Occasionally you run across a phrase that strikes you as well-constructed or elegant; then every rare once in a while you find one that you think, “I gotta steal that.” Recently I linked to Mónica Guzmán’s Seattle Times piece about taking a week-long digital Sabbath while on vacation in Colorado. In an earlier article, she talks about why her earlier tech breaks have been valuable:

Disconnection is a rest, of course, with all the relief that brings. But more usefully, it’s a performance review of my interconnected life. New technologies breed new attitudes and habits so fast, sometimes, they hide. It’s like a tide receding: The longer I let the water drain, the more of those hidden habits I see.

This idea of “hidden habits” that we need to surface and examine is really useful. New devices come at us quickly, we get absorbed by the intellectual challenge or frustration of learning how they work, and we compare their performance to earlier devices we owned. It’s a bit like what Daniel Kahneman calls “type 1 thinking,” the quick, familiar-rules thinking that we rely on most of the time.

All that diverts us from noticing what new habits we’ve developed with them, what unintended effects they have, or how they may make one kind of task easier and another harder. This requires more reflection, an ability to question our more basic assumptions about our uses of technology, and an ability to see those assumptions in the first place.

Studying history of science gave me a bit of a leg up on this kind of thinking, because it’s a lot of what I did in graduate school. However, if you don’t want to give up five years of your life (and earning power, and long-term career trajectory), a week away from your devices could help you see things that you didn’t even know you were doing, and question whether you need to do them.