Category: Wellness when Always-On

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The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Feedback and motivation, app edition – Part 2

(Part 1)

Another app I use in my routine that makes good use of feedback for motivation is Apple Books (formerly iBooks).

You can set a daily reading goal – I’ve set it to twenty minutes, even though I will get a little more done every day. The app then tracks this as you read over the day, and sends you a notification when you’re hit it.

The app then logs streaks for the number of days that you’ve hit this goal. You can see this in the large screenshot at the top. For me, streaks are highly motivating [1]

Books also syncs daily reading across iOS devices. I could read in the balcony on my iPad, pace around reading on my iPhone when I’m winding down, and both will count towards a single reading goal. I’ll get the achievement notification on whatever device I happen to be using at the time.

Finally, you can also set a goal for the number of books you’d like to read in a year, and as you finish a book the app will add the cover to a virtual bookshelf. You can see this at the bottom of the large screenshot. While it’s certainly one way to get me to read more books on Apple Books than any other, it’s never going to cover all the books I read – some will be paper books, others audiobooks. I will, though, read books that I have bought on the Amazon Kindle bookstore in Apple Books (deDRM + Calibre) – to re-iterate, this is for books I’ve paid for.

These simple mechanisms promote good habits in a lightweight, low-stakes way. It’s a refreshing contrast to the dark patterns common throughout the internet.

[1] That works two ways. Because I find streaks a good motivator, I also find negative feedback, especially guilt, highly off-putting. A big reason I gave up learning a language on Duolingo was because it was highly streak-oriented, which was great, but if you missed a streak the app would surface icons and text stating how I’d made the Duolingo bird sad. For me, positivity works, negativity not at all.

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Data Custody Product Management The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Feedback and motivation, app edition – Part 1

We saw yesterday that I moved my Fitbit app to the home screen. This placement of the app is solely for me to log my water intake, available as a home screen quick action:

I have ended up using this despite me creating my own iOS Shortcut. Even though my shortcut is easy to launch, offers a menu of sizes instead of having to type an amount, and stores my intake and timestamp in an open plaintext format. This was puzzling to me.

When I reflected on this, I understood that the Ftibit app gave me a view of my progress towards the day’s goal (which I had set), and compared it with previous days’. My Shortcut logged data with less friction, but I have yet to build in any feedback about the day’s total intake.

That little gap, that failure to close the loop – led me to unconsciously gravitate towards something less elegant and more time-consuming. There’s a little bit of the Hooked framework at play here:

Trigger, Action and Investment are self-explanatory in this context. The reward here is not variable in the way checking for new email and for Instagram likes is, but it’s good to know how close I am to my daily intake goal – I’ve forgotten from the last time I logged my water intake and checked.

Understanding this has helped me be aware of how much I’m influenced by such signals. I’ll be more deliberate in building these into systems I create for myself, and to watch out for such patterns in systems I interact with, beyond obvious ones like badgers and notifications.

(Part 2 – another app in my routine that incorporates feedback and motivation)

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The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Wind-down

On the website Morning Routines, I found the evening wind-down routine of Arianna Huffington most interesting

First, I turn off all my electronic devices and gently escort them out of my bedroom. Then, I take a hot bath with epsom salts and a candle flickering nearby; a bath that I prolong if I’m feeling anxious or worried about something. I don’t sleep in my workout clothes as I used to (think of the mixed message that sends to our brains) but have pajamas, nightdresses, and even T-shirts dedicated to sleep. Sometimes I have a cup of chamomile or lavender tea if I want something warm and comforting before going to bed. I love reading real, physical books, especially poetry, novels, and books that have nothing to do with work.

We’ve seen me use the Fitbit wearable to track a baseline level of activity while home-bound, and how getting adequate, quality sleep is a part of that. The piece above interested me because I’ve found that deliberately designing my activities prior to turning in have an effect on the quality of sleep – specifically, how often I awaken at night where I’m conscious.

You can see in the comparison between these two sleep graphs that the upper one has extremely short periods of wakefulness, not enough for me to remember them; the lower one has larger gaps.

It’s probably too much to optimise beyond a certain point what activities in what order have the most beneficial effect (controlling for bedtime, the evening meal and what kind of workday I have had), but the following seems to help:

  • Twenty minutes of browsing low-stimulation subreddits
  • Twenty minutes reading whatever book I’m on, on the iPad, where you can set a daily reading goal. I do this while pacing up and down, which is approximately 1500 steps and me wind down. Night Shift on the iPad is on and set to full, and the room has low-brightness warm lighting
  • Twenty minutes of solitude
  • Before any of these, I down a cup of chamomile tea. I’m a skeptic and remain so at the time of this writing, but I’m giving it a try because the US National Institute of Health published this 2010 review of the effect of the herb on, among other things, sleep:

Chamomile is widely regarded as a mild tranquillizer and sleep-inducer. Sedative effects may be due to the flavonoid, apigenin that binds to benzodiazepine receptors in the brain (68). Studies in preclinical models have shown anticonvulsant and CNS depressant effects respectively… Compounds, other than apigenin, present in extracts of chamomile can also bind BDZ and GABA receptors in the brain and might be responsible for some sedative effect; however, many of these compounds are as yet unidentified.

The whole thing takes an hour, but with it is contained my daily reddit and book reading, and a significant part of my step goal. With the benefit of good sleep and a refreshed start to the following morning, the return on that hour might be one of the highest in my day.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Timeboxing

David Sparks of the popular blog Macsparky, on his dealing with the online news. His observation:

It takes a lot of time. I need to make a living and support my family. Excessive time with the news gets in the way of that.

It closes my mind. With the way modern algorithms work, once I read one story, the computers decide what kind of news I like and try to feed me more of that. The longer I go, the more biased and extreme the feed gets.

It wipes me out. This year. This year. Do I need to explain how reading too much news drains me of the will and energy to do anything productive?

His plan on dealing with it? Timeboxing:

So, I am taking steps. I am rerunning my timers, this time with the idea of putting a 30-minute box around the news every day. Once I hit 30 minutes, I am done. Rather than get lost in the news, I would rather use that time for something else. Maybe I can spend a bit of it trying to make things better.

By and large I have stayed away from news about day to day politics for over a year, and that has been a big benefit for my peace of mind. But what David is doing is similar to how I timebox my other sources of distraction, Reddit and Twitter, even after my 30-day isolation.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Reflections on the 30 day Twitter-Reddit isolation

A month ago, I had committed to a 30-day isolation from Twitter and Reddit based on a similar exercise that the writer Cal Newport had his followers perform. The objective was to not dip into these two destinations during the snippets of spare time that I had. As I wrote in that blog post, the one piece in the original article that stayed with me was

The ability to lift your phone at any moment is slicing good hours into time confetti. It’s preventing us from accomplishing big things and focusing…

That was enough to convince me to give my own isolation a shot. That 30 day period ended on Monday, 20th July 2020. Here are some reflections of that period.

  • The early withdrawal symptoms were unconscious. As I had logged on the first day, “[I] Once launched Twitter app without realising, scrolled, even screenshot-ed an interesting tweet before realising I had even unlocked the phone, tapped Twitter and was in the app”
  • I didn’t miss Twitter much, but I found that disconnecting from Reddit took some joy away from my life. So I added twenty minutes of Reddit into my wind-down routine. That did not take away from the objective of reducing fragmentation. Unfortunately, I have found it hard to limit the time on Reddit to twenty minutes only. This is something I am working on.
  • I realised how much the endless rapid scroll-and-read tired my brain out. I was starting each working day with a depleted brain, right after I had refreshed it overnight. Starting my day with my small list of websites and my RSS instead of scrolling through Twitter and Reddit makes for a much clearer rest of the day
  • Similarly, last year I had been bothered by a mental fog. The act of committing to write daily, and the required structured reading, thinking and synthesis reduced it, the distancing from continuous casual reading has had an even sharper beneficial effect. I wonder if it is the relief from the continuous dopamine hit that scrolling gives you.
  • As I had written before, I have been spending some time, about twenty minutes, daily in solitude – not meditation, simply spending time by myself not doing anything. I have found that the temptation to reach for my phone has significantly reduced. If at all, it is now often to note down something that I am thinking about, or something that I want to remind myself of. While I don’t think that using my phone for quick note-taking will send me into a rabbit-hole of browsing, I nevertheless use a pen and notebook.

I am still not sure how I will use these sites again after the isolation.

But as an immediate step, I plan to use Twitter time-boxed to twenty minutes just like with Reddit. I will probably do this early in the day along with my RSS feeds and sites, since Twitter is also a source for a lot of articles and essays that are relevant to this site. I’m also going to use Twitter Lists even more to take friends and high-frequency posters off the main feed into their own separate lists.

I considered using Nuzzel, an app that displays a list of websites that people in your twitter feed have linked to. That may have been useful a few years ago, but people’s use of Twitter has changed in the last year. The cumulative effect of the doubling of character limits, the ease of creating Twitter threads, the grouped display of conversations and Twitter’s own quality-filtering is that there are interesting, valuable discussions on Twitter itself, making reading worthwhile.

In short, the plan is to use Twitter and Reddit by deliberation instead of by default. Twitter, as we have seen, is probably more a professional network for the passion economy than a typical social network, and therefore useful to me. Reddit is important to me simply because it brings me joy. The plan is to enjoy their benefits without letting them fatigue my brain.

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Discovery and Curation The Dark Forest of the Internet Wellness when Always-On

Everything is an identity war

This well-known 11-year-old essay from the investor Paul Graham advocates keeping your personal identity small because

More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people’s identities…

If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible

This is even more true today with social media having become pervasive since then, and the media much more polarised and polarising. There are vastly more things beyond politics, sports, religion, automobiles (and, sadly, today, science) that you can unconsciously weave into your identity. Beyond even iOS and Android: your email app. Your Twitter client. Your method of brewing coffee. Your food delivery service. Even stocks: long Tesla or short Tesla? Or cryptocurrencies. A tech personality: Musk or Dorsey or Bezos or Ambani or Jack Ma. A viral Medium essay. Notion vs Roam Research.

Very nearly anything can become an identity war.

The hard part is cultivating being detached from these positions emotionally while thinking about and considering them rationally. It starts with being aware of when you begin identifying with something, as opposed to making a conscious decision to adopt or pay for or subscribe to it. That in turn starts with being conscious of the information flows you plug into, and building online networks deliberately.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Solitude

In the book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, the author writes about solitiude

“Solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you… a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.”

It means not simply being alone, but being alone with your thoughts. So watching TV or Netflix, reading a book or articles, listening to music or a podcast, even if alone, do not count as solitude – your mind is still receiving, as the author says, “input from other minds”.

It’s when one makes this distinction that one typically realises that such moments of solitude are rare, if they occur at all during a day. But this is also when one’s brain actively processes all the information it has consumed or been exposed to during the day – sleep being the only other time, and one is not really conscious then.

Typical of the work-hard-play-hard culture that’s become the norm, our antidote to total absorption in work or socialising has become meditation. While not at all a bad thing, it is as extreme a disconnection from work & play as our work & play itself has become. The big ocean between them is simply spending time not actively doing stuff – whether it is simply sitting or going on a walk. As part of the 30-day Reddit-Twitter isolation I’m going to resist the temptation to simply fill the time with more books, and try to spend some time by myself.

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Wellness when Always-On

The first Twitter-Reddit-isolation day log

We read yesterday about my 30-day plan to stop eating my free moments of time by cutting out Twitter and Reddit, however joyful they are. The idea was that this would help carve out larger chunks of time for myself than are available today. Yesterday, Saturday, was the first day, and this the (short) log I kept about distractions:

– Lauched both Tweetbot and Apollo a couple of times unthinkingly; realised as soon as app opened; closed right away

– Once launched Twitter app without realising, scrolled, even screenshot-ed an interesting tweet before realising I had even unlocked the phone, tapped Twitter and was in the app

– A few times today, launchsurfed through email, Whatsapp, Telegram and Messages probably looking for new message dopamine hit

I was surprised at this. Although I think it was less the craving of the sort that addicts experience than just the brain’s muscle memory expressing itself. Today, Sunday, there is little of that behaviour left, and I expect at this rate it will soon dissipate entirely.

This morning I had my coffee reading a few long-form articles and also reflecting on + bringing together, connecting things in my mind that had been floating around for a few days, and typing them out. I am quite certain this thinking would not have happened but for the isolation. So far things bode well for the rest of the trial.

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Wellness when Always-On

Slicing good hours into time confetti

I finally got around to reading a blog post a close friend had recommended in Feb 2019. It references a book by the academic and productivity blogger Cal Newport:

Last year Cal Newport convinced 1600 people to completely change their lives. He asked them to take a 30-day break from the optional technologies in their lives. Unless not using it would get you fired, divorced, or cause the people you love to spontaneously burst into flame, it was out. Say goodbye to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for a month. 

People’s lives improved, they were happier and ended up spending more quality time with family and friends. You’ve read similar results in a few other places before, I’m sure.

It’s what the writer then describes that struck me:

The real problem is “reverse FOMO”. You’re not missing out on anything online. But by always being online you’re missing out on life. 

and even more so this:

The ability to lift your phone at any moment is slicing good hours into time confetti. It’s preventing us from accomplishing big things and focusing…

I’ve known this for a long time and have never taken action on it. I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Reddit: acording to iOS’ Screen Time tracking feature, over the last week I have used my Reddit app an average of 100 minutes a day, and my Twitter apps an average of 65 minutes a day. 

Now I derive great joy from these sites. I have been ruthless on both about cutting out negativity, blocking people and keywords aggressively.

But it’s still over two hours. And it’s fragmented. And I’ve often struggled to find time to read my RSS feeds and newsletters, my backlog of saved articles in Instapaper and Pocket, and write and build up this website according to plans that have been in the works forever.

So I’m going to give Cal Newport’s 30-day challenge a shot: 20 June to the beginning of 20 July 2020. It’s not as much a challenge for me as a test to see if this leads to a clearer mind, more focused time and progress towards my plans.

I will continue reading, both online and books, but deliberately and in pre-carved chunks of time. I will continue writing on this site. And occasionally reflect on what, if any, difference the Twitter and Reddit isolation has made.

Here’s wishing me luck.

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Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

Wake up

This piece, “Avoiding the Global Lobotomy”, is among the more powerful I have read in a while. It is particularly relevant to the Mega-trend of Wellness when Always-On that we discussed yesterday. Some quotes below, but the context is important and the piece should be read in its entirety.

… this entire ‘timeline’ of spectacle events are simply empty happenings which momentarily infect your thought leaving you no time to analyse your being until the next comes in and slams your mentality to the floor.

Time becomes constrained to the point where one is not ‘living in the present’ in a Buddhist or Taoist sense, but merely existing at the whim of the latest dopamine feedback response, whatever spontaneous social-media based or dopamine-inducing masturbation session the user succumbs to that day is their nano-present.

…the end-game is roughly 3 or 4 seemingly different thought loops which lead back to precisely the same reality, one wherein you are born, you go to work, you consume, you produce and you die, and you do not question whether or not you want to do this, whether you like to do this, or whether you even thought about any of this in the first place.