The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future. -Jordan Peterson
I (and many close friends of mine) are constantly looking for ways to optimize productivity, professional output, and improve chances of long term success. Yet I often feel like this magical box I always have in my pocket saps away short and long term focus. In exchange, I get frequent micro-hits of dopamine that make me feel good for a second, but always leave me looking for the next fix.
I’ve written before on my loathing for social media and the measures I’ve taken to mitigate the negatives, as well as how I think it’s making us more angry, divisive, and irrational. But the phone itself is another matter entirely that deserves some attention.
Now at this point you may be thinking: “I know Brandon acts like a crotchedy old man much of the time, but now he’s basically sitting on his porch yelling at the damn technology for skateboarding on his sidewalk.” And you’re not entirely wrong there, I will admit.
But anyone who’s paying attention would realize these things basically have us trained Pavlovian style. Posting things on social gives us approval from and interaction with our peers, something that’s in dire need in the world of covid-19 and social distancing. We get a similar hit from messages, phone games are obvious (so I’ll skip that explanation), dating apps as well; instant gratification and approval.
We engage in short term interactions that grant short term “rewards” (intangible, and essentially useless ones at that); all the while subconsciously crippling our ability to focus on longer term goals. I don’t know how often I stop while working on coding projects throughout the day to check my phone, but it’s far more than I’d like (even with the safeguards I’ve put in place).
Even worse than that, this “context switching” is bad for learning and focus. Coding is a trade that uses a great deal of abstraction, and requires you to completely switch the context your brain is operating in from that of normal life. It might sound like I’m being hyperbolic, but people in the industry refer to this as “programmer brain”; a state where you become at least somewhat autistic (the degree to which varies by person), and have trouble interacting with normal people.
That stereotype about programmers being socially awkward shut ins? It exists for a reason.
Anyway, it takes a good while to get your brain into this type of flow state with coding. Some days I drop right in and I feel like I’m going strong in 10 or 15 minutes. Other days it can take an hour or more.
And what’s worse, breaking the streak and forcing my brain to think in a different context by checking my phone, scrolling through Instagram, responding to messages, swiping on a dating app, etc all end the streak. This brings productivity to a screeching halt, and forces another slow ramp up to get back into a flow state.
I’ve found in recent weeks (despite the ridiculous challenge I posed to myself for the month of July) that my work output has been lackluster. I feel more easily distracted, and less able to focus in and bring a real project to life. Instead I bounce between doing smaller exercises, plodding through udemy courses, and going on periodic application sprints without any kind of sound strategy guiding those efforts.
In the past I’ve found keeping my phone out of arms reach to be somewhat effective at giving myself dedicated focus time, keeping it in another room more so, and keeping it in another physical location most of all (I lived a 75 second walk from a cafe on Elmwood in Buffalo, so that one was easy).
For the time being I’ll have to settle for keeping it out of arms reach, but on Saturday I move to my new home which will be much closer to co-working, and keeping it at home while I work would be much more feasible. Even more so at the beginning of October, as I’ll be switching to a co-working space that’s a 15 minute walk from my apartment.
To that end, I also dug out a cheap phone I picked up in Thailand when my old phone was quickly fading, which I’ll essentially use as a combination music/podcast player. This one doesn’t have a working phone number, social media apps, games, dating apps, email, or other “time killer” apps; those things you subconsciously know to pull up when you don’t have anything to do, or otherwise want to avoid doing something difficult or uncomfortable.
The plan is to use this in place of the full phone during the workday. I can download the maps for Denver so I can still use it to navigate (and hopefully track bike rides on Strava?). This will leave me phoneless from the hours of 8AM-5PM most days.
When I’ve done this in the past I’ve found it tends to lead to a calmer, more relaxed demeanor when it comes to my work (and my life outside it). I was also debating delete Instagram from my phone, but if I don’t touch my phone during those hours I think indulging a bit outside of them won’t do too much harm.
That said I may install something to block access to it and other time wasters in the morning, prior to work. If I want my brain to work well in a coding context, it’s likely I should start my day in that context and work to maintain it. Sure respond to messages, just don’t let an unfiltered information feed start dripping thoughts and ideas into your headspace, in the process driving your attention in a certain direction for the day (one that’s probably at odds with what you most want to accomplish).
Setting that attention and direction proactively feels like it could be a crucial factor for success when engaged in a period of self-directed learning or professional development.
I don’t plan to do this in the same manner as the last one, where I made it a month long challenge that left me completely exhausted and ruined my output for a long while after. Just going to do a day (the coming Monday), and see how it works, extending it out a day at a time if results are positive.
I’d do it sooner but I’ve got volleyball meetups this week which need some internet access. Come Monday I’ll live right next to the park where we play, so stopping to grab my phone after work is more doable.
Combined with that is the fact that I need to start taking on some projects with actual output. I joined a team from my bootcamp back in January that’s building an app to gamify and reward people who compost their food waste, and it’s being turned into a pilot project at MIT where one of our members has started her MBA, so that’s quite exciting!
Beyond that, I think I’ll do a number of short term, multi-day projects that mimic what one might face as part of a coding challenge during a job interview process. Since I’ve got some leads trending in that direction anyway, it’s a natural next step.
Anyway, enough rambling. This has been a long, winding explanation of why I think we might need to re-think our relationship with technology (particularly our phones). I’ve laid out my game plan (in a way), but I’m curious if anyone reading has tried something similar?
Let me know, and til next time!
-Brandon