Declutter - Day 3
I succumbed last night to YouTube but then got back on track immediately after 2 hours and went to sleep. This morning, I realised the main source behind my compulsion to check the phone is anxiety about new messages, emails, or any piece of information that might come to me which I am missing out on — or sometimes I even open my phone and refresh my RSS reader to check what new articles are posted. And after I get bored when nothing new pops up, we have YouTube and other distractions which pull me in, so it's not only YouTube or LinkedIn — it's the combination of that anxiety that you might be missing something and then turning to YouTube to soothe that anxiety.
So to cure this information anxiety -
- I am going to reduce my consumption of new information from a daily to a weekly level where I read articles on my Kindle (using ktool.io) at the end of the week, not every day
- Batch my message checking to afternoon before lunch and at night before dinner, outside of those two periods I don't keep checking my phone
- Work Communication - this one is probably harder — I haven't figured out a way to do this, but for email I can check once at the start and once at the end of the day and not in between. Messaging is trickier here; maybe I'll add focus blocks on my calendar and respond to messages outside of those blocks
- Another thing I want to try out at work is meditate on what matters everyday by writing all the stuff you need to do before doing anything else
My main source of information during the day will be books (non-fiction / fiction). This avoids the constant checking behaviours which I want to avoid.