The world is an exceedingly busy place. Each year it seems to get even busier. We continue to pile on a unending mountain of electronic minutia into our lives. It is no longer good enough to respond to the electronic buzz of business and society a portion of our day, but it must now be dealt with around the clock.

There is no time in my life when one of my streams of media is not dropping something in a box that, at the very least, I must delete.

The real problem is that the percentage of stuff I need to actually act upon is becoming greater than the volume I can delete. It is a never-ending cavalcade of minutia.

So much so that I now feel the need to carry laptop, tablet and smart phone (I have not succumbed to the smart watch and do not plan to, watches should have one function!).

I remember back in the cave man days when the only thing I had to worry about at night was the beep, beep, beep of my pager. Oh for those days! I could at least say that I had not heard the page and get by with a brief respite from the immediate need to respond.

No longer, nope, now everyone can see when I read my last text, email or message. Our need for instantaneous feedback has resulted in the demand to respond…NOW!

The robot revolution is here, and we are they!

This is not healthy. Neither the immediacy nor the minutia. We all need a time to disconnect and take back some of our lives.

Now part of this is totally my fault. I have spent 35 years in the IT industry as my day job expanding upon the touch of technology. My job, much like my father before me who was in medicine, requires 24/7 responsiveness. But we have driven this need. In my world there is never down time any more. Everything has to be accessible around the clock.

So the question is, how do I take some of my life back?

Well for one, I am going on an electronic diet. I am deleting the majority of my personal mailbox and unsubscribing to a host of things that I tend to delete when they come in anyhow.

I am going to focus on only Facebook and LinkedIn and those only because I publish my blogs to them both.

I am filtering through the app’s on my devices and getting rid of anything that I have not used in the last month. Once I have done that I am going to delete anything I have not used in a week. I am going to strive for a single page of apps that are the most useful to me.

I am going to step away from my electronic masters and devote more time to my carbon based interactions (friends and family). I want to learn what it feels like to be human again.

That may sound odd…human again.

But I have realized that this is exactly what I feel like I have been losing. My humanity. Learning to be driven more by my personal interactions than my electronic. Not allowing an email or text to suffice where a call, or better yet, personal interaction would be better.

I have a close buddy who is very good at this. Granted, his world is all about personal contact, however it is also his passion. He talks to his friends weekly, often daily, and makes a point to call or drop by rather than send an email or text. And he has a ton of contacts and friends. I have like four.

It used to frustrate the dog out of me! No, seriously, as a part-time writer my medium is … well, written words. So I would send him these long emails talking about some plan or another. Getting my thoughts out and really detailing my message.

Here is what I would get back; “Sounds good, we should talk.”

Really, really! I just poured my heart and soul into a two page email detailing a perfect plan to end world hunger! “Yep, interesting. Coffee tomorrow?”

Arrrrrggg! But, he was right. My theory probably had holes and we should discuss that before solving this particular problem. He is good at that. Helping me see my holes…when we talk.

He is human. I am robot. I don’t want to be but I tend to be. I need to take back my humanity.

And that begins now…I am calling my buddy.