How To Not Get Distracted By The Internet — Hard Mode
“People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.” — Paul Graham
The desperation of unemployment was creeping in when I read an article in the Guardian on how the best minds in technology were trying to limit using the very technology that they helped create. It made me realise that, despite having migrated to a new country recently, my most severe distraction was not the onslaught of new concepts and ideas needed to survive in a new country, it was the internet.
Over the last four months, It has been a small project of mine to free up the time that I spent connected on my phone and my laptop. Here are a few things that have helped me.
Starting with the dopamine vending machine
Edit: If you are already familiar with dopamine and how it works, I still suggest breezing through this section before moving onto the next
The miracles and vices of the internet can all be reduced into the supercomputers that we carry in our pockets everyday — That’s not a big revelation is it? We all know we are distracted by our phones every day, but to what extent? and How do the apps we love hog our attention everyday?
Cue in Nir Eyal, a writer and psychologist who’s work has been passed around in Tech circles as the path to the promised land of creating “viral apps”.
Nir summarises the design of viral apps into a neat model called “Hooked”. In a nutshell, the Hooked model says that a viral app is designed to be used/needed by someone based on “triggers”. A trigger can be a utility or use case such as calling a cab or, paying your friend on Venmo. In most other cases, it is an emotional trigger such as boredom, unhappiness or pride.
There are only so many utilitarian triggers that a user could have in a day, hence viral apps rely on an emotional trigger and the emotion we are confronted with the most on a daily basis is boredom. What is to be noted here is that it did not just come to be that we use these apps when we are bored, they are designed to be used when we are bored.
So I realised I was reaching for my phone with alarming regularity, unemployment did not really help. I had moments when I would check my mail a dozen times and scroll to the end of my Instagram feed and scroll up again just in case I missed something. It was not really making me happy. In fact, it was making me distraught at the end of the day when I looked at the quantum of what I had accomplished. So why was I doing this? What was I expecting to get from my Instagram feed and IM’s in the first place?
The answer lies in the now Infamous organic chemical in our brain — Dopamine.
Dopamine, in simple terms is a neurotransmitter that is released to reward behaviour that helps the human race survive. When you have food, or when you have an orgasm, dopamine is released so as to encourage you to do more of the activities that helps you survive. Over years of experimentation of thousands of stimulants, we have found things that just happen to trigger dopamine release, by chance — These are our drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and more recently sugar.
Our electronic devices are vending machine of small dopamine surges that are easily accessible. It just seems like when we need dopamine surges, our brain takes the path of least resistance. Our phones and electronic devices give these surges without a lot of effort on our part
Being in a constant state of dopamine surge desensitises our body to its effect, and as a result that becomes our normal state. We’ll need constant stimulation just to feel normal — This explained how I felt at the end of days which seemed busy but unproductive.
We have lost our appetite for boredom, as Neil Gaiman puts it:
- “The trouble with these days is that it’s really hard to get bored. I have 2.4 million people on Twitter who will entertain me at any moment…it’s really hard to get bored.”
So the point of not using your phone or staying away from technology is not to engage in other activities that give dopamine surges, it is to delay gratification and do work that we are actually proud of and do things that we daydream of doing.
Here are a few techniques I’ve found really useful with respect to reducing usage of mobile phones:
- Delete all the social apps on your phone — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and anything else you use. You may find it hard for a couple of days or even weeks. The easiest way to get rid of a habit is to replace it with a new one. So whenever you feel bored, and feel like checking your phone for social updates, use Kindle, Pocket or Medium instead
- Stop most notifications on your phone — Notifications are the bread and butter of engagement for apps. They are designed to catch you in your boredom and give you little doses of dopamine — “ooh check out what your friend has been upto”, “Check out what Donal Trump said about North Korea”. Keep notifications on only for important mails that should get through to you and perhaps may be your work Slack Channel (if it is unavoidable)
- While the above two steps go a long way in helping reduce phone usage, what I’ve observed to help the most is changing the display on your phone to gray scale. This step can seem a bit drastic, but nothing has helped me reduce my phone usage more than the gray scale screen. This is how you can do it on an IOS device, and try this for an Android device
Setting up your workspace
Getting any amount of significant, impactful work done is impossible if our attention is split between the task at hand, and the constant need for boredom induced dopamine surges. When I was searching for a job, I found it really hard to put in more than 4 hours of productive work in a day. These 4 hours, rather than being a sprint, was a laborious exercise that started in the morning and went on late into the night — I was getting work done, but I rarely found time for anything else and I found my attention being pulled by a hundred different directions when I sat down to work.
Here are a few things that have helped me get my focus back:
- I do not use my Facebook or Twitter accounts on the desktop browser. I have replaced my Facebook feed with a something called the newsfeed eradicator — A browser plugin that does not show a newsfeed for Facebook. This way I can still get notifications from friends I really care about and I’m able to repost things that I’m passionate about
- I use Tweetdeck to check Twitter on my desktop, but I do not spend time checking my organic feed. Instead I’ve made lists that I scroll through to shortlist things that I want to read or get updates on things I’m interested in. If you do not have the patience/time to create your own lists, the easiest way to get started would be to add lists of the top 10 people you follow to your list.
- Using a different browser or an extra monitor for work is also a good idea. That way you condition your brain to associate opening the browser or connecting the monitor to getting into work mode. It is classical conditioning of your brain. I’ve found a lot of people mention that music has the same effect, but I personally feel that music helps once you are in the groove to work.
- Use the Intent chrome plugin to observe and get weekly updates on your online browser behaviour. There are tonnes of apps that does this for you, but what I like about Intent is that it builds a weekly habit by notifying you to check it and it encourages you to be brutally honest in your feedback to yourself.
Another thing that I’ve observed about bringing in behavioural changes is that we can rarely force ourself and our will into submission — Changing habits using sheer force of will is both extremely tiring and unsustainable. It is always better to accept things as they are, be hyperreal with yourself and make smaller changes over a longer period. In fact, just observing your behaviour and being in the present moment can bring in change without us being consciously aware of it. There is also the chance that your habits get worse before they show any sign of improvement. As we become more consciously aware of our habits, we tend to indulge in them more before they subside (I do not know why, I am still looking for an explanation)
All things said, it makes me pretty sad and disappointed that even while I write this, there is a part of my brain that is thinking about what to watch on Netflix. But as a culture, it our responsibility to build anti-bodies to behaviours that are not conducive to our survival in the long run. The same way smoking was phased out of American society to become a seedy, frowned upon habit of addicts.
A few other resources that I’d suggest checking out if you’d like to learn more about addiction and productivity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg&&t=233s
