Reflections on Phones after a Month

I am about a month into an experiment where I am trying to be intentional about the role my phone has in my life. It’s been a topsy-turvy month.

Why I did it

I was feeling a little burnt-out and one way I could take action to reduce the noise was via phone usage. I thought being more present in my non-digital life would lead to more enjoyment of those moments and would reduce the amount of overwhelm I was feeling.

How I went about it

I set a time limit of 10 minutes per day for my social media apps (the amount of time I thought I needed to check what people I know are up to) and then deleted them entirely. I deleted YouTube from my phone. I unsubscribed from all my podcasts. I allowed myself to check those sites via my computer browser or by installing the app and then deleting it when I am done. I participated less in group chats and messaged a couple of friends to go for coffee or lunch to catch up in person. I took notifications off all my apps and remove Email from my home screen and check it once or twice a day.

How I did

Week one my screen time decreased from about 7 to 3 hours per day. Over the coming weeks, it crept back up as I added the NY Times games app and Reddit onto my phone- newer things for me. I have since removed the games app and then set a limit of 15 minutes per day on Reddit as I think both are a bit distracting from the overall goal I had. I added some podcasting back in but it was much lower frequency.

I realized that I can catch up on friends’ activities on social media in about 3 minutes per day via browser. I haven’t felt like I need to visit more than once and haven’t visited the explore tab or scrolled anything other than content from friends. I also realized that checking my email once or twice a day has not impacted my life whatsoever. Most emails are not time-sensitive.

I now primarily use my phone to stream music, run fitness classes, stream Netflix if I am in the hot tub, some messaging with people, and some browsing.

Pros

In general, I feel calmer, less overwhelmed, and more present with my family and friends. Getting together in person with friends (vs. feeling like I am connected via group chats) was very beneficial and allowed for a depth of conversation I missed. I also have been going into work most days and have had more idle conversations in a month with my coworkers than I think I did in three months previously.

I haven’t been influenced to buy anything – in fact, I feel like I’ve hardly seen a product to buy at all this month. I’ve had more time for introspection which has helped me in therapy greatly. It’s difficult to tell whether it’s the sustained therapy or the phone (or a mixture of both) but I feel very content with my life in a way that feels foreign. I for the first time since I was maybe a teenager don’t feel particularly pressured to change anything about myself or my life.

Cons

Opting out of social media has meant full disconnection from some things. I have a few friends who I would idly connect with a few times a week over social media content or likes – those friends I haven’t connected with at all. I also have fell out of touch with a local running group who only really organizes via social media.

I also feel at times like I have lost a tool for managing my immediate mood/mental health – dissociation. If my emotions get dysregulated, my habit is to dissociate from everything to re-regulate – and now that I find myself without my headphones in, or without a screen in front of my face, I feel a lot more exposed in those situations. With that said, there were fewer of those situations in this month so it is very possible that the very solution to the short-term issue was causing it over the long-term.

Where we go from here

I think this was a clearly successful experiment and something I want to keep at.

I think on some level after years of using my phone a LOT, my brain doesn’t really know what to do with itself without it. I still reach for it a lot. I started doing crosswords, and then subscribing to Reddit, and on both filled in the same amount of time I would have spent scrolling on social media. Though both have some amount of value, I don’t think a lateral move to just use different apps is really what my life needs.

In many ways, digital communication has been my method for deepening connection for my whole adult life and I am not totally sure what my social life will actually look like without it. In many ways I think my loose tie social connections are drifting while my close tie ones are getting closer – and I think that might be a good thing provided people will come with me on this journey. But I notice the change and it is a little uncomfortable. This is something I want to unpack at another time.

I will check in after another month as well to see what has sustained and what has changed.

Shibboleths

I have ADHD that is well-managed so long as I take my medication every day. ADHD is a condition that affects the part of my brain that controls what I focus on and do – the executive function. It also impacts my memory of what I have done or was supposed to be doing – the classic “what did I come into this room for” experience.

I don’t really feel the medication – it’s in the background boosting my overall energetic capacity. I don’t notice that I skipped a dose until about 2pm when I realize I have been running off reserves the whole time and am now out of capacity. It’s too late at that point to take my medication because it is a stimulant and can lead to insomnia which makes my ADHD worse.

So the medication is an important part of managing ADHD – but I must remember to take it when the previous day’s dose has worn off. This is a conundrum that I have solved by following a regimented morning routine – a set of tasks all laid out together that I can follow in order without really thinking.

But the routine gets interrupted more than it used to. I now get a kid ready for school which is not a consistent process and weekends often start at a different time or pace. And so I am stuck in a liminal space often in the morning where I don’t know for sure if I have taken my pill or not.

I take a multivitamin and Omega 3-6-9 pills each day and I recently bought one of those seven-day plastic pill organizers that I pack in my work bag to keep them organized. I unpack it when I arrive at work at 8 and take them shortly thereafter – a routine that is generally uninterrupted. It just dawned on me that I can add my ADHD medication to them as well where I will know for sure I have taken it.

It’s a good solution, but one that is complex emotionally. It was one thing having an organizer for supplements (things I elect to take) but another to use it for medication. I firmly believed med organizers were shibboleths for the elderly or infirm, but perhaps as I trudge mine out each morning alongside my laptop I will find another tribe of people who can’t remember to take their meds that I did not know existed.

An Exercise in Self-Compassion

I have been working on reframing some of my thoughts in a more self-compassionate way.

In 2023, I decided I wanted to focus on an athletic challenge. I re-found a love of running after a few years away where I focused on powerlifting and then had a movement lull while I found my bearings as a parent. As my aerobic capacity improved, I started to enjoy cycling again and I thought about a sprint triathlon, which would require me to develop some swimming capacity.

I thought I was a competent swimmer – I did the red cross programs as a kid up to becoming a lifeguard. Since then, I have spent some time in the pool and at the beach, but never really thought about swimming as a here-to-there type of activity. But there wasn’t really a moment where my swimming held me back from other things (like surfing) and so I figured I just had to spend some time in the pool and I would be fine.

I looked up open lane swimming times and started to go at 6am. I found a beginner program for learning to swim longer distances I could follow. I bought a swim cap, goggles and an athletic swimsuit. I showed up at the pool for a couple of weeks and swam 500m in a variety of forms.

I learned that my aerobic capacity did not translate to the pool – I was not very efficient. I shared a lane with a woman in her 70s who did more than I could with what seemed like less effort. I read a chapter in a book and found some simple form corrections that would make me a better swimmer. I got a little better.

But after the novelty of a couple of weeks wore off, I didn’t really want to go to the pool to swim. 6am would come and even when I was up and ready to go (the biggest hurdle) – I still didn’t want to go.

As a person with ADHD, this isn’t uncommon – once the initial novelty of a new thing wears off, it takes a lot of effort for me to get to the point where it becomes a routine. But what I felt was different – I was forcing myself to do something my mind was clear it did not want to do.

As I work through some of my patterns in therapy, one key thread seems to be finding compassion for myself where very little seems to exist. My internal monologue starts at:

I am a failure and a bad swimmer. This is yet another in a long line of things that I started and did not finish. I am never going to get good at anything.

There are some classic cognitive distortions here – all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, etc. Those are easy to correct:

I am bad at swimming, but that doesn’t mean anything about who I am. I am not just what I do. I am good at lots of things and finish things all the time.

But this is only part of the way there – because underlying this type of thinking is a paired thought that I wish I was good at swimming but I am not. And I think that is worth exploring – the “wish I was” and the “am not.”

First – “I am” or “I am not” is usually not how things work. Most things are a spectrum and very rarely are we at either end. Adults generally don’t drown the moment they are in water, nor can they swim infinitely fast and far. I can swim, I just can’t swim far enough to complete a sprint triathlon today. I could swim 100m in a row if I chose to. I could swim further if I practiced more, but I can swim today.

I think “I wish I was” is a more nuanced area for self-compassion. I use wish because I think it is a separate thing from want. Wishing is a longing to be granted (i.e., you have no control) instantaneous change – wanting is the desire to see a change with some agency involved. You wish to win the lottery, but you want to be richer. And I already know that skills are not granted but earned, and so wishing for them is pointless.

If we shift from “I wish” to “I want” then there’s an implied question to be asked – what are you doing about it? We have time, energy, money, and other resources at our disposal but not enough to do everything we want to do. So we make choices – and learning to recognize and accept them is I think the hardest part of self-compassion.

All my life, I wished I had better teeth – I thought mine were unattractive and one of the reasons I felt like such an outsider in my teens. As a kid we didn’t have the money to do anything about it and they just got worse as I started to drink coffee.

Today, I could invest some time, energy and money into fixing my teeth. After an initial consult, I decided I didn’t want to invest in them in 2022. I invested in a house that suits our family well instead. I still want better teeth and need to heal some of the wounds from my teens that I associate with them, but I am learning to accept them and appreciate what the choice not to do anything about them has brought me. My house is filled with the love that I thought having nicer teeth would bring me someday.

So, in my opinion, more compassionate take on swimming looks like this:

I am okay with how well I can swim. I could swim better someday with more practice, but my time and energy is going to my family and friends, running, and self-growth because that is where I want it to be right now.

To get to that statement is work, and at least personally, the initial critical voice is still the first one that speaks up. But slowly, deliberately, there’s another voice that is emerging and the prospect of that voice getting louder is exciting.

AI Failing at Email

Hey David – A team member forwarded me some of the work ActioNet has been undertaking lately, it seems like you all are doing well in the GovCon space.

Our mission is to help partners establish themselves as leading proposal writers by cutting RFx response times by 70%.

We’re similar to RFPIO and GovDash but at half the price.

Your peers like GDIT and Lockheed Martin have implemented AI proposal software, completing proposals and replying to more opportunities.

Can I send over a few customer examples so you can see what that could mean for ActioNet?

Tyler

For the last few weeks, I have been receiving 10 or so of these types of emails a week to my work email. It is not captured by our spam filter, indicating to me they’re generated through artificial intelligence one-at-a-time with enough context to not seem like spam.

This is AI in action in 2024 – a cold pitch for a technology, followed by a reply asking about the email earlier that week. I think they’re a great example of where theoretical AI (the hype) and actual AI have almost nothing in common. Because this is by all accounts the simplest type of task – get customer information and develop a five-line intro email with barebones context to avoid spam filters and generate leads – and the context is always a different company and industry, and it is always wrong.

I’m toying with a saying – AI is going to be great at feigning attention. It can make a logo if you think paying $20 on Fivrr isn’t worth it. It can summarize a video if the alternative is that you aren’t going to watch it at all. It can listen for you in a meeting if you weren’t going to pay attention in the first place. It will do those things lousily, but you won’t notice, because you didn’t see a lot of value in giving it attention in the first place. It will be great at replacing zero value with slightly above zero value.

It is positively awful at replacing attention, which is what it is promised to be able to do. Where we spend our attention is we generate quality and value for others. So in many cases, it is replacing something that has some value with slightly above zero value. And you only notice the difference if you are paying attention yourself. And I am concerned we are in an era where the demands on our attention are greater than we can provide and we are skimming our way through so much that the drop in quality will only be noticed when it’s too late. Like when a chatbot makes things up because your circumstances don’t fit its training.

I imagine the success rate for a cold email from a technology company was extremely low to begin with, but it was not zero. Letting AI take over this space (however scammy, someone invested some time and money into something) has reduced the value of everything that looks like it to zero because there’s so much zero value in this space that, in an effort to protect my own attention, I delete it all.

Style and Taste

I found Ezra Klein and Kyle Shayka’s conversation on what it takes to develop taste and style fascinating. It put into words three things I have felt recently in some form:

Moving from an internet you curate yourself to one being curated by an algorithm has really led to a ho hum content experience for so many of us.
The cause and effect of this has led to a specific type of “local” coffee shop (white subway ties, light wood, minimalist) that now exists in all places and is a largely digital driven space.
Artificial intelligence’s greatest risk for culture is not its capacity to replace quality human work with an equivalent product – it’s that we have become so accustomed to the meh-ification of everything that we are very much at risk of losing anything authentic, risky, and moving in our culture.

Perhaps this is why, in 2024, I created a weblog, am cutting way back on digital content, and am opting out of the social media algorithm. I do not find photos, likes, links and content an adequate replacement for conversations, hugs, in person visits and thoughtful discourse. And the promise that social media would be a bridge to those authentic human moments died with the enshittification of everything.

Lapses in Presence #1

I am curious about presence – not necessarily starting from the macro “how can I be more mindful” lens but instead a more granular where, when, and what do I feel when I am not present one. My hypothesis is that I may find some wisdom through patterns that emerge.

And so I am beginning what I think will be a periodic series on situations where I feel like I have not been present and any thoughts I have about that.

Driving – I feel like a lot of the time when I am driving I am mentally at my destination and not on the journey. And so I drive faster and feel frustrated with anything that prolongs the journey as it is “in the way” of where I want to be. I feel like the more connected I feel to a place or people (reminding myself it is a neighborhood and not somewhere I drive through), the more present I am.
In public with headphones on – I often run or walk through public places with headphones on and I find that disconnects me from the place I am. When I am without headphones on, I often notice and remember the details of the journey better.
The period before something else – if I am doing something largely fun or recreational, I find I am often very focused on what I should be doing next or to “justify” that I took the time. I think about where I need to be, when, and what I need to do. Examples are – rushing to get through a disc golf round, spending time at the beach and feeling compelled to leave, and any time I try to take a nap.

Why I Create

I am in therapy for the first time in a sustained, recurring appointment kind of way. It has only just begun, but already I feel deeply curious about what a compassionate approach to my life looks like.

One “aha” I have had is how I approach being a creative person. I would identify this as a core part of who I am, but I have never thought about the parts of me that drive it.

I believe the essence of creativity is joy – driven by the optimism of being able to take the beat of my heart and turn it into something, and the fulfilment of seeing it happen. I experience this enough to know this feeling’s realness – I know I have tapped into it when my spine shivers.

However – what I have noticed is the parts that drive me to create are often not joyous. They use words like “must” or “should” and tie my self-worth to what others see value in. Other parts worry that what I create isn’t worth anything to anyone, and therefore neither am I, so I ought not to.

I imagine these parts as piano teachers to a young child, yelling forms of “this isn’t good enough.” I see a dramatic movie scene where the child bravely yells “I want to quit the piano”, or one where they sink into deep resentment of those who do not see the pressure’s impact on their joy and sit idly by.

I am now very curious about the alternate ending to that movie and how I might separate what I do from who I am, as it seems the very nature of compassion. I can see its importance in my role a parent to my own child, as I have found those inner voices in my own more often than I care to admit. I have at least fostered enough compassion to recognize I cannot mentor what I don’t know, and so it must begin with me.

Slow and Steady

My grandmother turned ninety-three this year. She’s full of dementia, largely robbed of the understanding of who she has been and what she believed.

When I was a young boy learning at her hip in the kitchen, she had a saying she would repeat often – slow and steady wins the race.

As a runner, I rejected it as old-fashioned and absurd. You win races by being faster than the others. If you want to win, you need to focus on speed.

Now, in my forty-first year – I think I’ve figured out what it really means.

For much of my life, I’ve rushed. Rushed to finish schoolwork. Rushed to finish a book or a TV series. Rushed to get to the goal fastest. Rushed to follow something new. My rationale, I think, was that I created value for other people through speed and volume. I win by getting somewhere first. I was good at math because I was quick to get to an answer. I was a good employee because I could deliver quickly and cover a vast number of responsibilities. I race straight and fast to the finish line.

But running a race is more complicated than that. A marathon course often has people running 10k, half-marathons, marathons and team relays. There are people who are running their first race and their 50th. There are people who have a goal time and people who have a goal to finish. So a running race is not really a single race to the end, but a bunch of people who show up to run their own race.

In my life, I’ve been quick to react and change course because I am worried about where I am in the pack. And so sometimes I miss a key detail in the math problem. Or I burn too much energy on a work problem that doesn’t need it. Or I decide to leave or abandon something at the first sign of trouble. Or I move from a realistic goal to a stretch one very quickly and then the original goal feels like a failure.

What I have realized in the last year is – slow and steady wins your race. You can’t win someone else’s race. A race is won by ending up where you wanted and being happy along the way. When I rush, I am universally trying to run someone else’s race and threaten my ability to win my own.

This learning has been particularly helpful as I’ve set a goal in 2024 of running my first half-marathon in 13 years and, if it goes well, to run my first marathon ever in the fall. And as I set my training plan in place, the urge will come quick to do more, push harder, and finish faster and to set new goals for performance and to run someone else’s race. This post is a gentle reminder to my future self of what we felt at the outset.

One Thing at a Time

I was feeling particularly burnt-out last week that led to an epiphanic question:

Do I take in too much input in a given day?

A computer works most efficiently when it works on a single task. Each process you run in the background pulls from your current task’s capacity. My hypothesis was that I am running more background processes than I used to, such as:

Social media. The introduction of the algorithm and loss of control over what I saw was a turning point (although I have always waxed and waned) – the content kept me there longer, and I would think about what I was exposed to long past when I closed the app.
Somewhere around 2016, I found podcasts. I tend towards educational ones, but my app tells me I have spent 307 days consuming podcast content which seems absurd. I also listen to a lot of music, and over the years have gotten very used to maxing out the volume on my headphones during a workout or run.
During the pandemic, I got invested in YouTube documentaries and followed a bunch of creators. I also found archives of British panel shows that were not available in Canada that really appealed to my sense of humor.

And as I thought about it, I realized I was never consuming this content in a dedicated way. I check social media in the bathroom. I listen to a podcast or a documentary while I work. If I was relaxing in the hot tub, reading a book, or doing chores outside the house, I had headphones on. I worked out and showered with loud music on. I watched TV with a phone in my hand. I was almost never doing one thing – and so I had 2x-ed the amount of information my brain was processing without realizing it. And everything I was supposed to focus on was suffering.

So, early last week, I made a conscious effort to be present and do one task at a time. I put a time-limit of 10 minutes on my social media apps that would give me time to interact with friends but no time to scroll. I deleted the podcast and YouTube apps on my phone. I used my home office speakers more (in lieu of headphones) and stopped wearing my headphones at work, outside of my house, and even went for a 5k run without any music. I cut my hourly phone time from about 7 hours to 3.5 hours – the vast majority of that being streaming music in my office. A couple of days I went three or four hours without looking at my phone at all.

The early results were great. I read three books in a week and remember the details. I had a productive and fulfilling week at work. My partner and I found a show and spent more of our evenings together. I got the same amount of general home and parenting busy-ness done as normal – but I have felt a LOT less rushed doing it. I went a bit further and disconnected from some other sources – Goodreads and Strava to name a couple.

Despite the good returns – this week has been harder, which is a familiar pattern when I am changing a habit. I am picking my phone up to do other things – crosswords, browsing articles, and looking more into my fitness data. I check messages frequently and am quick to get into a group chat if it’s active. If I leave my home office during the day, I feel like putting my headphones on. The novelty of focus has worn off – it’s not the new thing anymore. And my brain wants the next new thing and it associates my phone as the singular place where it can get that. And that is a worrying thing to realize.