Taking back my attention - redux
It feels like I’m starting to ‘win’.
About a month ago I decided to try and take back some of my attention from the draw of social media, Instagram and Twitter in particular.
The first step I took was to block both sites on my iPhone. At first I thought I would be able to do this in the restricted sites settings (now part of Screen Time) but unfortunately this carried the restriction across all my devices - not quite what I was after.
Next port of call was my ad blocker. I use 1Blocker (and highly recommend it) what has very useful custom config settings. It was a simple task to add the domains for Twitter and Instagram and boom, no more temptations. The one drawback is that I’ve had to turn off iCloud sync for the settings on my iPhone as otherwise the blocks were also spreading over to my iPad. These are the only custom rules I have so there’s no major issue there.
Feeling pretty chuffed with how that experiment went I took one further step: I deleted email off my phone.
Taking inspiration from Tim Ferris in The 4-Hour Work Week I figured, why do I need to always have access to email in my pocket? Now I only do my email on my laptop or iPad and try to batch it as much as possible.
I definitely find I have less of an urge to grab for my phone and play the notification slot-machine game and am getting round to being more present in the activity I’m actually supposed to be doing.
Next steps: could I still find the phone to be as useful tool with the browser disabled?
