We're living in the age of digital overload. This culture of constant connection takes a toll（造成损失） both professionally and personally. We are kept busy but can't concentrate. We keep constantly checking our laptops, tablets, and phones with stress, for fear of missing out. Are we addicted? How to regain our focus?

The solutions of two experts, Larry Rosen, a psychologist, and Samuel, a technologist, offer useful approaches separately on how we can begin to tackle this huge and growing challenge. 

In one of his studies, Rosen's colleague Nancy Cheever brought 163 students into a lecture hall, asked them to sit without talking, doing work, or using their phones, and then assessed their anxiety over the next hour. Although light smartphone users showed no change, moderate users experienced initial alarm that leveled off, and those accustomed to checking their phones all day long felt their anxiety rise immediately and continue to increase. Some people refer to the overuse of digital devices as an addiction. But since most of us don't appear to gain much pleasure from the behavior-a defining feature of addiction-Rosen doesn't classify it as such.

How do we calm the anxiety and thereby avoid the distraction? Rosen recommends using behavioral principles to disconnect yourself from your digital devices. Allow yourself to check all modes of e-communication, but then shut everything down and silence your phone. Set an alarm for 15 minutes, and when it rings, give yourself one minute for a tech check-in. Repeat this process until you are comfortable increasing your off-grid time to an hour or several hours. 

Samuel argues that "Turning off" is simply not a well-founded solution in the digital age. Technology was not the problem; our use of it was. We were not using tools designed to make online communications as focused and productive as possible. Now the first step is to abandon the myth（荒诞的说法）of "keeping up". Instead, your goals should be to sort and limit the information you receive and to streamline the work of reading, responding to, and sharing what matters. Then, as for E-mail, news consumption and posting, automation offers huge benefits. Outlook, Gmail, and most other major e-mail tools will allow you to set rules and filters.