The Producer-Consumer conundrum
I am slowly eliminating my smart phone from my life. Right now, it sits banished on the ground floor on my house. I have not looked at it since roughly 6PM yesterday.
This has been brewing for a while now. It all started with a book I began last year but did not complete - Deep WorkTM by Cal Newport.
Phase One
Sept/Oct 2016
My first step was to mute certain WhatsApp conversations and delete the Facebook app. From my phone's mail settings, I removed one email account in particular which gets a lot of unimportant traffic. I started using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on my phone.
This went well.
- I did not miss the Facebook app at all. I do use my phone's browser to get my Facebook fix but it is not nearly as often as before. I forget whether Facebook has 2FA on by default or whether I turned this feature on manually but it basically means that if my phone isn't with me, I cannot easily log into Facebook from any other browser. E.g., I can't log into Facebook from my work laptop
- Ditto with WhatsApp. On a side note, have you noticed how every WhatsApp group has that one person who constantly posts pointless memes to the group and expects readers, us, to ignore whatever we don't find interesting? 99% of the traffic I was ignoring was of this type.
- Dropping one email account was the biggest boost to my ability to do Deep WorkTM. I used to respond to emails as they came in. Those days are long gone now.
Phase One outcomes
- I was able to focus more on reading in the kindle app
- I signed up for and completed three online courses. One was a light course on Learning how to learn. The other two were far weightier courses within the Algorithms specialization. I did 4-6 hours of coursework every week on my phone and laptop without constantly checking my apps for notifications.
- I don't know this for sure but I feel using DuckDuckGo meant that Google's recommendations were a little less personalized and hence less attractive to me.
- I got invited to foo.bar. Ran out of time in Round 3 but I'm told being invited to foo.bar is a biggish deal.
Phase Two
Oct/Dec 2016
- Since iOS now allows us to delete native apps from the phone, I removed the default Mail app from my phone. I use my phone's browser to read Mail. Responding to email on my phone browser is sufficiently painful that I've all but stopped doing it. I wait to go on my computer. If I do respond to emails on my phone, I tend to keep followups to a minimum. It's just the right level of annoying to be change my relationship with email.
- I switched managing my passwords using the iCloud's password manager tied to my laptop.
Phase Two outcomes
- Mail, which used to be a huge vice is now a passing acquaintance.
- I used to keep my passwords as a Draft email in my Gmail inbox. Once I started using a iCloud's password manager, I had one less incentive to open my inbox.
- The added advantage is that now I cannot log into many services on new computers because my password manager won't work on those devices. Few Windows machines have Safari on them.
Phase Three
Jan 2017-
- Bye Bye WhatsApp
- Bye Bye iOS News App
- Bye Bye Yahoo! Finance
- Bye Bye Quora
- Bye Bye subscriptions to any news and world events subreddits.
Phase Three outcomes
Phase Three started just yesterday. I am starting to feel like I am on a vacation. For example, I had no idea that Obama gave a farewell speech yesterday. I admire Obama. I think his life post Presidency is going to be remarkable but not listening to his farewell speech did not affect my life in any way.
I would, at some point in my life, like to meet and work with Obama but right now, the way my life was setup - running from one distraction to another, chasing one notification after the other - I would have no chance of producing work of sufficient quality to reach Obama's ears.
I was a Consumer until now. I'm transitioning into a Producer.