IF there’s one thing I hate about today’s wonderful and fascinating communication technology it’s that it’s totally addictive.

Thanks to the latest Smartphones, you can check on your emails and social media wherever you happen to be. So frequently looking at your phone – iPad, laptop or computer – takes away large chunks of your life.

We’re not alone in this. In spite of a decline in active users over the last year or so, Facebook remains the largest online community with 82 per cent of the world’s population, excluding China, having a Facebook account. This equates to four in 10 people using the platform regularly.

YouTube is still the most popular social network with a visitation rate 8 per cent higher than Facebook. Of course, I found out all this stuff online, using Safari on my phone!

The reality of this is that many of us are obsessive about checking our email and Facebook accounts, just in case someone has either contacted us (usually Groupon) or posted any sort of message that might just be of vague interest to us.

I know it’s not just me because you can tell when people have posted something or when they’ve replied to email. So how can we devise a more rational and less time-consuming approach to communication?

One way would be to learn to ignore the ping, buzz or whatever other notification there is on our phones that tell us someone has sent us an email, text, posted on Facebook or pipped us on ebay.

For many, this takes a strong will. After all, a text could be about a life-threatening illness just diagnosed in our nearest and dearest, an accident or other fateful missive. An email might be information vital to our work and wellbeing, and a post might be a notification about a friend in need – lying dead in a ditch or whatever.

Really? No. Unless we are terribly unlucky, nothing dreadful has probably befallen anyone we care about in the hours or minutes since we last checked and probably won’t if we don’t check for another few hours, either.

Keep phones on by all means but, perhaps by rationing all our social communication areas, we can just give ourselves a bit of freedom to be unavailable. How about that? Being completely unavailable for a couple of hours.

I just don’t think the world will come to an end. Do you?