If you are reading this and thinking ‘that guy’s just an old-fuddy-duddy’ (which, to be fair, no young person today would ever actually say), and you are also patting yourself on the back because YOU are a great multitasker, go take a break from this piece, google ‘multitasking myths’ (or just read this) and then come on back.  Bummer, eh?

And it’s not just about getting stuff done, as that, too, is just massively overrated.  It’s about a lack of peace and calmness. When do we take time anymore just to do nothing?  Even standing in line for a coffee (which is, of course, a take-out coffee, since there’s no time to just sit in a cafe and enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a real cup) everyone’s on their phones, doing stuff.  The human brain actually needs time, every day, just to do nothing and process all of the events that are transpiring (great article here on ‘doing nothing’).

I couldn’t agree with him more — real time has its benefits and it is great. But there is a time when everything doesn’t need to be instantaneous. I have been trying to do the same: the email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram apps have moved off the front screen to the second screen of my iPhone. But that’s still a Band-Aid. As Nova Spivack once said in a conversation:

“With the real-time web, the amount of information we have to handle is changing the Now,’ he said. ‘Now is becoming a lot denser. There’s a lot more information in a per unit of Now. The Now is getting shorter. The horizon is getting narrower. Now has gone from days to hours to seconds.’”

Some might say — turn off the notifications and exercise some self control. I have tried that, but the behavior of constantly reaching for my iPhone has become too ingrained in my mind. You take out your phone to take a photo or send a text message and the next thing you are doing is checking emails, liking photos on Instagram, using Foursquare and reading the latest tweets.

There are some apps that give you some control over real-time: Tweetbot, for instance, has a sleep option, which I religiously use. I have removed the Facebook app and use their website when I need to, so it has made the process a little bit slower than before. My colleague Mathew Ingram brought up the real human challenges of the realtime in a brilliant post over two years ago.

As a result, our lives are becoming more “real-time,” whether we like it or not. Just as Google and Microsoft’s Bing are upgrading their search indexes to make them more real time by capturing things as they occur, instead of hours or even days later, we are being forced to upgrade our internal processes to do the same thing. But doing that isn’t quite as simple as tinkering with a search algorithm — we have to find ways of managing the real-time demands placed on us while still maintaining something approaching a healthy personal life, something Stacey wrote about a little while ago. How do we handle the demands of our our spouses, our children, our relatives and friends? How do we maintain our health when we are always on, always available, in real time?

If apps like SnapChat and Highlight are any indication, then the realtime nature of the internet isn’t going away and, in fact, it is going to become more pervasive. What would be really cool is an individual “off switch” for these real time apps. In one simple toggle of a virtual button, email is off — like my stereo when I power it down. A flick of the switch turns off Twitter. You get the idea. Why? Because I do like to use these real-time apps during parts of the day, especially when I am working. However, I don’t want to deal with them at night or, say, when I am hanging out with friends or at dinner.

I don’t know about others, but I would welcome that off switch. Turn off tweets till the dinner is done and switch them on when I’m ready to jump into the real-time information stream again. I think taking that break is becoming more and more essential.

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It’s a solid update worth checking out if you’re interested in an app that helps you to find shows and movies on live TV as well as streaming services like Amazon Instant and Netflix – but the thing that I took away from a conversation I had this week with Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman was something else. I asked Toeman why there’s even a need for an app like NextGuide, now that everyone from Google to Roku offers universal search across a multitude of services. His answer: Because we’re Switzerland.

NextGuide’s newest update includes a social stream that shows which content your contacts like – even if they’re not using the app.

Toeman argued that most companies involved in this space have too much of a vested interest to be good at becoming TV’s next recommendation engine. Subscription services like Netflix exclusively focus on their own offerings, and all but ignore anything on live TV. Cable companies on the other hand recommend both live TV and their own on-demand services like Xfinity.com – but they still don’t link to their competition. “I don’t see the Xfinity app searching Netflix for me,” Toeman quipped.

Device makers are in a bit of a different position, because they often want to present you with as many content choices as possible. But Roku exclusively focuses on viewing content that works on its own devices. That means you’re screwed if you want to watch anything on the TV in your den that doesn’t have a Roku, or even continue watching a movie on your iPad during your morning commute.

NextGuide on the other hand doesn’t care about any of that. The app supports content from 54 5 different content sources, including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu Plus. It currently puts a heavy focus on watching content on the iPad, but it can already be used in conjunction with a DirecTV DVR, and Toeman said that support for other devices and platforms is coming soon.

NextGuide extends this Switzerland-like approach to the way it handles social signals. The newest version of NextGuide integrates an activity stream that lets you see what your friends are doing on the service. But it doesn’t stop there: Users can also see what kind of shows their friends are liking on Facebook, even if those friends don’t use NextGuide themselves.

Missing from the app is the kind of restless conversation through pulled in Twitter or Facebook comment streams many others in the space are banking on. Toeman told me that he wants to use social networks to find recommendations for new content, not to relay what everyone is saying about shows and movies. “I don’t care what people tweet,” he told me.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user twicepix.

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NextGuide isn’t Dijit’s first stab at this space. The company first launched its remote control app, dubbed Dijit and capable of controlling TVs and set-top boxes through a custom IR blaster, last summer. It added some basic social programming guide functionality to Dijit earlier this year, and the company signed up more than 100,000 users. Still, Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman told me recently that he never saw it take off, and so the company realized that it had to refocus.

One key lesson learned with the Dijit app was that remote control functionality wasn’t used as much as the team initially thought. That’s why NextGuide squarely focuses on content recommendations. The app pulls in social data from Facebook and recommends content to you in a variety of channels, with the ability to add and customize the channels you’re interested in most, and even combine various filters. Only want live TV results about dogs in your home city? NextGuide can deliver.

There is also a time grid that mixes live and on-demand recommendations, which can be a bit confusing: It’s not easily understandable why NextGuide would recommend one Netflix title Thursday at 9 p.m. and another Friday at noon. Toeman acknowledged that the personalization could still be improved.

What’s interesting about NextGuide is that it’s not your classic throwing old ideas out of the window and starting over from scratch move. Instead, NextGuide and Dijit are joined by the hip: Dijit logins work on both apps, and comments posted on one of them are also displayed on the other.

Of course, NextGuide isn’t the first company to take a stab at the next-generation TV guide. Fanhattan, Peel, Boxfish and a bunch of others are also trying to apply new ideas to content recommendations on the second screen, and TVGuide.com itself recently published an app that tries to combine the traditional grid guide with more personalized recommendations. Still, NextGuide definitely looks interesting, and the personalized channel idea might just be what the company needs to succeed the second time around.

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