Focused - 70: Digital Decluttering, with Shahid Kamal Ahmad

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

Video game developer Shahid Kamal Ahmad is back to talk about his digital declutter, staying present, and quieting the voices in your head with an intentional approach to managing your technology.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. How's it going, David? Hello, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How are you today? I am doing well. I am excited to talk about digital decluttering with our special guest, but we've got a few things that we need to follow up with from last time. So the last episode, you talked about how you were going to be leaving on a hopefully productive trip. So how did it go? So how did it go? Actually, pretty well. It was a lot of juggling because we had family with us and I gave two and a half presentations and I did a live

show with Mac Power users and I was really busy, but I did stick to it. I had some stuff planned to do, got up early every day, got it done, and things didn't blow up. It was a relatively short trip, but I was impressed with myself with the amount of work I got done. So strike one for the good guys.

Awesome. Yeah, I attended the live show. That was really fun. You guys did a great job. And it was cool to see, obviously, Stephen and Mike and Rose and John and all the other relay gang that was there. But it was also cool to see some focused listeners. I got to spend some time with Chris Upchurch, who I guess I forgot to put this in the outline. But I should mention that we talked about masterminds and Chris Uji and David Galloway are launching the very first focused

mastermind. So that was cool to make a connection with him there. And we've got another MPU live show coming up at MaxDoc. So if you missed the one in Chicago in March, you can attend the one in Chicago in July. Yeah, Chicago is a big, big target this year, I guess. Yeah, well, Woodstock is definitely not Chicago, but close enough. I will be presenting at MaxStock, I found out. It's not officially been announced yet, but they did give me a coupon code. So if you decide to go, definitely come say hi. I'll have stickers, You'll have stickers. You'll get to see David and Steven record MPU Live. You'll get to see me talk about Ulysses.

And if you use the coupon code FOCUSED, you can save an extra $10 off of the early bird price. If you're listening to this later and the early bird price is gone, then that coupon code will basically get you the early bird price. So the early bird is $70 off the full weekend price, and that code will get you an extra $10 off, or it will get you that early bird price after the early bird price is gone. All right. Focus with 1S.

We'd love to see you there. We'd love to see you there. Definitely. I also have to tell on myself because we talked about in the last episode the importance of margin, and we have been saying all along that we're not masters at this stuff. We make mistakes and we try to figure things out and do better next time.

Well, I need to do better next time because I did not have enough margin and I got sick. Wore yourself out? I wore myself out and I got the flu and it took over a week to recover from it. And there is nothing more unproductive than having to just lay in your bed for an entire week. Yeah, a good reminder. Yeah, it's worth it. You know, the lesson learned for me is it's worth it to build in a little bit of that margin systematically so that you don't have to completely stop for an extended period of time. But lesson learned, I'm gonna do better next time. Yeah, I've done good at incorporating a lot of the common sense productivity advice into my life. And like, you know, I think

I'm really happy with my journaling practice and some things I've been doing. But the margin is the one that I know is out there that I never seem to capture, if that makes sense. It's just like, it's elusive to me, the whole idea of margin. I completely understand why it works. I understand the benefits, but I can't seem to find it. Yeah. And it's one of those things that you don't realize how important it is until after the fact, and then you're like, oh, that was really important. I should have paid attention. Yes. But yeah, learn from my mistakes. Try to build in a little bit of margin because a little bit of prevention is worth a ton of cure yeah we're going to do a whole show on this at some point but i'll just the the put a point on that whole idea of margin for me is that the thing

i find is if i don't build margin in i inevitably have a crash day it just happens all the time you know where it's like all of a sudden uh some real productive time for several days goes in a row then you have a day where like nothing gets done and that's because it's like my body says okay you don't want margin buddy you're gonna get margin except you're completely out of control of it anyway well let's do it let's talk about that in a future show uh because i want to talk to our guest today um welcome to the show shahid al-mad thank you so much now shahid is the first multiple appearance guest on the focused podcast that is an honor indeed yeah you were on as the free agents you know and now you're coming back

to talk about a focused topic i you know you know i was thinking about saturday night live you know maybe you're like our Steve Martin. We're going to just have you as a regular guest coming back to kick off shows going forward. Oh my goodness. Well, I do have a ton of material, sadly, little of which has been practiced in small bars around your fabulous nation.

Do you play the banjo? That's super important to know. No, but I do play the ukulele. Ah, of course. Well, you know, maybe that's going to be your thing. Maybe we'll have you do the theme song. There we go. Don't tempt me. It's a little bit of history here. There's a relay Slack team. And I saw that Shahid had put something on there about Cal Newport's digital minimalism, which I am a big Cal Newport fan. And I just recently finished that book. And a central tenet of that book on digital minimalism is this idea of the digital declutter.

So Shahid and I kind of started a thread, went back and forth. And when I found out that you were a video game developer who was embracing this digital declutter idea,ahid and i kind of started a thread went back and forth and when i found out that you were a video game developer who was embracing this digital declutter idea i was like we got to get this guy on the show to talk about his experience so maybe let's just start here with what inspired your your digital declutter i think taking stock of my life i i know that sounds like a a pretty fancy premise but at my age you kind of take stock of your life all the time because you get to that point where you know there is an awful lot of stuff you just want to get done in your life and and you have small children yeah and you have small children and you have grown- up children and you have more life behind you than ahead of you. Unless, of course, technology at the current rate of progress might actually handle some of that.

We just don't know. But the likelihood is, you know, if you look at the stats, I got to be very, very careful with my time. And so, you know, I've been a fan of yours david as you know for a very long time i've absorbed every productivity uh tip i possibly can i have read just about every management effectiveness um self-improvement book that you could possibly buy my My Kindle library is obscene. My Deadwood library is also pretty massive in that respect. And yet I felt like I was not getting the most out of my time. So I did something that Peter Drucker says is the very first thing you need to do if you want to get more effective at managing your time and that is take stock where is your time actually going

and it's all very well doing the time and motion studies but in improving certain areas of my I guess productivity if you want to use a catch-all term for it, I still found that I was not producing enough in the time that I had available. And that was simply down to a lack of focus. And that lack of focus, I think, is a natural byproduct of having a ton of responsibilities. responsibilities and also i think you know when you're working from home as i do that you don't really have a boss you know you're your own boss and you can sometimes be the worst person to be observing yourself and you don't get the opportunity to ask a colleague or a trusted manager who maybe isn't your direct line manager, hey, how do you think I'm doing in this area? How much output do you think I'm producing? And do you think that's the kind of output that someone of my ability should

be producing? You don't really have that. So you've got to work it out yourself. So the only way I could really work that out was looking at the results and the results were not as good as I expected, given how hard I was working. So I looked at what I was doing and I realized, you know, I'm actually wasting a lot more time than I care to admit. Where is that time going? And the reason I say I was wasting that time, even though I thought I was spending a lot of time at work, is because the output just wasn't good. You know, there was not enough of it. Sure, when I hunkered down and got focused, and I'm pretty good at that, for certain periods of time, I could produce an enormous amount of good quality work. But then as you alluded to earlier, both of you, there wasn't enough margin.

And then what happened is when I did allow for margin, that margin started to eat into the productive time. And so I started taking stock of the things that were making the lack of focus an issue for me. And I realized the smartphone was one of the biggest culprits. All right. Now, I want to wind back just a little bit here before we move on. Yeah, sure. You say you're taking stock of your time. How are you doing that?

I mean, how are you figuring out where your time is going? So to begin with, I used tools like many years ago, I used rescue time. And that wasn't totally effective for me because it only measured computer time. And a lot of valuable time doesn't get covered unless you manually record it. So there was another thing I was using. I think I was using Todoist for a while and measuring the amount of time in each task, or was it something else? There's another app I used on the PC, basically.

I don't think it was Todoist. It's something that let me measure the time I was spending on certain tasks. And that didn't work either. So I thought, you know what? All I'm going to do now is I'm going to log every hour. What did I do the last hour? What did I do? Where did the time go?

And then I realized that there are a lot of hours where I said I was working, and I actually hadn't got much done. Yeah, I'd measure my output by summing the total of things I'd actually achieved by the end of the day. I stopped keeping a to do list, by the way, and I started keeping a done list. And that made me feel a lot more positive. And at the end of the day, if there weren't an awful lot of things on the done list, then I realized that I'd fritted away a lot of time. And I didn't really know how that time was, was getting fritted away. And there's so much to unpack there.

First of all, I know, Mike, you're going to have something to say about the done list. I can just hear you rubbing your fingers together. Yeah. fingers together. But I do like the idea because time tracking is things a lot of people do. There's different tools. You can get it down to the minute. Actually, just saying, what am I doing each hour of the day is a very sane way to do that. And I think that would be a nice entry point for anybody that wanted to get a better idea and take stock, as Shahid was saying. Yeah. I mean, it was a good start, but it still wasn't telling me where that time was going. Because, you know, I'd put down, say, I spent the last two hours working on this area of a video game.

And then at the end of the day, I'd look at the things I'd actually done. Another way of doing that, if you're programming, you can just look at all of the commits that you've made. The commits are, for those who aren't familiar in programming terminology, they are deltas to the code that you've created or the code base that you've created. And for each new commit, you should put a meaningful message that explains what you've actually done. And if there wasn't enough appearing in that list, then I realized I was getting distracted. Even if I was staring at the screen and not doing anything else, that meant that something internally was distracting me. So I had to work on my focus, of course. But then when I started

to look at my focus, I thought the focus is not the issue. The real issue here is that I haven't got my priorities straight. What the hell am I trying to do with my life? And so I had to wind all the way back to life purpose, you know, the 10 mile high view and all of that. You can look at it in so many ways. You can look at it in GTD parlance. You can look at it any way you like. But basically I'd lost perspective.

So I pulled back, gained some perspective, listed my values, all the things that you're supposed to do. The values hadn't really changed. What had changed was that I'd lost sight of the goals that would correspond with the values that would meet my long-term objectives. And I'd also lost sight of principles that were really, really important to me. So for example, one principle is that time is the most valuable resource we have. It is in fact an invaluable resource. You will never, ever, ever get a single

second of it back. So if you don't make every single second count, there is something really wrong. So I did a couple of things. I'm guessing some of your listeners are going to be spiritual and some are not. But either way, it makes no difference. Let me explain what I did. I increased my presence during prayer as a practicing Muslim, a believer in the same God that all the Abrahamic faiths believe in. That's a very, very important part of my daily spiritual practice. If you don't have a spiritual practice, no worries, because I also meditate.

And when you're meditating, meditating is the same, no matter what background you have, whether you're an atheist or not. I mean, Sam Harris, who doesn't like Muslims particularly, what background you have, whether you're an atheist or not. I mean, Sam Harris, who doesn't like Muslims particularly, is a keen advocate of meditation and is actually a very good guide to its practice. So you're covering all your bases. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the important thing was to get some clarity, right?

Yeah. And to get out of the weeds. And presence in prayer, presence in meditation, presence in life in general helps you to appreciate what is happening right now. And I lost sight of that in a big way. And I was lost in my smartphone. I would be in conversations. This is a thing that I swore I'd never do. I'd be in conversations with one of my kids and I'd be holding my smartphone and then they would complain. And I'd say, oh my gosh, I've become that guy. I've become that guy that I used to think I would never be. And so a lot of things started to change when I became a lot more mindful, a lot more focused on my values, on my guiding principles and so on.

a lot more focused on my values, on my guiding principles, and so on. The foremost being that time is absolutely priceless. And so that's when I decided I need to strip away the things that were eating at my presence. Yeah, there's no more clarifying question than when your kid says, Daddy, what are you doing? And you have to say, I'm checking Twitter. Daddy, what are you doing? And you have to say, I'm checking Twitter. So I definitely have been there myself. I do want to go back and ask about this done list, though. Before we get there, I also want to clarify what you call presence maybe we would call we call it intentionality in our our last episode but i think that those are very similar ideas and i think that that's a really powerful concept for people who feel like they have no control over their their day-to-day that as soon as you make any sort of effort to gain back that presence or that intentionality and steer the ship, that it provides a much greater return than you think. But I'm curious,

like I said, about this done list. So what does your workflow look like? Do you just go to work and then at the end of the day, you just write down a list of the things that you've accomplished? Or do you have a list that you work off of, but the done list is really the one that you care about? Or walk me through this. My practice has evolved over the years. I used to do done lists to build momentum. It was a cheap hack to try and get me to the point where I was actually not ending up the day with a blank page. And that goes decades back. And it would be extremely rare for me to end up with a blank page because the premise I

started with back in the days when I was not doing so well, you know, everyone has ups and downs, right? So I had a period maybe decades ago, actually, where I wasn't doing so well. And I thought, you know what? Getting dressed at the beginning of the day is something that I did. And I'm happy I did that. Making the bed is something that I did. And I'm happy I did that. You could just not make the bed. You could just stay in your PJs, right? And that would not be an achievement. And there are all kinds of army disciplinarians and a lot of self-help gurus who make a lot of money out of teaching people to make their bed first thing in the morning. It doesn't actually need too much thought to realize that the whole purpose of that exercise is to have an accomplishment very, very early on in the day.

So for me, I would list even the most minor accomplishments. But of course, you grow beyond that and you start to realize that you need to start listing important accomplishments. But of course, you grow beyond that and you start to realize that you need to start listing important accomplishments. And what does that even mean? So I didn't continue with that practice because I'd gone past that. I got past the sticking point and I got to the point where I realized I needed to be planning ahead. And planning ahead meant listing all of the things that I needed to absolutely get done this month, this week, this day, and then a regular review practice as well. Some of this, of course, relates to GTD, but other aspects do not. They relate to other disciplines.

The important thing, as you say, going back to your point about intentionality and my calling it presence, they both have the same root, and that root is consciousness. If you are not conscious, you will not know where your time is going. And that was a problem. I was going through parts of life unconsciously. And so, one of the things that I thought was really important was consciously declaring my intent to do one small thing. Anything that was really important that corresponded with my priorities, goals, values, objectives, all of that stuff, right? So one thing that I did a few years back was I decided every day I'm going to get on my stationary bicycle and I'm going to pedal that thing for five minutes. And that got me into a routine of exercise. And once I had that going for a month, I upped it to 10 minutes. And then I upped it to 15, 20 minutes. And then I thought,

you know what? While I'm sat on the stationary bike, I can be doing some Duolingo. So I started learning some Italian. I mean, why not? And then you get to the point where it becomes part of your life it becomes a habit and then you don't have to worry about that you don't even have to have it on your streaks app you don't have to have it on any kind of habit list it is just part of your life and the reason it is part of your life is because exercise is an important thing to do because it meets one of your your objectives in life which is to stay alive long enough to raise your kids right i know it sounds like really simple like they don't teach you this stuff at school though do they they don't say at school no you know what kids what you've got to do is look

after your bodies and the reason you've got to look look after your bodies is because you are responsible right now you're just responsible for your body. But one day, you might be responsible for somebody who is not able to look after themselves, be it a child, be it somebody. And you are going to have to be there for them. And that is your duty. Duty is not taught enough. Responsibility is not taught enough. And I realized that, hey, look, I can't be a kid anymore.

I have responsibilities. I have duties. I had a really profound moment of clarity a few years back that started to kick this off in a really big way which was when uh like like you mike i had a moment where i basically not just eaten into the margin but i'd gone into my overdraft to the margin you know um it was it was that bad and i had a very very bad uh medical episode and my young child was looking at me from the bed while I was collapsed on the floor. And I'm thinking I'm dying. I really, it was the worst

I'd ever felt. I was on the floor losing consciousness. And the feeling I had at that point was regret. And the regret was a feeling that, oh my God, I'm not going to be around when this child needs me. And then when i recovered from that everything changed my entire life changed my priorities changed um and when i say priorities i meant that when you have two or three different things to do you always prioritize the one thing you know the whole thing about priorities right priorities never used to be a plural it used to be singular you only ever had one priority right so my priority just became this stay healthy and healthy in every respect in every dimension physically mentally psychologically spiritually but most importantly physically because you know your body's a vehicle that carries all those other ideas and so i just so i know this is a very very long answer to you get uh to

to your done list i still maintain that but the way i do is i do a day review at the end of the day and in my day review i think of all the victories that i had no matter how small the smile of one of my children a thank you from one of my, me being able to please my wife in some tiny way, or me just responding kindly to somebody who perhaps didn't deserve my kindness. Anything that I thought made me a better human being, anything that made me more conscious, right? Because being conscious is, for me, the crux of all of this you have to decide moment to moment what kind of person you want to be do you want to be you know as religious disciplines would have it do you want to be a good moral person according to your religion or if you're looking at it purely

from the human perspective and completely setting aside religion? Do you want to be a selfless person? If so, how are you practicing that in this moment right now? And that's what brings me to the smartphone, that beautiful accursed device that is simultaneously so attractive and so deadly. It is the ultimate temptation. I reckon if there was a creation 2.0, and if we're talking about a biblical story, there wouldn't be a serpent in Eden, it would be an iPhone. Because that is the thing that draws me in. It is so beautiful. You've got to remember, I started in a time when my first monitor for my ZX Spectrum was a 12-inch black and white telly that showed in the most horrible blurred pixels, 256 by 192. And it was able to show color, but the black and white telly, of course, wasn't capable of showing the color.

So I could only ever see 256 by 192. white telly of course wasn't capable of showing the color so i could only ever see 256 by 192 and here i am confronted with a device that has more pixels than i can actually see even if my eyes were those of a 20 year old on an oled screen with the deepest deepest lagoon like black that sucks me into its bottomless pit those vibrant juicy colorful juicy, colorful, 32-bit HDR high-definition icons that look so real. I can touch them. I can press them. There's feedback from the device. It is a sensual marvel. So don't for a second think that in any way I'm criticizing the iPhone. The problem is technology has outpaced our evolution and our evolution needs to be consciously managed now and if we don't do that we're in trouble we'll lose consciousness

we'll lose track of time all of these people um who uh is it adam alter the guy who talked about addictiveness wrote a book about it yeah drunk take drunk take pink. Right. So, you know, we are going to be victims to that, and we are going to spend our entire lives unconscious, attracted to this irresistible technology. And it's not just, of course, it's not just the iPhone. It's all kinds of technology. But the iPhone primarily, because it's so intimate, it's so personal, so useful, we can do just about anything.

I mean, you can run an entire business on an iPhone, but people don't do that, right? People run their business and they run their personal lives as well. And they run their personal lives to the exclusion. And I blame myself here. I'm pointing the finger firmly at myself. They do this to the exclusion of their immediate family, who are supposed to be, if we had been taught in school correctly, our most important responsibility and our most important duty. Everyone likes saving time, but it is especially important when you're a freelancer. Time is money, and our friends at FreshBooks can save you up to 192 hours with their super simple cloud accounting software for freelancers. It simplifies tasks like

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slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, and enter focused in the how did you hear about us section. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash focused and enter code focused in the how did you hear about us section for a 30-day free trial. We thank FreshBooks for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. You know, it's funny you say that because this change has happened so fast. I was thinking about my mother who passed away shortly after the iPhone showed up. And if she were here today, the iPhone is a totally foreign element to her. And it's so much a part of our lives. And it was zero part of her life. And that's in one

generation. Yep. I mean, I'm the youngest one here probably, but I would be classified as a millennial. And even I don't get what Cal Newport talks about in digital minimalism. He calls them the iGen generation, where they literally don't know what it's like to be disconnected from their devices because they spend nine hours a day on them. I can't even wrap my head around that, and I'm not that far removed from it. Sadly, I felt myself inexorably falling into that pit. In what ways? I mean, we've talked about how attractive it is to you but where where what were the traps you fell into specifically so you know i i say that

an iphone you could practically run a business on it i was fooling myself so here's the thing i was not entirely conscious when i was using the iPhone a lot. And I couldn't be because I wasn't using it purely for business. I was using it for Twitter. So I was connected to the outside world. It was literally like the matrix for me, Twitter. I was not using Facebook so much. I decided I needed, if I wanted to be relevant, to connect on other forms of social media. So I started to play around with Instagram. I started to get drawn in by the dopamine hit of likes and retweets. And then I realized this is a silly game. What am I doing?

I'm doing exactly the thing that I'm reading about, that I know about, that I've played a part in helping to come to. Because, you know for for game development uh user experience and user interface are key principles nothing else no other technology in the world no other software in the world pays more attention to ui ux addictiveness um and so on than video games development so I know about all of this and yet I'm completely susceptible to it it's like doctors who smoke, right? They know the risks, but they still do it.

And for me, I knew the risk, and I was fooling myself. So, for example, I would be using Day One. Day One is, for me, one of the greatest apps ever made, and it still features on my iPhone. But once I'd finished with Day One, done the thing that I needed to do, on my iPhone. But once I'd finished with day one, done the thing that I needed to do. So for example, I would keep a gratitude journal, which has, you know, I don't know how many entries, well over a thousand now. I would keep a goals journal, a whole bunch of other journals. Once I'd done the important stuff, I'm back to the home screen, right? And there's an email notification, going to my email, I've done my email loop,

going to Slack, done my Slack loop. You know, I'm on 15, 20 channels, go through all of them, browse back through the history, done that. Okay, I need a break now, man. I feel like I've just done a ton of work, okay? But actually the only work I really did was day one. That was the thing that mattered.

Now I'm into YouTube and okay, I need about 10, 15 minutes on this. One hour has passed. And I think I've watched useful videos, right? And I kind of have, but this is a realization I came to recently. Productivity porn, if there's something that I call it, on YouTube is not that useful. You want to go to people who really know their stuff. So for example, if I wanted to learn about Mac productivity, for years and years and years now, I've listened to

Mr. David Sparks. Okay, that's where you go. If you want to know about software, you go to people like David Smith, you read their blog, you know, you do that, you go directly to the source. What you don't do is watch these people who have almost rehashed the stuff that you know could be found in a more concentrated and useful form by people who really know their stuff. And I'd be watching this productivity, self-help, whatever stuff, and it would be like a half-hour video, 45-minute video, and I would get maybe one sentence out of it that was useful, but because I was unconscious, I probably missed it. And me saying that I'd got one sentence out of it that was useful, but because I was unconscious, I probably missed it. And me saying that I'd got one sentence out of it that was useful is probably being charitable.

Yeah, I think the same thing could be said about a lot of productivity books, to be honest. I mean, that's fine. I don't want to criticize those people. There is an audience for those people who will get information from that, and it will be a useful entry point. I don't for a second want to criticize those videos. What I want to do is criticize myself for falling for it, because I don't need it. It's like, you know, I'm a grown man who can read to a very high standard. Why am I still reading the same comic books I read when I was seven years old? I will not learn anything new from them. I'm not incidentally reading comic books written for seven-year-olds. But my point being that, you know, you don't go back to third grade. I mean, like, for example, David, you're a lawyer, right? According to some people. So you don't need to go back to like a high school debating class your level of

learning is going to be extremely high and so i realized that me watching youtube videos on productivity self-help whatever motivation whatever was procrastination of the highest order not only that but i was turning myself into an imbecile and it was my own fault. Yeah, I think that's a really important distinction there between just consuming the information, which doesn't have any sort of application in your life. That's the thing that a lot of people will use as procrastination. I love the way that you define that. I think you hit the nail on the head. You got to do something with what you're taking in, which is hopefully where this podcast can help people out. something that you can apply to your personal situation and recognize some benefit from. Because I do think that there is some value in understanding what other people have gone through and lessons that they've learned so you don't have to make the same mistakes and experience

isn't necessarily the best teacher. So if people find themselves in a situation like you are in, Shahid, then they can do their own version of the digital declutter and hopefully recapture some of that presence, intentionality, and margin. Now, I want to ask you, because you mentioned a lot of the apps that I have deleted off of my phone, Twitter, Instagram, email's not on my phone anymore. But I am still terrified with this idea of the digital declutter, which Cal Newport kind of describes as you just take everything that is optional off of your phone for 30 days. And then you only add it back after the fact when you've established new parameters and new rules for how you're going to interact with this stuff.

So what kind of pushed you over the edge where you were like okay i really have to do this digitally clutter and i have to hit the reset button as opposed to just identifying that oh twitter's the problem so i'm going to get rid of that app well i actually read um digital minimalism after reading make time uh Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. And I had already gone down the road of deleting a whole bunch of things that I realized weren't serving me and were reducing my consciousness. So I guess my vector for approaching the iPhone was one of limiting my access to anything that reduced my consciousness, that reduced my presence. And so one of the very first things I did was, so first thing in the morning, I would have my iPhone, and it was an iPhone 10 at the time.

And, you know, after I'd, like, you know, bathroom duties or whatever, downstairs with the iPhone, get up really, really early, right? But I was wasting a lot of time early, and that's all changed now, thank goodness. But I would go to Safari. I would go to the Guardian website. I would go to the guardian website i would go to um the bbc website and just go through the news and of course you're just filling your head up with disaster from the beginning of the day that's not going to set you up well you know so what i did was i turned once i got um the screen time stuff i started using that that religiously. That was one of the things, actually, that really helped me reduce my iPhone usage. And so I put content restrictions on.

I blocked The Guardian. I blocked the BBC News. And you know what happened? For a while, I felt good. And then after a couple of weeks, I thought, oh, I haven't blocked The Daily Telegraph. I'll browse that. Brought that up. Two days later, I realized, what the Daily Telegraph. I'll browse that. Brought that up. Two days later, I realized, what are you doing?

You know? It's fascinating how your brain does that, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know that you're doing this for a very good reason, and your brain finds the exception. It's looking for the loopholes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a trickster in your head,

giving you rationalizations for things that consciously, if you were conscious and intentional, you would know is not right for you. You would know is not serving you. So one by one, I would block all of those things. And they were gone. And suddenly I was not depressed in the mornings. Who knew? And then I started to remove. here this this is really um a breakthrough moment for me uh jake knapp and john zaratsky in their book make time refer to those apps that allow you access to infinity a virtual infinity of content as infinity pools so twitter is an

infinity pool you can you can use it forever, and you will never exhaust it. YouTube is one. There are many others, but, you know, so they were gone. I mean, Twitter, I knew for a while had been a problem for me. So that went quite a while before. And that made me feel a lot happier. And then Facebook was another one. You know, I remember maybe last year sometime and I've never really been a huge user of Facebook but I'd check it pretty much every day I would be scrolling through the timeline and I would realize that it was making me sad or upset not depressed you know depressed is a very strong term but it was definitely making me sad. I would not be as happy after scrolling through Facebook as I was before.

And so now I hardly ever check it and it's not on my phone. So basically I got rid of the infinity pools and I felt great for it. I'd already got rid of the news. I felt great for it. And then the rest of it was just down to, okay, you know what? My consciousness is coming back. you know what, my consciousness is coming back. I'm now only going to have apps on my home screen that are things that I would use multiple times a day and will serve my life in some meaningful way. They'll either be for helping me to stay on track, reminding me to get back on track,

or recording how on track I was. And that stays on my home screen. And there's some health stuff as well. And then on the second screen, I just have another couple of rows of icons, one row, which is financial stuff, because I don't want that stuff on my home screen, because really, I don't want to be thinking about money all the time either. I want to be thinking about purpose. Money's important. Don't get me wrong you know i'm i i am a capitalist sadly that has negative connotations now which i don't think are deserved because capitalism has done an awful lot uh of good for for humanity sadly it comes with a cost a downside and we struggle with that and we continue to struggle with it but hey i think

it's the best thing we currently have. It hasn't exactly made me a rich man, but I'm not going to blame capitalism for that. Again, I will blame myself squarely for that. But yeah, money needs to be there, but it just doesn't need to be in your face all the time. And I think you prioritize the wrong things if you do that. So it's on my second screen, but it's important. So I have like my receipt bank, my Xero accounting software, my bank accounts and so on.

And then I'll have a bunch of other stuff hidden away in folders. And you know what? I do not look inside those folders except the one I have for connection. Some people might be surprised I have a folder called connection, but connection is about direct connection. And this is something that I think Newport's okay with as well. That as long as you turn the notifications off and the badges off well i leave the badges on and the reason for that is it's not on my home screen so i never see them but if i scroll over to it i'll see that somebody has tried to get hold of me and uh i will i will then process that and also I don't get a ton of messages, and I try not to use these things too

much. I'm very conscious about limiting people's access to me, which I know sounds incredibly pompous. It's not that at all. It's not a feeling of importance. It's a feeling of prioritization. That prioritization is, if I get lost in this, it's time away from one of my kids yeah now you mentioned getting rid of the infinity pools one thing that stands out to me based on the screenshots that you gave us is that you do not have a web browser on your phone is that correct i do actually have a web browser on my phone but because i no longer because i've blocked the news sites. I have no use for it. So I think you can disable it using some hack, but if you hold down the icon for Safari, you can't delete it.

But you know what? I don't use it because the thing is, I was using it mainly for news. And I found myself recently, I think the other day, in an idle moment, I got my phone and I decided to, because somebody had been talking about Brexit in the real world, you know, one of my real friends in the real world, face to face. So that conversation was still fresh in my mind. So I decided to bring up Safari and I googled Brexit.

Brexit news, I think it was. And the first few pages that came up were from The Guardian, The Telegraph, The BBC News. And I thought, oh, well, you know, world's still ticking on. Nothing's going to happen if I don't look at these things. And then you were sad again. Yeah, and that was it. And then I was fine.

And it was a nice little, it was like a nudge and a wink from my past self saying, see, I saved you from yourself. And just setting up a few restrictions like that can save you so much of your life down the road. This episode of Focused is brought to you by ExpressVPN. High speed, secure, and anonymous VPN services get three months free with a one-year package at expressvpn.com slash focused. Everybody thinks that cybercrime is something that happens to other people because who wants your data, right? Well, the bad news is stealing data from people like you and me using public Wi-Fi is one of the easiest ways for hackers to make money. If you leave your Internet connection unencrypted, your passwords and credit card numbers are vulnerable.

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That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-v-p-n.com slash focused f-o-c-u-s-e-d for three months free with a one-year package start securing your internet today our thanks to expressvpn for their support of focused and all of relay fm shahid now i know how your story ends and and how this experiment has worked for you but before we talk about how that's worked for you, I want to interject a bit about digital minimalism, because this is something that I've had trouble with. And honestly, this has been an ongoing thing for me. And this is where I sound like I'm on a high horse. But all these apps, and this has been going on for years. I remember on the Mac, there used to be an app, it probably still exists, where you could push a button and it would disconnect your internet. And the only way you

could get it to work again is to literally turn your computer off and then back on again. And people had all these tools to keep themselves away from temptation. And I don't know whether it's a long meditation practice or the fact that I grew up without these tools. I don't know whether it's a long meditation practice or the fact that I grew up without these tools. I don't know what it is. But this stuff has never been a problem for me. I have Twitter. And if you follow me on Twitter, there'll be days where I'm in there a bunch. And then a week will go by and I don't tweet.

And sadly, even for the user groups for Mac Power Users and Focus, sometimes I'm active in there. the user groups for Mac Power users and focus. Sometimes I'm active in there, and sometimes when things get busy, I'm good at setting that type of stuff aside. But then lately, I started tracking how well I was sleeping, and I was able to draw a direct correlation between a good night's sleep and nights that I did not open Apple News before I went to sleep. a good night's sleep and nights that I did not open Apple News before I went to sleep. I mean, it suddenly became obvious to me that I fell into an infinity trap called Apple News and I would get myself wound up and then I couldn't go to sleep.

So I kind of see a little bit of where you're going, but I also feel like it seems so extreme to go and remove all of these tools that can be of use sometimes. But how did it turn out for you? It's turned out fantastically well. My productivity over the last few months has soared. I've accomplished more, I think, in the last few months than i had in a year and a half before um you know you you are a very unique individual because yes of course you do have

control and i suspect your years of meditation have definitely raised your consciousness to the point where your consciousness will interject more often than someone like me. I spent decades in distraction where I didn't realize that the voice in my head wasn't really me. The voice in my head was procedural. The way I like to put it is like, you know like you have procedural generation in games. It's not content created by humans. It's content created by an algorithm.

And I think a lot of the thoughts in my head were procedural. They were not conscious. They were not true original thoughts that I was intentionally thinking about. I mean, real thinking's hard work, right? I cannot agree with you more. It's something that, I don't know, at some point in my life,

I realized that my brain is just another internal organ. It's, you know, I have a heart, I have a brain, I have a leg. You know, I have these parts of me. But the difference with the brain is it's the rebellious one that fights against you. And when you get to the point that you realize that the little voice in your head does not always speak truth, it changes your life. Yeah. And if you can find the space, maybe that's where the meditation part comes in for me. can find this space.

Maybe that's where the meditation part comes in for me, because I find it easy to find this space where I will catch myself. Just the other day, Apple's had this big announcement, and I'm like, oh, Ron Moore's going to be doing something for Apple. I used to like Battlestar Galactica, and then yesterday I had a big contract to work on,

and I was thinking, oh, why don't you instead go back and watch some old Battlestar Galactica? You know, right? And then as soon as I was thinking, oh, why don't you instead go back and watch some old Battlestar Galactica? You know, right? And then as soon as I said it, I'm like, oh, there goes that rebellious organ again. Right, the monkey brain. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

And then I took the iPad. I stuck it over in my desk to charge. I went back. I wrote my contract. So, you know, it is, so much of it is, I really think, is catching that you have an instant. Because as soon as you get on the track, you're gone, you know. But I say that is all, that is all. That is all you will ever need. That's all you will ever need, right? That's absolutely enough. You need your reason to be able to step in just for an instant. And that's free will. The rest of it is not free will. You know, if you're religious, then you fight with the ideas of determinism and free will all the time. But there's your moment. If you want to get it, you need to meditate. Religious practices, spiritual practices will

ask you to contemplate. And the purpose of contemplation is clear, is to allow yourself to develop that space so that the real you, if you want to look at it from neurological terms, that bit that resides in the prefrontal cortex, that takes over. Your reasoning brain takes over. I mean, over the last few years, I've started to but there are so many people who've talked about it in so many ways over millennia. You probably are familiar with an old time author called Dorothea Brand. She's done many popular books, but one that wasn't so well known was the will, something like live and be happy, maybe. But in that she talks about the will to fail. And what she says is that what most people realize very, very quickly is that people have a will to succeed. But what they will not accept is they also have the will to fail.

In other words, there is some kind of mechanism in your head that calls you towards your destruction. And of course, if you go back to Abrahamic traditions, they call this an entity and they call it Satan. And yet, if you go to someone like Steven Pressfield, who I doubt is incredibly religious, I think he has a better religion, but he is, for me, one of the greatest descriptive authors around this phenomenon that has ever existed, especially when it comes to art. He wrote an incredible book, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners have read, The War of Art. And I'm sure just about everyone's heard of it. Absolute classic. But he calls this thing the resistance. And basically, any time you have something important to do, the resistance comes into play, and it manifests in so many ways. But again, for me, it's that voice in your head that is calling you to something lesser, whereas the real you will always call you to something higher. And then if you go to neuroscience, then there's Britain's own Professor Steve Peters, who wrote one of my favorite books of the last 10 years, The Chimp Paradox.

And he refers to that brain. He actually describes it as an independent entity. It isn't, of course, and he does clarify that it isn't. But for analytical and descriptive purposes, he calls it the chimp. And that is a lower form of thinking, one that is much more emotionally driven than the more highly evolved thinking in the prefrontal cortex, which is driven primarily by reason. But I just think it's fascinating that the exact same phenomenon you know if you if you think about meditation like monkey mind right it's the same phenomenon all the time it is disorder versus order it is emotionally driven versus rationally driven

it is impulsive versus um versus considered and conscious. Or even destructive versus constructive. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's all the same stuff, right? I mean, as a type 1 diabetic, I spent most of my life, I'm ashamed to say, letting my diabetes destroy me.

And diabetes, especially type 1 diabetes, is very much like this procedural negative voice in your head, in that it will destroy you if you don't manage it, if you don't tame it. Professor Steve Peters says that you have to box a chimp. You have to manage a chimp you have to manage your chimp what he says is you cannot defeat it because like real chimps it's they're seven times stronger than you you cannot defeat diabetes right diabetes is is there uh there's nothing you do about a type one that is so what do you do you have to manage it. And managing it is such a pain until you become conscious and you realize that if you do not hold the reins of the horse, and the horse being this wild horse that is type 1 diabetes, if you do not hold the reins, you are going to get thrown off.

And one day when you get thrown off, you are not going to get up again. And when you realize that and you think, you know what? I actually do want to live. I actually don't want to break any bones. I actually don't want to run the risk of this thing destroying me. Every single decision you make from that point on is no longer a labor decision. In fact, it's not a decision. It just becomes a value. You don't even have to decide. so when you get to the point of true consciousness about the consequences of what you're thinking and what you're doing you don't say oh you know what shall i just forget about the insulin today thought doesn't even occur to you it's like i have right right now as we're recording this podcast, I have a web browser open that displays my

interstitial blood glucose level all the time. It's there in front of me all the time. But do I think of that as information overload? No, I don't. It's essential information that helps me to prolong my life. The other great thing about it, of course, is that my wife has access to this site and she can see my blood sugar at any point, as can anyone who has the link. But the difference it makes to know rather than decide not to know is the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness. with declutter, mass declutter on my iPhone. And that is also why I went from an iPhone X,

which is the most seductive device I've ever had the pleasure of owning, back to an iPhone SE. So ignorance is not bliss. That's what you're saying. Well, it's bliss until you get thrown off the horse, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what's the biggest difference between the iPhone SE and the iPhone X for you other than you mentioned the OLED and you're drawn to the beauty of the device? It seems like you could do a digitally cluttered regardless of the device that you have. So what did the iPhone SE additionally get for you? additionally get for you it took away the last barrier of temptation i did actually start the declutter process on my iphone 10 but you know what all that beautiful black space looked too inviting i was always tempted to drag something onto it i was always tempted to do something more with it because it can do more. And the thing with the SE, twofold. The first thing was that I didn't have that beautiful expanse of gorgeous OLED space, so I didn't feel compelled to fill it. And the second thing is, actually, for me, that form factor, the iPhone SE form factor, originally seen on the iPhone 4 and then slightly expanded on the 5 and so on, is my favorite iPhone form factor of all time.

I think that is where they reached peak design for the iPhone. think the iphone 10 cuts a very close second but that screen destroys the iphone se screen obviously in in every dimension and then the other thing of course is a camera i really miss the camera but you know what the camera is an infinity pool that sounds weird doesn't it it's weird but i found okay so my icloud library has 60 000 photos photos in. What on earth am I ever going to do with 60,000 photos? Are they all carefully curated? No. Do I trust either Google or Apple to pick out the moments that mattered to me? Of course not.

So now what I do is I don't use the iPhone camera except to use scanning software to scan my receipts, which is what it's fine for. I use a real camera. I actually do have a vain attempt to preserve something I'd never witnessed in the first place because I was behind the lens of my iPhone. Yeah, I think that's probably a whole other topic and something that I've kind of struggled with over the years. I've gone through spurts where I take a bunch of pictures and I like to go back and look at the pictures and videos of my kids doing stuff. But a lot of times, if there's a cool moment happening, I want to enjoy the moment. I don't want to have to take out my phone and go to the camera, even though you can

do it without unlocking the iPhone. There's still something about grabbing a device out of your pocket that kind of forces you to disconnect from the moment. And as I think back to how fondly I recall certain experiences, I definitely connect a greater sense of joy with the ones where I wasn't worried about trying to capture it and take a picture. That's an excellent point. I mean, the thing I would like to add to that is that you are going to control the moments in which you are present. But the other people in that moment won't necessarily be present to that moment. But they might well be present in another in which you are not present. You know the way kids remember stuff that you don't and you remember stuff that your kids don't?

Right. And there are very few beautiful moments of overlap that you remember. And they're almost worth not preserving in a photograph. They're almost worth allowing both memories, because memories aren't perfect, as we all know from neuroscience. They're just associations. And for you to both have your own beautiful take rather than to refer to a picture and say, that is the authoritative take on that moment. For me, it doesn't make any sense. Even a video does not make any sense in that respect. I think, yes, for key moments, it is useful having somebody as the assigned photographer or the assigned videographer and then allow them to share the stuff afterwards.

Weddings, of course. Of course, you're going to take videos and photos and so on. Birthdays and that kind of thing. But, you know, when you see a concert now, the defining image of a concert is 10,000 people holding a smartphone aloft. And how many of those people are actually watching the band and experiencing the moment and being there? They're not even in the room in a lot of ways, you know? Right, right. Yeah.

Yeah, if I'm going to pay for a ticket, I'm not going to watch it through a two-inch screen. I don't understand that either. But, you know, I do think there is a benefit of having a camera in your pocket, and there are times when it's very useful. But it is definitely a question of moderation. And with young children, it is nice capturing some moments as well, because one day they're going to be older and just asking you for the car keys and money, and you're going to want to go back and watch some of those videos. But it makes sense. I mean, so often I see people, there's the guy, you go to a family event, and there's a guy there that has a Bluetooth earpiece in his ear, right? And he has the camera out and he's shooting the whole time. And it's like you don't even know if he is mentally in the same city as you.

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We thank Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. for their support. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. Shothead, tell us where the hard parts are, because I'm sure there's some folks listening that are thinking maybe they need to try a little bit of a digital declutter themselves. I mean, you know, what were the initial first steps you took? And where did you get itchy to reinstall and try and find hacks around some of this stuff? You know, for a while, I have not felt any impulse to reinstall anything. If anything, I've gone further down the route of removing any potential time sink.

So, for example, during the day today, I was thinking about all of the infinity pools I deleted. And it occurred to me that I needed, perhaps wanted, a decent set of screwdrivers. So I was sitting down, picked up my iPhone, went to the Amazon app, started looking for screwdrivers. In the old days, you would Google that kind of stuff. Now, I just go straight to Amazon and look at a long list of fake reviews and hope for the best, you know. And by the way, half the time when I'm delivering stuff like that, I'm not entirely serious. It's British deadpan irony and sarcasm and humor, which I know is not very, very easy to translate. But yeah, I mean, you're looking at screwdrivers, right? And you're

thinking, what am I doing? This is just as as bad as twitter so i deleted the amazon app as well and while i was at it while i was at it i deleted the ebay app now you might ask where um well what am i doing with with all all these services now well i use them i just don't use i just don't have them with me 24 7 they're not on my iPhone, but they are on my iPad. But the iPad I use in a much more strictly defined context. As to what I miss, that's a good question. I don't. I really don't, David, because the thing I found is I started to be so much more creative, so much more productive, so much more focused, I started to be so much more creative, so much more productive, so much more focused,

so much more energized with the time I now have. I feel liberated. I feel light. I feel like, you know, the only reason I'm carrying my iPhone around at all now is in case my family needs to contact me and to have a Bluetooth connection to my blood glucose monitor, which is on my arm. Other than that, I could conceivably go back to a dumb phone. I would rather not because there are some things there that I think are really, really useful.

So the banking stuff, the business stuff, the comm stuff, you know, for direct communications, the health stuff. I love Brain.fm, for example. I don't think I could do without that. That really helps me to get in the zone. It uses binaural magic gimmickry. Whatever it's doing, it's working for me. But that really helps to get me in the zone.

I use all of the activity stuff, obviously, with the Apple Watch and so on. I really don't miss the other stuff. It's interesting because I got so deeply into the YouTube hole that I subscribed to the premium thing so I could not have to waste any time watching the ads. That's a classic example of thinking, you know what? My time is worth a lot. If I just pay £10 a month, then I won't have to watch any of these pre-roll ads and I won't be interrupted by interstitial ads. Well, you know what? I was a guy who was looking to rearrange the furniture while the house was on fire because, you know, I was watching one-hour videos that were a complete and utter waste of time. Why was I trying to optimize away the advert time yes so if i really want to

be productive let me just get rid of the commercials well your time is worth a lot but your attention is worth a lot more absolutely but the thing is i mean there still is an hour gone every evening where where i was watching youtube that doesn't happen anymore so i might as well cancel the subscription right um no i think i'll keep it going i i really i can't i'm really struggling to think of anything that i really miss the the thing i miss the most i think is the iphone 10 camera because even though i've just given you a long list of reasons why I don't think it's a good idea to constantly have access to a great camera, when you have kids, there are some moments you want to capture in a video. And I don't think anything out there does video better,

more conveniently, and more shareably than the iPhone X. And I would add to that, if you're listening and you're thinking, you know, I need to use some of these tools, I want to be more productive, like Shothead, you don't need to change your phone. I mean, I think that this is all stuff you can perfectly do with your existing phone. You don't need to change hardware. And so you can have the advantage of the nicer camera or whatever. You don't have to spend money, I guess is my point, to make this happen. The problem is that when you have an iPhone 10 and you use it for a million different things,

and you take it out to take a picture or a video, and you see a notification, now you are sucked down the rabbit hole. That's the struggle for me. And yes, you can turn off your notifications and things like that, But there's always something that can steal your attention away from the thing that you're trying to apply the intentionality to. So I think it does make sense to close as many of those doors as you can. And if you do need to do it with hardware, I can definitely understand where some people might have to do that. I do agree with you, David, though, that that wouldn't be my general advice would be go go find a dumb phone somewhere. The essential phone, I think, or light phone is the one that's on Kickstarter right now, where it just gives you like calls and texts and things like that.

But yeah, I agree with you. I mean, you know, I'm not a Luddite. I'm doing what I'm doing precisely because I'm the opposite. Because I understand the pull of these things, understand how they affect me personally, understand how they were taking away valuable hours from my life. And I understand that I'm weak, you know, and I need to work around my weaknesses. This is almost a productivity hack for my own evolution. And everybody handles their evolution differently and people like um david who are far more experienced meditators than myself will have more moments where they catch themselves and therefore don't lose tons and tons of time whereas i know for a fact that i'd be a bit more like you were suggesting mike that you know you pull out the iphone 10 you take a video and suddenly you see something or you're compelled to do something, or rather you feel compelled to

do something. And it's not your fault. You know, you can't blame yourself for that. But I know my weakness. Oh, yeah. So I gave my iPhone 10 to my wife. And she's amazing, by the way. She, well, amazing in every respect, of course, but she's amazing in the sense that she only uses her phone for productivity. She never uses it to waste time ever, which is incredible. So an iPhone 10, of course, she had absolutely none of the issues that I had with. But she asked me to have a look at something on a calendar I needed to fix. We share calendars and I needed to change a setting or something. So I had a look at the screen.

I sat down with her iPhone 10, which used to be my phone 10 and you know what i felt myself drowning seriously i just looked at that beautiful screen felt the glossiness of it started looking at those deep blacks the smoothness oh my goodness it was there's something about it that really compels and attracts me because I look for these things. I'm highly attuned, as a video games developer, I'm highly attuned to high frame rates, low lag, responsiveness, beauty, aesthetics, something that the iPhone X delivers like nothing else. So it's the ultimate praise of the device that I know I need to keep clear of that temptation. Otherwise, it will get sucked in. But no, you don't have to cut it down. I had the iPhone X cut down, as I said, but I think the most important thing is,

as we said several times, develop the intentionality first, and you will no longer feel the pull. Right now, I think I've actually cured myself of that compulsive iPhone twitch where you're constantly reaching for your phone. I can spend hours not knowing I have an iPhone, which for me is the best thing that ever happened to me. Yep, that's success right there. Yeah, I mean, I keep mine on my desk and my charger most of the days when I work from home, I just have the watch if something comes through I need to see. And I think there is something to that.

Do you see yourself, is this like an all or nothing deal for you? Or do you see yourself reintroducing any of the things you've removed in the future? I don't think I will reintroduce anything i mean you're you're talking to a reformed um i guess for a former drug user about the possibility of trying some methadone for a bit see if it will cure me i i got to the point now where i don't feel that pull i don't feel the urge and cal newport makes that point he says you don't if someone is addicted to drugs, the solution isn't to take the drugs away for a week and then give them back to them.

Right, right, right. I get it. I do have a question. You mentioned the infinity pools, and you mentioned the Amazon app and the eBay app, which when you started describing those, I thought, oh, maybe that's an infinity pool, and you confirmed that it was.

Were there any other apps that you were surprised to find acted as infinity pools for you? Oh, great question. There's an oddity here. Netflix is an infinity pool, but I've been disciplined about that. I don't watch much Netflix. My family watches it, but they're not consumed by it. watch much netflix my family watches it but you know they're not consumed by it um amazon prime another infinity pool but i was never really attractive simply because i knew even before ahead of time so here's the thing infinity pools that have uh low friction to entry low barriers

to entry youtube they're the killers for me because with youtube you have a look and you think i'll find a video that's five seven minutes long that's not a lot of time and before you before you realize you watched 20 videos back to back on um your favorite fretless bass players of the 1970s and you had no intention of doing that right so? So that's the thing. You know that the on-ramp is really shallow, and so you get sucked in. But those infinity pools that have a steep ramp, the ones that tell you in advance how much they're going to cost you. So with Netflix, your price to entry is one hour. Well, one hour is a non-negotiably long period of time for me that i cannot cut out from my uh calendar at any point in the day there simply is not the hour available

and yet here's the thing if i was watching youtube right that was the worst for me if i was watching youtube then of course i'd have five ten minutes straight after dinner five ten minutes and you know what the hour that i had something else planned would have been eaten up by YouTube. Yeah. Um, other, other surprising stuff.

That's practically an infinity pool, but doesn't affect me. Um, podcast apps, because I don't think they count. Yeah. I don't, I don't think they count because you can multitask.

So you could be exercising while listening to a podcast. You could be going for a walk while going for a podcast, uh, a podcast or audible, for example. Even though I have an absolute ton of audio books in there, I don't consider an infinity pool. task with it, but you are picking and choosing authors that you care about and subjects that you care about, so the information will be condensed. And so I don't consider that an infinity pool. But the other thing also is that I'm very, very careful to be a lot more conscious in my activity now as well. So whereas previously, if I went for a walk, I would not want to leave the house without my AirPods because I'd want to be listening to something because it's all about the best use of time.

That has changed. Now my approach is I'm going for a walk, therefore I will walk. And I will be purely conscious of the walk and nothing else. I will not be lost in my thoughts. I'll be looking at the environment around me. I'll be taking in the smell of the walk and nothing else i will not be lost in my thoughts i'll be looking at the environment around me i'll be taking in the smell of the the grass which is just started to reappear you know it takes a long time to get to spring in these parts and um i'll just be awake you know and then

when i get back i will will feel very, very different. It's not quite a walking meditation. You're just being more conscious while you're doing that. But then, here's the interesting thing. When I do listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and it's often in the morning, I get up at 4.30 a.m., I will listen for half an hour, and I will not do anything else. In fact, the only other thing I might do is coffee, and that's not really an activity, because I'll want to pay attention to what I'm listening to. So that has changed. My relationship to the management of time has changed drastically. I'm much more consciously single-tasking. I'm much more focused on the thing that I'm doing

right now. Like right now, for example, in a conversation with you guys, the world doesn't exist except for two gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I'm presuming, Mike, you are also on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yep, I'm in the Midwest, so I feel your pain with spring taking forever to come. Yeah, well, I can't say anything. Mr. Sunshine, eh? It really sounds like this has been transformative for you, Shahid. I think it has.

But I also think it's going to be a journey that continues. And to be clear, that continues and to to be clear i love the iphone i think the iphone is one of the most transformative pieces of technology the world has ever seen i think it's as important an invention as a wheel i think it's as important an invention as just about anything i can think of bar perhaps penicillin. Maybe over-singing its praises. I do think it's transformative. It's changed everything. And of course, like anything transformative,

like nuclear power, it has potential immense costs if not managed well. And I'm not going to blame Apple for that. I'm not going to blame the iPhone for that. I think it's done everything it's set out to do but we have opened pandora's box simply because not because of the iphone but because our evolution just hasn't caught up yet and i think if we don't take conscious control over how we use these devices so here's the other thing that was brought up in Newport's book.

I think it was in Newport's book. Correct me if I'm wrong, because I've read a lot of stuff on this lately, is the amount of depression that we're seeing in young people. Yep. And anxiety, suicide rates. Exactly. Right. And that terrifies me. And so I think if someone like me, a technologist for decades, one of the first people in the

video games industry, and a proponent of technology is not able to set an example, then I think that would be a real dereliction of duty. And that's the thing. Duty has become increasingly important to me. My first duty is to myself. My second duty is to my family. And if I'm going to be absorbed by this device that has hijacked my evolution, I'm no good to either of those. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap it up. Thank you so much, Shahid, for coming and sharing your story. You're not alone. I mean, there's, Shahid, for coming and sharing your story.

This is, you're not alone. I mean, there's a lot of people talking about Cal Newport's book, Digital Minimalism, but I also would recommend if you're interested in this, listening to Hurry Slowly, a podcast that is very good about talking about

these types of subjects. And we started the show with you talking about taking stock, and I would like everybody listening to this to try and take a little digital stock themselves, and maybe there's some piece of this that can help you stay a little more focused. Yeah, the thing I got out of this conversation was that definition of infinity pools. I really like that. I guess prior to this, I might have called them endless feeds. But an infinity pool, that description really just helps me to realize how many of those things are still on my phone. And so while I'm dragging my feet on the full-on

digital declutter, we're about to cover this one for Bookworm. I definitely think the thing for me is to take stock of those infinity pools and probably eliminate the majority, if not all of them, off of my phone. Thanks so much, Shahid, for coming in today. My absolute pleasure. And you're going to have to keep us, or you're going to have to keep the infinity pool open

just enough to let us communicate with you, I guess, in Slack or text message. You've got to keep us in the loop on how this goes for you going forward. I have a feeling that this is going to be a long-term change for you. Well, the important thing to realize is that it's not disconnection. It's about making connections conscious. So, of course, I still use Slack. It's about making connections conscious. So, of course, I still use Slack.

I used it to chat about the setup of the call with you gentlemen earlier. It just isn't on the iPhone. Well, I think there's something to this. And, you know, I sound a little dismissive of it when I say, oh, look at me, I'm special. I can keep these things on. But I do think if... But you are special, David. But if I saw myself having a problem, like Apple News is something I'm struggling with. One of the ways I'm thinking about dealing with this is just become more deliberate and just like read a magazine or something as opposed to getting lost into the news trap because it is an endless stream of stuff. And, you know,

the way these things work, once you read one article, they're ready to feed you the next one. It tells you largely the same thing. So it's something, so that's an area that I definitely relate on. But in terms of the social media stuff, I just never got enough into it for it to become a problem. And maybe that's a different problem. I don't know. But either way, I love that this is a conversation that's taking place now. It was something that people were talking about in whispers two or three years years ago and now people are really putting this in the forefront and addressing it and i i'd like

to hope that anybody listening to this show is now thinking about it for themselves all right so where can we point people to connect with you shahid um even though they're you're not going to get the notifications on your iphone obviously well Well, they can listen to me on Remaster, which is on RelayFM. But the easiest way to reach me is Twitter still, where I'm at Shahid Kamal. Kamal is my middle name. I think Ahmed was taken. So that's probably the best way of connecting with me online. I do still use Twitter, but just not compulsively. Well, it sounds like it's working out great. And thanks again for coming on the show.

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