For years, I've been hearing about the positive growth happening as members of my community reclaimed their time, focus and joy through digital mindfulness. After years of studying technology's impact on our daily lives, I have concluded that there is no silver bullet, no one time solution to the problem of tech overwhelm. And there never will be. We're going to have to find a way to navigate our digital lives.

This is the JOMOcast, a podcast about deepening our commitments to the things that matter most and joyfully missing out on the rest. I'm your host, Christina Crook, bringing you interviews with leading creators, thought leaders and technologists inspiring us to take action to thrive in a digital age.

Hello, everyone. You just get me this week. I want to tell you about a brand new program called Navigate that I'm launching this week. In this episode, I'm going to share what drove me to create it, my biggest fears and how I shaped the program. I'm sharing all of it. Really, Navigate has been years in the making, starting with my own road to JOMO.

It started with me seeing a priest conducting a blessing service for smartphones. Yes. I was watching a documentary, a CBC documentary called Our CrackBerry World. And in it, there was a scene of a priest conducting a blessing service for smartphones. Here was a man dressed in Holy vestments, calling upon the God of the universe to bless a Blackberry, a piece of glass metal and plastic design to speed our lives to the brink of exhaustion.

I had a completely visceral reaction to the scene unfolding before my eyes. It brought up all these questions for me. Like, could this phone be a blessing? Could it be blessed? I already had a growing curiosity about giving up the internet for an extended period of time to kind of just figure out what might happen to my creative life, and to my personal life, to my professional life.

I gave up the internet for 31 days. And as many of you know, I Chronicled that experience through a series of letters called Letters from A Luddite, which eventually turned into my book, The Joy of Missing Out. I gave a TEDx talk about it. And through all of this, people would come up to me and say things like I'm so exhausted. I'm on 24/7. I feel like I can't turn off because if I do, my career will slow down and my boss will think I'm lazy. They would come over to me and say things like, I feel like I live my life through filters. I'm spending so much time putting on this online performance. But I feel like I'm not even living my life.

Other people would say, I love the work I do, but I want to put boundaries around it, so I can turn off at the end of the day. And still others would say, If I check out too early for my work in an effort to maintain tech/life balance, I fear I'll fall behind. I'll be left behind. There was one particular software engineer who said this to me one day. He said, “you know what? Sometimes I want to divorce tech.” 

Sometimes it does feel like we're married to tech and the honeymoon was over a long time ago. Last year I launched this podcast and right here on the JOMOcast, we've heard story after story of mindful tech leaders, creators, academics, authors, parents, and educators, each finding ways to thrive with technology in their own unique way.

For years, I've been hearing about the positive growth happening as members of my community, this community, reclaimed their time, focus and joy through digital mindfulness, digital intentionality. After years of studying technology’s impact in our daily lives. I concluded that there is no silver bullet, no one-time solution to the problem of tech overwhelm.

And there never will be. That's why I decided to create Navigate as an ongoing resource. It's a digital wellbeing membership that, through weekly lessons and accountability, empowers you to keep your tech use aligned with your unique values, joys and goals. Navigate follows a peaceful methodical content flow. core concepts are taught over the first five months, followed by a new monthly focus, such as privacy, nature, connection or email management. new habits build over time to reduce stress and increase your capacity. Content is delivered to your inbox every Thursday as video, audio, and text to serve your learning style best. it can be learned and actioned in 20 minutes or less, ultimately saving you hundreds of hours of wasted time and effort online. 

There are many reasons I chose to launch a digital wellbeing membership. The first is this: an ongoing problem requires an ongoing solution. Managing our tech attention and productivity is something we do every day and we will keep doing for the rest of our lives.

Just like going to the gym for your physical well being, going to a therapist for your mental wellbeing or going to church, temple, or a meditation group, your spiritual well being, your digital wellbeing needs, regular maintenance, tune-ups, and accountability that keep you on course. 

Second, we are not going to solve the technology problem with more technology.

There are many wonderful apps and tools designed to monitor and block our tech use. And we've talked about some of them right here on the podcast. These tools can be part of new habits, but they won't solve the problem on their own. That's why Navigate is designed to systematically help you understand your media environment, discover your values and joys, the people, and practices that support your wellbeing and success.

And finally create the positive conditions for those values and joys to thrive online and off. It's an ongoing process. We work out in the real world. and third, and also my favorite: focusing on joy takes us out of the shame cycle. Every detail of Navigate has been thoughtfully considered. That's why there are joyful analog elements incorporated into Navigate.

You receive a welcome package, which includes beautiful letterpress items, A values discovery deck, a journal, and a wood stand followed by a beautiful monthly postcard to spark joy in your inbox. Who gets joyful mail anymore, Right? And each postcard has a quote to help you keep focus offline. You'll also be invited to join other joy seekers at our live monthly digital house cleaning parties to clean up your inbox, desktop, and phone, to optimize for focus. Confetti is included. We keep it fun around here. 

I've had many fears about creating Navigate. What if the teaching isn't quite right? What if no one wants it? What if it doesn't succeed? Will I be rejected? But this year I made an important commitment to myself. early in 2020, even before COVID hit, I promise myself that all I am is all I'll offer to anyone ever again.

That's all I have to give my unique knowledge, my personality, my love all year. I reminded myself it might hurt if I don't succeed, but it would hurt more If I didn't try. In the end, I will know that I have done my absolute best. That is enough.

Navigate has a really been years in the making, but it was this spring that my husband, Michael, a brilliant thinker and experienced program developer laid all of my learning on the table–all of the lessons, stories, and insights I've gathered through my own studies, network of digital wellbeing experts and mindful tech leaders, and my personal writing.

Over two intense months, we workshopped and refined our thinking on creating the best possible system for change. With the help of my trusted researchers, psychotherapist, Rebecca Wineguard now also Navigate’s dedicated community coach, we built out five core months of learning to help members transform their digital lives.

We all know the uncomfortable feeling of life as a 21st century, digital native, a kind of exhaustion mixed with self doubt that never completely fades away. It is at its strongest. When you absentmindedly stare at your phone while waiting for a friend or standing in the grocery lineup, this is not a good way to live.

Maybe you wake up, roll over and start your day scrolling through Instagram, seeing the carefully curated images, broadcasting an idealized 21st century lifestyle. Most of the people in the pictures are strangers who you started following because you like their inspirational quotes or because you're a fan and want to feel closer to your celebrity crushes.

However you got there, You're there. And somehow every time you close the app, you feel just a little bit worse about the reality of your own life, your home, your wardrobe, your friends, and your travel budget, like that exists anymore. The bathing suit in the last ad was cute, though. You've been meaning to get a new one.

Most nights you're answering work. It seems like everyone is on their email at unreasonably late hours, probably because they're stuck in back to back video conferences all day. You've been told it's not expected, but it does feel that way. Especially when the email that was sent at 2:00 AM was from the vice president.

Every time this happens, you carry that sinking feeling around in the pit of your stomach, until it is replaced by some new crisis of the day. You have no idea how other people stay on top of everything. Hint, no one does. One of my readers told me that the only time she can take a breath, a moment to herself is sitting alone on the toilet.

It's the closest thing to relaxation many people can find these days, and then it's still interrupted by your damned phone buzzing at you. The crazy part is it wasn't supposed to be like this was it? I'm admittedly a child of the 80’s. I remember when the future was going to be hoverboards, replicators and flying cars with time machines in the back and some pretty embarrassing fashion trends.

If you told my nine-year-old self that in 2020, turning your life into a never ending ad could be a viable career choice or that you'd tell the device you carried around in your pocket It was okay to spy on your every move, I would have laughed out loud. I know there are things you wanted your life to be about, hopes and dreams and ambitions you had for all the potential you imagined in your life.

And I know for most people, those things aren't happening because you are stuck. You can't move forward. Anytime you try to take action, you find yourself interrupted or distracted or needing to deal with some urgent crisis in your personal or professional or online life. And if you do get time to focus on something you care about, you're just as likely to end up down a rabbit hole, learning from some new expert about the latest innovations and techniques and hacks to get better results, as you are to take action.

No wonder. All you can do is roll onto the couch at the end of the day and numb out. Netflix and chill is all the rage for a reason. Maybe you lay awake at night, fixating on missed chances and not having the relationships you want to have, feeling lonely and regretting how you've spent your time. After thousands of conversations with people about the challenges they have trying to navigate the relationship with digital technology, I know that everyone's story Is different. 

My story. Well, I used to be on the fast track to life as a cog in the digital media machine. When I was choosing a major for college, my grandmother's lifelong habit of clipping newspaper stories brought me right through the doors of the communications studies department.

Let's be honest here that the prospect of TV, personality hood was also top of mind. And with my newly minted communications degree, I did all the things you do to get on the media career ladder and internship in a newsroom, a gig doing PR and community relations for a radio news magazine, a stint at Canada's national public broadcaster and my first true love the CBC. I even pitched a show to MTV called, get this, Unplug about critical media analysis. The greenlight didn't happen. Neither did the bikini shots or binge drinking. 

This all happened more than a decade ago, just as the social media behemoths were getting started. I had a front row seat for the collapse of the media ecosystem they taught me about in school and the new world that Facebook created. And I was having a blast living my #blessed life. Meanwhile, I started to realize that living in the media bubble was a little surreal. My work meetings were like a strange sci-fi thriller where my colleagues have been slowly replaced by robot duplicates who couldn't finish a sentence without checking their Blackberries for instructions. Blackberry. I know, right. Remember them? 

And this was 2007. The rise of the smartphone hadn't even started yet. I'd read enough Marshall McLuhan to see that the new technological forces would have a level of impact no one yet understood. Real-time communications in your pocket, cameras everywhere all the time, new technologies can and do transform people and societies.

I wanted to understand what was happening, what it all meant and what we could do about it. I didn't know how I just knew I wanted to figure it out, somehow. Do you remember 2008? Web 2.0 technologies were unleashing the creativity of the masses. Bloggers were credible. Barack Obama built a political movement on top of a web app that promised hope and change.

Before anyone was talking about surveillance capitalism, cancel culture, a global epidemic of mental illness, or a generational threat to the financial security of the middle class. It was around that time that I was home with my newly walking, talking daughter, starting to feel skeptical that the promised tech utopia was going to arrive.

I felt disconnected from the world around me. I was tired of being perpetually on, permareachable, and constantly interrupted by a growing number of apps that seemed to think that the latest bit of online gossip was worth interrupting my kid's nap for. My relationships were changing and I found myself living with a low grade background sense of anxiety.

Maybe you know what I'm talking about. In fairness, that's basically what it feels like for everyone to be a new parent. But when I felt those things more, not less, years into parenting, I wanted to try something different. So I turned off the internet. For a month in early 2012, I turned off the data on my phone, shut myself off from the internet and lived like it was 1999. 

I had to buy a map book for the car to find my way around and had to make sure I had up-to-date phone numbers. At one point I had to courier a flash drive across the continent to meet a writing deadline, but it was a big enough difference that it helped me to see clearly that life was different in good ways and bad ways.

During my offline experiment, I wrote a letter every day to a friend reflecting on the experience I was having without the internet. I published these letters online and was amazed at the reaction from friends and strangers and editors at magazines who wanted to hear more about what I had learned.

Those letters eventually became the starting point for a book, The Joy of Missing Out, in which I argue that we had our relationship with technology backwards. Technology should be tools that serve people, not the other way around. It was clear to me I had touched a nerve that wasn't yet close to the surface for people, and it has continued to motivate my work for the last 10 years.

The synergy between our modern technology and our modern economic system is that there is a lot of interest out there in giving us FOMO, the fear of missing out, because FOMO keeps us glued to our devices, keeps us buying, keeps us hustling in side gigs. This has led to the digital distraction, disconnection and exhaustion so many of us feel. 

The danger of forces like FOMO is not only in the pressure to try to do, be, and experience everything, It's the lie that we're told that it's possible to. First of all, FOMO is stealing our joy, our ability to pursue our goals and prioritize our wellbeing. One of my huge aha moments this year, as I built Navigate, came from a conversation with Dr. Ellen Langer right here on the JOMOcast. 

If you don't remember, Ellen Langer is a Harvard professor and known as the mother of mindfulness. She popularized its study more than 30 years ago. It was my conversation with Alan that finally unlocked this question for me. What does joy have to do with technology?

What is joy and why does it matter? It was my conversation with Ellen that helped me understand why I believe joy matters when it comes to our relationship with the online world. Here's why: the path to joy is not effortless. It's effortful. It's not mindless. It's mindful. It requires courage and curiosity and openness to wonder. The things that bring the most joy to your life involve active, noticing and nurturing–two things Our online lives often do not demand of us. 

Noticing is about your attention. Nurturing is about your effort. The time you spend online and what you consume there is most often designed to be effortlessly convenient and abundant, thoughtless and unintentional inaction, And ultimately in service of someone else's values and goals, not your own. content curated to your past behavior, doesn't challenge, your curiosity or courage. content served up binge style ready-made in endless quantities with more always on the way asks no effort in seeking or creating it. Experiencing joy usually takes work. Consuming usually doesn't. Joy, isn't effortless and it isn't frivolous either. 

I believe that the simple things you do every day can have a profound impact on your life. You just need to stick with them for long enough to see results. We go to the gym for our physical well being. We go to the therapist for our mental wellbeing. We go to temple, church or meditation class for our spiritual well being. In just the same way, we need to spend our attention and effort on maintaining our digital wellbeing so we've got a shot at joy. 

You likely have one or two specific blind spots in your relationship with technology that prevent you from enjoying maximum joy, balance, and warm relationships. Fortunately, every one of those areas is within your power to change. You don't need to spend a decade figuring this out like I did. You don't need to dig your way out of overwhelm by trial and error, just hoping something might work. You should be focusing on living your life. Not becoming an expert on digital well being. 

Don't try to figure this stuff out for yourself. Why does every one of the world's top athletes have a coach or a team of advisors? Because success only comes from having support. Athletes have trainers, executives get coaches, politicians, entertainers, and diplomats, all have teams who bring out their best performance.

You do not need to figure this out all by yourself. If the world's best can benefit from advice, structure, and expertise, imagine how much you could benefit from the advice from someone who can give you the systems, tools and support you need. That is my pledge to you in Navigate. 

Navigate will help you to develop digital immunity. It'll help you understand the tricks of big tech and get control of your digital life. It will help you move past FOMO, learning to recognize the specific ways you fall into this trap and stop worrying about what's happening somewhere else. It'll help you put your agenda first. You'll learn to build walls around your attention and focus your effort on what matters to you, not influencers and advertisers, and intentionally live a life aligned with your values. And finally do your best creative work, focus your attention and effort on the work that makes you come alive. 

Here's how Navigate works. It begins with a comprehensive digital wellbeing assessment followed by quarterly check-ins to track your progress.

You'll receive Navigate’s digital wellbeing strategies in your inbox every week delivered in three modalities, video, audio, and text to serve your learning style best. These sessions are designed to be learned and actioned in 20 minutes or less, guaranteed. Over the first four months of your membership, you'll learn core concepts to build the digital immunity you need.

Each month you'll be invited to gather with the worldwide Navigate community for a digital house planning party. Live one-hour group coaching with me every month to review and reduce your digital footprint, saving you hours lost in digital clutter and money by regularly eliminating digital tools you're no longer using. 

Navigate is officially open for registration!

Visit Christinacrook.com/navigate to sign up. I hope we'll see you joining this brand new group of navigators. selfishly, I'd also like to get to know you, engage with you in the Navigate discussions and see your face on our monthly calls. You deserve to begin 2021 with all the clarity and support you need to beat digital overwhelm and live with more joy.

If you're looking to invest in yourself and put intention into action, then Navigate is for you again, that link is Christinacrook.com/navigate. I hope I'll see you there. 

In two weeks, We're back with our regularly scheduled programming, an interview with James Williams, author of my favorite book on the attention economy, Stand Out of Our Light.