Happy new year quarter century.[1] This doesn’t happen often. I’m going to use it to re-shape some of my behaviours. As I was born in 1976, this roughly coincides with Q3 of my life. Let’s shake it up a little.
Would you like to join me? Habits are better formed with friends.
Vision statement
Behaviours are driven by goals, so let’s define what I’m hoping to achieve. This is the immutable part. And then we’ll talk about how I’m going to do it, which might evolve over time. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
1: Check stuff less often
As in, check my mail less often. The price of that stock I own. That tech website I browse when I’m bored. Reddit. Or something related to what I’m doing: I’m reading a book and the character is on Bleeker St, NYC, and I think I wonder where that is and 35 minutes later I’m on YouTube via maps and a pizza shop and a recipe and … you know how this goes.
This is a habit that wasn’t possible at the start of 21c/Q1 and is now endemic. In 2000 I had a computer in the house but its default state was powered off: when I wanted to do a thing, I turned it on and loaded that thing.[2] The internet, such as it was, was dial-up; the connection took a full minute to establish. You didn’t just check stuff.
Now, the device I’m writing this on has instant access to all of the information that humanity has ever generated. Let me try it now. I’m going to time how long it takes me to find some interesting fact about that pizza shop.
15 seconds. John’s of Bleeker St is open today 11:30 through 22:00. So we’ve conditioned ourselves to think that 15 seconds is the distraction: and then, what’s the harm? Of course this isn’t how it works.
The solution, I believe, is to completely break this habit. It has to be: otherwise Q3 rolls around and I’m a 75-year-old dude glued to his phone? That sounds pathetic. I intend to be a 75-year-old dude glued to Schubert on vinyl.
So am I becoming a meme and quitting the internet? No: my job is on the internet. You can’t quit the internet. But you can spend a lot less time there. And you can make sure that the time you spend is deliberate, and that it is serving you well. That’s the vision.
2: Live more deliberately
I’ve alluded to this already in my stalled YouTube series Focus and Productivity.[3] I want to move through life more deliberately: to do one thing at a time, and to be aware of what it is.
The first corporate training course I ever took was on ‘time management’. I was on a graduate program at Rank Xerox in 1996. The advice was so inane as to be absurd: if you’re waiting for a large job to print, said the instructor. Don’t just sit and look at your computer screen. Do something else! This is called multi-tasking.
Sounded like a great idea. Something an instructor told you to do. 29 (!) years later, I’m not so sure.
Again, technology is the enabler. In 1996 there was a hard limit on the number of things I could have done while I waited for my print job. Now the list of things is functionally infinite. Great, so I’m more productive! Well, no. Because an infinite subset of the infinite possibilities isn’t productive work. It’s Reddit.
I think that we need to learn to do less in order to do more. Not a new idea: in Deep Work, Cal Newport sets out four rules.[4] The second: embrace boredom. Give your brain time to think, to drift, to wander in to idle spaces.
This ties in with Johnny.Decimal. I want to work by engaging with my system. Something like this:
- Choose what to do. Identify the appropriate Johnny.Decimal ID.
- Open that ID in my JDex and my task management system. Check in with myself. What’s to do? What did I do previously? Is there a context to load? A thing to not forget?
- Do the thing. And only the thing. If there is a pause, just pause.
- Finish the thing. Close it down, mentally. Put it away.
This applies to life as much as it does to work. Example: yesterday, I had to drop a parcel off and shop for dinner. About to depart, I put in one of my AirPods as I was half way through a video a friend had sent me.[5] Fortunately Lucy was there, otherwise I’d have cycled 3kms without the parcel, which I’d left on the table: a victim of distraction. (It would not have been the first time that this had happened.)
I don’t think the solution to this is technology; it’s not yet another to-do app. And I don’t want my life driven by a reminder app. I want to drive it myself. The solution is to be more considered in what you do. To engage with life and not let it be the background to some YouTube video.
New Year’s resolutions don’t work…
Yeah, so they say. But I have a data point.
Exactly four years ago, after doom-scrolling Covid for all of 2020, I decided – mostly in the moment, if memory serves – to stop reading the news. And I did. Since then I haven’t once visited the home page of a traditional news organisation, or watched any significant portion of a TV news broadcast. (I still keep up with ‘tech news’ because I’m a nerd and it’s not really news.)
It wasn’t the resolution that helped, it was having a date to anchor it to. By the end of January if you still haven’t done the thing, well you’re not going to start doing it in February. And four years later here we are. It worked for me. Science.
Let’s leave the how for tomorrow
Would you like to join me? Let’s do this together.
Your goals should be similar to mine but if they’re not exactly the same that’s okay. And you might not want to go as hard as I plan on doing. But I’m Johnny.Decimal: this is content. So that’s also okay.
I think if we do this together, we can keep each other honest. I’ve created dedicated threads on Discord and the forum. Throw your hat in the ring!
And if you don’t keep it up, that’s okay. There’s a good chance that I’ll fail. This feels like it’s going to be difficult.
But let’s give it a crack. Think how nice it’ll be in 2035: someone says, hey, you are like a really chill person, and you can say, yeah, I haven’t been distracted by the internet since the start of this quarter-century.
Don’t pedant me here. I don’t care if the millennium started in 2001 and therefore it should be '26 not '25. 100/4 = 25. End of story. ↩︎
This thing invariably being Counter-Strike. ↩︎
Another perfect example of distraction just occurred. I opened YouTube to grab the link to that playlist. One of the suggested videos was a repair of a vintage Omega watch, just like mine! I’ve been trying to find its exact model specification for ages. So I can’t just ignore that link: I might never see it again. And I didn’t. But now it’s open in a tab, un-watched, and I’ll figure out how to queue it for later viewing. ↩︎
If you haven’t read Deep Work, please do. ↩︎
Having become aware of this earlier this year, I have drastically reduced the number of podcasts that I listen to. And essentially never while outdoors. ↩︎
