Distractions

We took a trip to Sweden in October of 2023. I have gotten nothing written or any of the photos or videos edited. I have been to distracted. It’s hard to say why. It seems that doing anything else on my phone has taken place to making any content, or progressing in life.

One or two days like that is fine, but I’ve been in this funk for weeks. I feel the need to kill my phone.

One of the things that help is to go through all the apps on the phone and devices and remove all the time vampires. Social media, chat apps, games; they all suck time that you never get back. I saw my app usage from last week. There are about 20-plus hours I’m not getting back.

But the only thing that you can do is move on. Time is lost. And even if I could get the time back, I might waste a bunch of it doing the same thing. I have gotten used to this. Wasting time is normal. Some days, it’s my thing.

I’ve been in this funk since early this year (2024). I’m not sure what triggered it, but I need to get out of it. I need to get back to the Daily Things. Especially in the morning, I find myself grasping for the phone right away. I just need to put that thing away. Put it away in the morning and at night when I’m spending time with my partner.

Lots of people seem to have a lot of solutions for the phone distraction. There is even a selection of folks who have decided to go back to the dumb phone as a way to be focused. This sounds like a great idea until you figure out that there are a number of things that are much harder to do without a smartphone. Now, you think that growing up without even a cell phone this would be a simple path to take. Nope, people my age might even love the smartphone more. Kids who grew up with it find the novelty in a simple phone. But even then, it wears off even for them.

I found a way to be able to take my smartphone and turn it into a dumb phone. I put it on super power saving mode; which essentially turned off all the apps and features. It works really well, and it’s easy to turn off if you need to get an email, or the boarding pass for your flight. If that isn’t quite your thing, I have discovered modes.

Modes let’s you select what features and apps to allow. I created one called Focus. I have to turn on at 3AM in the morning until 8 AM. I’m up really early. It’s also made so that if I turn it on during the day, it stays on for two hours.

The one thing that I always need to ask myself while doing something is: Is what I’m doing right now leading me to a goal? Now, I might know the answer to this. It might be no. I might also just keep on doing what I was doing anyway. That leads me to question whether the goal is worth it or if I am finding excuses because the goal really doesn’t matter to me.