Randomized

If you haven’t seen Casey Neistat’s latest video, spend a couple of minutes (NOT during the work day) doing that, even if you are not that into vlogging.

I wrote on this topic last year, but this is something that I kept encountering more and more - there are so many distracting factors that one needs to get under control to truly be on top of things. Randomization is everywhere, and it’s 90% coming from your shiny screen, mostly from social apps.

For me to be effective at what I want to accomplish (and I want to do so many things - there is not enough time in the day), I needed to take some more proactive steps in the right direction. I ended up deleting all social media apps from my phone - I realized that I spent too much time handling notifications from those. And wow - it’s like a permanent “do not disturb” for both your phone and smart watch. There is a dramatic increase in productivity by taking this one simple step (and for 99 more cents - you should also disable push notifications for non-critical apps) - highly recommend. Bonus points for not having the ability to “boredom browse” - scroll through things every minute that is not occupied by something important. Having the time to be bored gives one time to think about a variety of things that otherwise would be preoccupied by pointless things.

If I don’t respond to your @-mention, that’s because I am checking Twitter less frequently now, and only on my laptop. Less randomization for me.