway, they nonetheless often feel as if they waste too much time doing nothing productive. The temptation to grab the newspaper, check up on your friends on Facebook or read a few articles on the Internet, such as this one, is just too great.

Here is a radical idea for you to try out: Spend 24 hours without access to the Internet. Yes, this includes your smartphone.

The point of this exercise is to make you aware how much time you actually spend doing nothing at all, and to free up some of your resources. There is a certain addictive quality to the Internet, because even though we are mostly just passive users, it provides enough potential for activity, and be it just to click “like” on a Facebook button or write a short blog comment. The downside, though, is that the energy you spend on those things could have been spent in a much more productive manner.

I often criticize consumerism, and for good reasons. But instead of merely criticizing the Western world for it, let’s instead look at this problem from a different angle. I’ll discuss a thought experiment, and want you to seriously consider the implications and consequences of it. This is not a piece of entertainment, but the chance to gain an insight that could fundamentally change your life. So, please take is seriously.

While environmental pollution at least on occasion gets highlighted as one of the prime evils of our time, even though corporations rarely if ever get prosecuted for the disasters they cause, the issue of what I am tempted to call “mental pollution” receives far less attention. It does affect our lives just as fundamentally, however. In my view, mental pollution is being exposed to questionable thoughts, unsound theories, and absurd ideas. An uncritical mind then quickly proceeds  to entertain them and draws its own erroneous conclusions.

Many people feel as if they don’t really get much done all week long, even though they are always busy. Thus, I will tell you about two techniques you can use to figure out whether you are not getting anything done because you are prone to get distracted, or because you do so much that it’s just too difficult to remember all of it.

First, let me tell you about a great idea I recently read about in the book Freedom Twenty-Five by Frost. In order to raise your awareness of how much time you actually spend on “just checking your email inbox,” and all those other activities you habitually do, he recommends making a list to record how many times you do all those little things. At the end of the day, you may be surprised how many dozen times you’ve checked your newsreader, wrote a text message, or had a peek at your email inbox.

In another article I recommend going on a media diet as a means of limiting the noise you are exposed to day after day. Refusing to consume newspapers, television, and only using the Internet selectively has many more benefits, though. One is that you’ll notice that you don’t really need all those new gadgets coming out month after month.

There are a great many diets available that aim to improve your physical health, albeit to varying degrees of success. On the other hand, your mental well-being is often neglected. Thus, I propose a simple, yet very effective “diet” to drastically improve the quality of your life. It’s actually very simple. All you have to do is stop consuming all kinds of news.