digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Keep your phone from using you by adding friction to compulsive habits: no email app, no social media apps, airplane mode after dinner until the next morning, and silent mode for almost everything. Tim Ferriss says this has been his approach for a long time and has had no irreversible negative consequences, while making him more productive.
Key Points
- Use friction deliberately: remove apps that trigger compulsive checking (email, social media) so you have to go out of your way to access them, while adding ease to habits you want to build.
- Post to social media without consuming it by using a posting tool such as Pult, which lets you publish to Instagram without seeing a feed.
- Protect the start of the day for meditation, journaling, writing, or creative work by keeping the phone in airplane mode until morning, before inbound messages and notifications shape your priorities.
- Stay in command of your time: the phone is always on silent, and you batch-check messages and calls every few hours on your laptop rather than responding in real time.
- Recognize that you overestimate your own importance and the urgency of social media content; most people can wait an hour, two hours, or three, and things keep moving.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Do not install or set up the email app on your phone. If you need email on the phone, use the browser only, and check your email at scheduled intervals via laptop.
- Delete all social media apps from your phone. To still post, use a posting app like Pult (spelled P-U-L-T) to publish to Instagram without seeing your feed or other people's posts.
- Put your phone on airplane mode after dinner and keep it on until you are ready for input the following morning.
- Keep your phone on silent. Batch-check iMessage and incoming calls every few hours at a set interval from your laptop, where iMessage has no pop-up notifications for you.
- Use the first few hours of the day for meditation, journaling, writing, or creative projects before checking messages.
- Ferriss notes that the habit of quickly checking Instagram can turn into a 20-minute session, even while sitting on the toilet, which he cites as unhelpful for productivity.
- He describes the "apnea" feeling of picking up the phone to a flood of notifications and texts, which airplane mode helps avoid.
- He says that after deleting social media and email from his phone, he has seen no irreversible negative consequences, only occasional small annoyances that are easily repaired.
- He says that friction should be inserted for compulsive behaviors and removed for habits you want to develop.
Bottom Line
Reduce the phone's control over your attention by making compulsive apps harder to reach, protecting your mornings with airplane mode, and batching communication on a schedule, since most messages and calls can wait.
