Breaking Digital Distraction at its Source
Most days I feel like I use my phone way too much — yes, impulsively so. Many of us know that familiar gnawing feeling of checking social media, emails, text messages, etc. Our phone is our constant companion and also our greatest distraction. Part of this issue is because we’ve been trained by technology to behave this way, but it’s also due to the easy access we have to our connected devices — it is literally always by our side. This past week I’ve been trying to tackle this digital distraction problem from the latter angle, that is removing my phone from the picture completely — in other words, applying a physical constraint to my digital access. And the results have been surprisingly good.
It also turned out to be easier than I expected. I simply left my phone in my car’s glove box during work or at home when I was working from the local cafe. Even putting it in my bag was much better than leaving it on the table next to me. I found that because the phone wasn’t in its usual place for me to impulsively grab, it short circuited the usual programmed action of turning on the screen, unlocking with my thumb, checking [insert your favorite digital indulgence here], before returning to whatever the hell I was doing in a daze. It quite literally broke the habitual cycle.
Research shows that if you do enough of an action (roughly 66 days), it will eventually become habit, so I’m hoping that after even a week of this artificial constraint, I will be have made significant progress towards weaning off my digital addiction. Why a week and not 66 days? Because we touch our phones on average 2,167 times a day (yep, scary), a frequency that makes up for raw days. Anecdotally at least I feel that way.
This experiment with physical constraints then prompted me to reflect on other types of constraints and how we can beneficially use them. For example, time constraints and Parkinson’s law: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Or money constraints and the old adage, “do more with less”. And of course both money and time combined contributes to by now Valley cliches like “move fast and break things” or “perfect is the enemy of good”. But hey they’re cliches for a reason. Maybe it’s time to revisit some of these and incorporate them into our daily lives.
