Measurement is an essential part of life.
You don’t know how dependent you are on caffeine, takeout food, or digital apps until you measure hours and dollars.
Here’s a challenge: download Moment, an app that tracks phone usage. After that, write an estimate of hours you spend daily, and your number of pickups.
Then compare it to the actual numbers after a week. It’s frightening.
The first step to any problem is noticing.
After that, action.
Smartphones make things incredibly easy, a welcome change from a world in which deep work requires hours of concentration.
It also eases things that don’t make sense, like keeping up with thousands of people you knew for a brief time.
Dunbar’s number is a theory that suggests that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 relationships.
I have almost 2,000 “friends” on Facebook and almost 12,000 on LinkedIn, numbers of people that aren’t feasible or efficient to stay updated.
When you hear a phone notification ring, people break concentration to immediately grab their phone just to notice a new Tinder match.
If you want a deep dive into the importance of digital minimalism and focus, check out Cal Newport’s books “Deep work” and “Digital Minimalism”.
Here’s a summary: to achieve significant work, you must concentrate for long periods without distractions. Spending significant amounts of time on social media gives you a shallow human connection.
“Liking” and leaving brief comments doesn’t replace genuine, undistracted conversation and togetherness.
A person’s social media page is a highlight reel of what they want other people to know about them, so it’s a false front of connection.
Instead, social networks like Twitter and Facebook optimize their design to suck as many minutes as they can out of your life because that directly translates to dollars through advertising, and packaging every one of your “likes” and selling it to advertisers, who hound you across every app until you falter and buy junk that you don’t need.
Groups beg users to download their apps so a company can steal your attention through meaningless push alerts.
We live in an age of distraction, where so much information floods us that marketing is diluted.
We bounce from app to app for hours on end but accomplish nothing, chasing fading dopamine hits of people pretending to be our friends.
It’s strange that there’s a designated number of drinks per week that makes someone an alcoholic, but no time constraints identify one as a social media zombie– there isn’t even a warning on the label, as for tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana.
Life is a process of constantly questioning action. Your life should look different every few years, or you’re not growing.
Here are a few small ways to kidnap your hours back:
Leave your phone in a separate room or a backpack.
Turn off notifications
Delete all social media on your phone
Use social media for targeted purposes
The best parts of life aren’t experienced while hunched over a glowing screen. Get outside and be present with real people.