I’m sitting here on a Monday at a Barnes & Noble writing another “meaningful” blog about life, recruiting, social media, and any other musing that catches my eye. However, I should be with the love of my life enjoying a brisk but sunny day doing anything but being on the computer. I’m here because I lost a sense of what is truly important – not just personally but in business too.

In the current era with the nod towards being influential, I’m afraid many of us – including me – have lost the true sense of what it means to be influential. First graders receive iPads and other computers from their parents in the hope that the little buggers will become computer savvy before puberty hits; teenagers tap away in the backseats of their parents’ cars or at the kitchen table during meal times when they’re but two feet away from having meaningful talks with the people who should be influencing them the most. Adults out for dinner sit across from each other paying more attention to their smartphones.

We’ve become dangerously tethered to communication devices large and small because we believe that a small dopamine spritz from a new text message, email, Tweet, Facebook post, blog comment, or LinkedIn message makes our lives complete. Instead, it compounds – in an often unseen way – the loneliness in our lives.

We’ve been conned into thinking that computer-literacy needs to be entwined into our DNA at the expense of being able to hold a conversation with a loved one, to ask how their day was. In reality, we need to be insanely interested in how the loves of our lives are feeling and the be able to pick up on the cues that make us human rather than the computer based messages that make us androids.

From now on, my phone will be off limits to anything but the phone from the time I leave work until the next morning when I leave for work. If you leave a voicemail, be certain that if it isn’t life or death it won’t be returned until the next day. I’m going to set up Sunday afternoon “office hours” to answer whatever other messages come in between leaving work Friday and then.

Of course, a “meaningful” blog post isn’t a substitute for talking to one’s heart throb but it’s all I have now. I really want you to see how YOU are tethered to computers and see if changes need to be made to make YOUR life more influential.

And I’m going to find a way to convince the love of my life that I’m not a computer addict and that I will pursue her as doggedly as she pursued me. I’m sure groveling and flowers will be involved but that’s between us (in case you’re wondering, I’ve written this more for her than for you).

In the end, her love is far more important to me than your message. And love trumps influence 24/7/365.