The Crackberry Addiction

It’s amazing and rather sad how new forms of addiction join the officially recognized list of addictions every year. We should all stop and ask – what does this picture tell us about the human condition? Why are so many people so out of balance?

Are you addicted to your blackberry (crackberry)? Do you have an “involuntary habit” of checking your Smartphone every 64 seconds? Do you check messages at traffic lights? Do you wake up in the middle of the night to check your messages?

Like with any other addiction, crackberry addiction has side effects and consequences that range from mild to severe and to completely debilitating. Here are some of the dangers and possible consequences of the Crackberry Addiction:

1. Compulsively micromanaging your people.
2. Becoming a disruptive manager and stifling people’s initiative and motivation.
3. Managing the now with an obsessive need for instant report back on every detail instead of focusing ahead.
4. Unwillingness of your people to make decisions they are capable of making because they need your confirmation.
5. Diminishing your own creativity and the creative capacity of those around you.
6. Replacing meaningful conversations with Chatberry.
7. Sacrificing quality coaching and genuine leadership development and holding people back from developing their potential.
8. Building a culture of dependency and preventing the distribution of power and trust in the organization.
9. Confusing “Being Busy” with “Being Effective”.
10. Being so preoccupied with the present that you do not dedicate time and mental resources toward creating a vision and a strategy of realizing it.

Take action
1. Cut back on the use of your Smartphone / crackberry.
2. Create blackberry free meetings.
3. Put it away when you are at home.
4. Discover how productive you can be without Blackberry.
5. If you don’t believe any of this, keep a log for a week. Chart the amount and number of times you spent checking email. Then, take action to reclaim time to think, to connect, to coach and to enjoy what you do.

© Aviv Shahar