Weekly Post 35

Phone Foyer

One of the things that I picked up from Cal Newports podcast is the concept he advocates which is the Phone foyer to improve productivity.

The idea is to have a designated place in your house where you keep you smart phone. Imagine landline era, if you are familiar with it¹. You keep your phone in a designated place could be a corner in your work room, living room or anywhere. Ideally some place where you need to put in some effort so that the inhertia would work in your favor to avoid the phantom vibration(notification).

Don’t take your phone with you to the bed

I accidentally kept my phone in my work room the other day before going to sleep and to my surprise I woke up without an alarm. In fact I woke up fresh and energized(could be a coincidence of getting a good night’s sleep) but I think there is a benefit to not having the phone next to you at night.

The advantages are multifold:

• You can go to sleep earlier than if you had the phone next to you.

• I often wake up in the middle of the night and having my phone next entraps in the doom scrolling. An innocent instagram reel will surely put be back to sleep I will think only for it to chew away an hour.

• Having an alarm go off from the phone results in a series of snoozes before I can get myself to wake up. But if there is no alarm, there is no snoozing which forces you to get off the bed.

• Wake up more relaxed - waking up to my phone usually means I either check my office slack or laze around in the bed to do something :P. And if there are slack messages I need to respond to then it instantly puts my mind in an unrest mode which depending on the message can turn my morning a bit upside down.

I extended this to my other smart devices as well, primarily the Apple watch. Turns out that after my iphone the other most distracting piece is my tech is Apple watch. I seem to have FOMO and check for notifications.

Through the lens

Links

• We don’t need a boss, we need a process