1 billion seconds = 31.7 years
If you're 45 or younger, you might have more than 1 billion seconds left. You are a time billionaire.
Menu of this edition⌛VERTIGO OF THE WEEK - From Distraction to Intention: Redefining Your Daily Digital Habits
💚 3 EMOHACKS - Digital Hygiene Hacks: Boost Productivity and Reclaim Focus
⚖️COACHING STORIES - Smartphone Detox: Quality Over Quantity
🗞️ BREAKING NEWS / HOT LINKS - 2 free coupons for coaching! A brilliant movie extract on relative time and the grid of life.
⌛VERTIGO OF THE WEEK … You can’t escape it.
100 10-minutes blocs in a day. Which part do you consciously fill? Which part has purpose? Which part is left blank every day? Which part is stolen by non-desired entertainment?
Herbert Simon coined the term "attention economy" almost 60 years ago, stating that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. 📱🌍
We are constantly bombarded with data, notifications, and distractions. Our attention is stretched thin: it's affecting our mental and emotional well-being.
At the same time in many countries today, the average worker works fewer hours than 150 years ago.🧑💼 In 40 years the daily timespent on mobile phones went from zero to 4 hours a day.📱
William Penn once said, “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”
Infinite scrolling wastes 200,000 human lifetimes worth of time every single year. 😱📱
And the world spends 720 billion minutes per day using social platforms. Over a full year, that adds up to more 500 million years of collective human time.
Our “effective” habits compete with the “non effective” ones on a daily basis… and these tend to be way more rewarding!
For instance, social media copies gambling methods “to create psychological cravings.” (Daniel Kruger) Aza Razkin, the inventor of infinite scrolling, once said it’s like “sprinkling behavioral cocaine all over your interface”
💡 The attention economy is devouring your time. 📱🌀💚 EMOHACKS… What can you do about it?
A few basic digital hygiene tricks:
Turn off notifications 100%. As a manager it’s something I encourage teams to do. Go radical and turn back only what you can’t live without.
Install an app blocking program. It allowed me to get rid of certain programs at certain hours. Byebye youtube, hello deepwork. FREEDOM works well. Lifelong subscription costs less than 80€ and you get to customize what to block on which device at which time at your convenience.
Refuse 1h meetings. Why spend 1h when 30 min can do the trick. At least check before. Explain your teams to challenge you as well.
Filter incoming media. I parameter my inbox so that all newsletters go directly into a specific folder, then plan a 1h slot every week to review them.
Do the “habits scorecard”:
You want to raise the level of awareness from a nonconscious daily “thing” to a more conscious level. Do this activity inspired by James Clear: make a list of your daily habits and routines. Things you do every day. Little things!
Rather than labeling “good” and “bad” habits, sort them into “effective at solving problems” habits VS “ineffective at solving problems” habits. Do it like you would empty your pockets. Without judging, just observing.
The power of awareness will do the rest.
Now among them identify 3 things you want to act on. They can be little ones. What matters is they are part of your weekly load. It is proven that once an action is named and shared its likelihood to happen increases! (look up how the method “pointing and calling” reduces errors!)
💡Rather than big commitments, stick to identified concrete actionable habits.
Make the switch!
“A gambler hits the jackpot every now and then but not at any predictable interval.This variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances memory recall, and accelerates habits formation.” James clear
Find the element you could switch up each time.
Want to run three times a week? Select a different podcast each time, change the route, change the app, change the hour. 🏃♂️🎧
Want to listen more regularly to music? Each morning, my kids draw from the music hat, making sure we listen to a different style every day. 🎶🎩
⚖️COACHING STORIES
I regularly say I’m gonna use my smartphone less. Don’t you?
And I regularly get the coaching client who wants to use his phone less.
It revolves around different things.
Avoiding multiple things at a time (here comes atttention economy!!!).
Sometimes it’s about addiction identification/management.
Checking at specific times VS randomly.
Drastically eliminate. Or slightly reduce.
Limit the exposure to digital content.
Make space for being productive.
Even sometimes use responsibly.
Handle input and notifications.
Whatever the objective, it always start with radical intents.
It mostly fails because it’s not realistic.
My client was there. Aiming to do all of the above. Aiming at looking at the phone only 3 times a day.
I listened to him and asked “when will you NEED your device?”
“Eating”. “Driving”. “At work”. “In the morning”. “Cycling”. “In the bathroom”. He started listing all the moments the phone could be needed. Hmm… Not exactly 3 times.
It quickly became clear for him it was not about how many times in the day but about the quality of the use. Putting awareness on all the moments the phone was justified and necessary, it became possible to adress the precise situations when it was not.
There the objective started to be more realistic, more positive. The need was about quality. The first step was to regain clarity.
💡To get out of autopilot mode, be humble first. Look at your needs.
🗞️BREAKING NEWS / HOT LINKS
💡For the launch of the newsletter, two coupons valid 10 days for coaching sessions: feel free to share them!
A 30€ coupon for a session: Launch2024S
A 100€ coupon for a process: launch2024Watch this 2 minute Vertigo Video, extract from the fantastic movie Margin Call. Stanley Tucci explains to Paul Bettany how he built something once, that saved 1531 years of human time. What’s that one thing you want to accomplish?
Another resource from the clever/funny Waitbutwhy blog (Tim Urban is the kind of genius we need). He puts your whole life on a grid. I love the idea that everything is relative!!!
See you in two weeks and don’t forget to breathe!
PS: Have you read my latest in-depth article on the acceleration?
My last linkedin post?
Or even better, why don’t we have a chat? I’d love for you to be listened like never before.
Last thing, I would not want you to leave without a good playlist you can listen to while reading or just chilling.