In my previous post I talked about wanting to return to a simpler more focused state of being. This post discusses some practical ways I’m attempting to do that, providing some real world examples.

🤳 Phone habits

My phone is an incredibly tricky piece of tech: it is the single largest source of distraction in my life, but it is also essential to my daily work and home routines. These are some ways I try to strike a balance that keeps me from being constantly distracted.

Screen-shelf

It’s a lot easier to not be distracted by your phone if it isn’t on your person. I try to put the phone on a shelf (ideally around a corner out of sight) or in my office or the kitchen. This is just enough friction to prevent the “I’m bored, let’s check Slack/Doomscroll” loop.

Someday, I’ll invest in something more official.

No phone mornings

This is an on-again-off-again habit, but I try to leave my phone in my bedroom or office in the mornings, since I typically wake up with my kids, cook them breakfast, and tidy up. This helps me be more focused on them, and wake up without checking slack or reading a depressing newsletter.

I do usually wear my smart watch so I can receive texts/calls/urgent slack messages if someone really needs to get ahold of me.

One screen at a time

I’ve increasingly found myself watching a show and looking at my phone. This robs the joy out of both the show and my scrolling, and just feels bad. I’m trying to limit myself to only using one screen at a time, or at least being intentional about when I do this and committing to either focus (I’ll enjoy a show) or treating the show as background (I’m committing to this Wikipedia rabbit hole on the history of flat bread).

Decreasing Notifications

In general, I limit the apps that can send me reminders to:

  1. My calendar
  2. Slack
  3. Pager Duty (during my on-call rotations at work)

Too many apps these days co-opt the notification privileges you’ve given them for useful information (“your food is here”) to also serve up junk ads (“why not DoorDash tonight?”). I make a habit of silencing them whenever this happens; the risk is that I do miss critical information, but this hasn’t bitten me (yet).

Muting slack

I use Slack’s channel muting and VIP functionality to try and slim down the amount of unread badges and messages.

I have yet to get into a routine of regularly pausing notifications, so I just try to reduce the overall messages I’m aware of as a substitute.

🙅‍♂️ No feeds

While it’s easy to scapegoat technology for everything, I do think engagement driven feeds are generally a net negative for the world. I try to minimize and avoid them as much as possible. Here’s how:

Social audit

After a few years of trying to limit usage, I finally deleted my Facebook account and idled my X/Twitter/Instagram accounts. This avoids the lure of “I wonder what my friends are up to” that inevitably leads to doomscrolling an infinite feed of junk or me wondering why i’m not living my best life vineyard hopping in Chile.

I haven’t regretted a second.

Hacking my way to focus

LinkedIn is the most “social” social networking I do, and I’ve gotten a lot of value out of it as a way of connecting with old friends, classmates, and folks from my Alma Mater. Over time, it’s begun pushing feeds with hot takes and click bait, making it feel a lot more like business casual Twitter.

For awhile I wholesale blocked LinkedIn, but missed the the actual networking pieces. As a compromise: I’ve put a few countermeasures in place to try and make things more calm:

So far this has helped me avoid getting stuck scrolling the feed or getting distracted by engagement baiting notifications. App/site blocking applications or extensions can help here, but they require their own investment and it can be easy to just ignore them.

Making the news come to me

Starting in 2020, I began to spend way too much time reading the news. This was a combo of having sites on speed dial in my browser home tab and obsessively refreshing the apple news app (which is it’s own feed hellscape).

Now, I’ve pivoted to more passive ways of getting info:

  • Newsletters: Substack and a few technology weekly (JSBytes, JSWeekly, etc).
  • My work slack interest channels
  • Friends who have better self control than I do.

Note: the SubStack app — unfortunately — leans into the algorithmic feed model and is a complete distraction. I would not recommend installing it. I wish they would reverse direction here, but I understand that the money is in engagement and a feed is a great way of driving that.

🕰️ Ordinary time

Spending less time scrolling is one thing, but it’s easy to pour that time into more work, or playing videogames (which I love too much to entirely eliminate) or busywork. In general, I’m trying to use free time as a space to be able to reflect and notice the world around me, versus something I need to fill with mindless activity or more work.

Normalize boredom

My natural instinct when I’m sitting around is to want to pull out my phone. I’ve made a habit to explicitly not do that, or to explicitly pursue a task like writing in my journal or reading a book.

It’s awkward, sometimes painfully so, but it has two primary benefits: it’s a small meaningful choice that helps me say “no” the next time I want to reach for my phone; it can be built-in time for reflection/meditation/presence. It’s easy to lose track of how I’m feeling in a day of running from one thing to the next, and this built in break time of letting my mind wander helps recharge my creativity and sense of self, and practice what I preach.

Pursue slow fun

A lot of my habits are built on maximizing the dopamine I get from any activity, and that’s typically meant I’m more willing to spend time playing a video game about playing guitar versus actually playing my guitar. So many “real” things are less immediately rewarding than their digital counterparts and this forces a challenging bargain when I have a slice of free time: do something immediately and maximally “fun” or pursue something ultimately fulfilling.

To break myself out of this binary, I’ve started to try and slow down and really enjoy slow things like noodling on the guitar. It can be frustrating sometimes, or just boring — if I’m honest — but there’s a slower simpler pleasure in connecting the different parts of my brain and body that I’ve come to enjoy and even look forward to.

I’m still trying to figure out the balance here, because sometimes it is really good to just turn my brain off, but I think more of this “slow fun” is better and that’s what I’m trying to orient towards.

The journey continues

These are just a start, and I’m constantly finding more ways that I’ve spread my focus. Hopefully that’s been helpful. I don’t have commenting enabled right now, but i’d be curious to know what patterns have been helpful for you.