This resonated, especially the bit about being particularly militant with smartphone use. I'm now 2 years into using a dumb phone (I have a smartphone on WiFi at home but my sim is in a dumb phone).<p>The control you have on desktop is considerably greater than on mobile, so my strategy has been to avoid social, email, news on the small screen and instead do this on desktop where I can use better time and attention management tools like getfocus to ensure I'm not distracted.<p>I wrote about it here [<a href="https://variousbits.net/2018/05/11/im-happier-without-a-smartphone/" rel="nofollow">https://variousbits.net/2018/05/11/im-happier-without-a-smar...</a>]. I should write again now, 2 years down the line. Some stuff has changed (dumb phone is now a CAT, I'm now without any social media at all and CV19 has provided some interesting challenges) - but I'm still basically doing the same thing.<p>My fundamental reasoning is that I live in an astonishingly beautiful bit of the world, I have wonderful kids and wife, and my life is basically superb. To be interrupted by some bullshit notification when I could be looking at my wife or the sea or a sunset is essentially what I'm trying to avoid, and my strategy basically works.
I unfollowed everyone on Facebook which means that my news feed is entirely free of content (conveniently, this includes ads). I now spend exactly zero hours per week scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, but I can still use social login, events, and check in on people if I want to (though TBH nobody in my age group still uses FB).<p>Edit: script to help unfollow: <a href="https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/renestalder/c5b77635bfbec8f94d28</a><p>Similarly: no FB or Twitter app on my phone, and a time limit of 15 mins set on Twitter and other "mindless" apps.<p>Related: turning off email notifications was the best thing I ever did for my sanity.
> Rule #2: No feeds or social media apps on the phone. Your phone is always within your reach.<p>Lol I'm soooo not a typical person.<p>My computer is always within reach. My phone is usually on the charger while I'm at home :D, I didn't use it much at all during the quarantine. Why use a 6" screen when I have 24" 4K multi-monitor goodness?<p>But I agree, I banned FB, Twitter out of my life and even deleted my reddit account. I just lurk on reddit now in a few dedicated groups, that's all.<p>I do like HN though, as it's usually about actually interesting stuff and good discussions. Unlike Twitter and FB where it's the opposite. On reddit it really strongly depends on the community you're in :) But I never feel like I waste my time on HN, every time I visit it I feel like I've learned something. And I just <i>love</i> the information density. No scrolling through lots of whitespace and superfluous pictures.
I would recommend one simple rule that has had a huge impact on me:<p><i>No mobile screens (phones, tablets, laptops) in a bedroom</i><p>I no longer lay on my phone at night. I sometimes stand in the kitchen and browse before I plug in to charge for the night, but when I go to my bedroom, I got to sleep or read a book. In the morning I don't reach for my phone. I lay there and stare or get up.<p>It took about a week for the urges to go away.
Yes, it is important to remove the things which you don't want to do. But it is important to set yourself up for the things you <i>do</i> want to do.<p>Humans with iron deficiencies often find themselves compelled to chew ice[1]. Humans often have other unmet needs, such as the need for deep intellectually-stimulating conversation. I know very few people want to randomly drop what they are doing to have a 2-hour conversation about game theory. So, I've found Calendly useful for helping satisfy that need.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagophagia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagophagia</a>
I dread the day the trick using Search to force Twitter to show a chronological view of just the people I follow will stop working:<p>- without replies: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Areplies&src=typd&f=live" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3Are...</a><p>- with replies: <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3A&src=typed_query&f=live" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20-filter%3A&s...</a><p>They already send irrelevant notifications (sometimes even about tweets that I already read & even retweeted with comment) if they feel like you're not engaged enough.
<i>> Rule #2: No feeds or social media apps on the phone<p>Your phone is always within your reach. Access feeds only on your laptop, in order not to condition yourself to constantly check it. Don’t install social media or video apps on your phone.</i><p>I used to block HN on my smartphone through a simple URL block rule. HN was only available on my laptop for me. I felt way better because every time I saw the message “page blocked” I realized that I had landed on HN subconsciously. It developed into something like a reflex. Pick up the phone, open browser, surf to HN. Nowadays, I have turned it on only for specific times of the day. But honestly, I feel like going back to blocking it completely again.
<i>>Your brain has a limited capacity to process and hold information. Schedule a certain hour of the day to receive it, and don’t surpass it. Example: No more than 30 minutes of social media, restricted to 10–11 am.</i><p>Suggestion: schedule your social media time for the afternoon or evening, and do high-value work during your freshest, clearest-thinking brain time - morning and early afternoon, or for night owl hacker schedule folks, late at night.
I'm trying to do pretty much everything it described and have to say the most important part is Rule 3 combined with Rule 4 i.e. one has to limit his/her purposes. Once you can do that, the rest just follow along.<p>Throughout my life I have been wasting tons of time scratching surfaces here and there but never applied the little knowledge gained or went deeper. A complete waste of time I must say.
> Rule #5: Schedule and limit your exposure<p>I wrote a simple Go program to email me weekly updates of the RSS feeds I follow. It runs on AWS Lambda with weekly triggers from Cloud Watch and sends emails using AWS SES. [0]<p>If you are following a high number of feeds, it is a life-changer to go from the mentality of "let's see if there is something new" to "let's wait for the email on Monday".<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/ege-erdogan/rss-email-lambda" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ege-erdogan/rss-email-lambda</a>. You have to setup some environment variables and then set up the cloud services.
If you use Twitter, you should use tweetdeck[1], not Twitter as your UX. I create lists grouped into categories like "Pandemic", "Tech", etc. Lists can be public or private. Assign accounts to lists. Add columns to your Tweetdeck and introduce additional mute words for each column.<p>This gives you AFAIK a chronological feed without a bunch of random things injected into your main feed. I find this a very satisfying way of using Twitter.<p>[1] <a href="https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/</a>
outside of the 5PM to 9AM schedule, also consider:<p>uninstall slack, MS teams, etc.
uninstall MS office altogether
decline meetings. ask for justification for your time. barter your time with people that would book it.<p>keep a calendar
use these products in a browser on a timed interval, and set a limit on how long you have to respond.
Something I've started doing many years ago that allowed me to cut back on "wasted time" was reading websites/feeds/blogs only once per day. I automated it and eventually built a product around it, since a few people asked me about that routine.<p>It allows you to receive a daily email with a digest of the news about the day before. The "news" will be any update on any website, or blog you follow (including public twitter accounts).<p>It's News, calm [1].<p>Bringing calm and tranquility into people's lives is something I strive to do in every product I work. Hopefully you'll find it useful.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.calm.sh" rel="nofollow">https://news.calm.sh</a>
I can't get behind the last two. I know they can be beneficial, but they can also be damaging.<p>I follow a few people with whom I disagree with fundamentally and I don't block anything they say, nor any other topic. I just don't want my social media to turn into an echo chamber.<p>Reading stuff I dislike helps keeping me grounded and reminds me that people who disagree with me are still people, flesh and blood, instead of faceless others.<p>I feel like many, many problems could be solved if more people remembered that. If nothing else, it could reduce polarization.
Mostly agree with all the points, but you should still be careful not to construct an echo chamber for yourself by only allowing what you like to see / read and banning everything else.
I have historically followed all the first five rules (even the one about not having ALL social media apps at once in my phone, only some of them) so the last rules "block generously and ruthlessly" and "mute words" end up looking quite childish after the first five because you naturally won't put yourself in those situations if you followed all the others. If you consume shitty content in huge volumes of course you will need to control the smell eventually.
One thing that really helped for me was stricter banning of mindless browing on my phone, on IOS(using ScreenTime with a password I don't know), I block:<p><pre><code> * Email
* Browser
* Any feed apps
* Games
</code></pre>
If there's any ability to distract myself with my phone, I'll relapse to bad habits. But with this in in place, I just forget where my phone is and it's mostly just a place for messaging and podcasts.<p>These days I often lose my phone, that feels like progress.
I actually blocked the feeds on my main development machines so that I am not tempted to visit them when I commit to work.<p>I left them available on the phone, but perhaps I should block them too. Outside of HN, most sources of content are just trying to exploit my lack of focus for data gathering and the like.<p>PS: I quit social media years ago and that is a huge positive IMHO.