1. Digital villains

Five types of digital villains:

1. Digital distraction

2. Digital deluge

3. Digital dementia

4. Digital deduction

5. Digital depression could be added as well: the comparing sickness.

2. Distractions and Addictive Cognitive Garbage: Eliminate Them

Key point: technology, notifications and news media are vampires that suck our time and energy.

Many things require deep, focused work. Switching contexts is expensive. If we are distracted from writing code by a 5-minute phone call we do not lose 5 minutes, we might lose hours of excellent work.

There is more. Every time a notification, a phone call, a YouTube video distract us, our neural networks get rewired. We become more distractible. Less able to focus. More addicted to these things.

We become more stupid.

Modern tech and media are deliberately designed to make us addicted. Couple quotes from top Facebook executives about this:

• “Your behaviors — you don’t realize it but you are being programmed… you gotta decide how much you are willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence,” “my solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.” “[my kids] are not allowed to use this shit.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, former head of Growth for Facebook [1]

• “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’…exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” — Sean Parker, former President of Facebook [2]

This is not limited to social applications. The news media, from Buzzfeed to the New York Times, are overhyping threats, optimizing clickbait-y headlines, and generally doing everything they can to make us care about things that are actually totally fucking irrelevant to our lives.

That’s right — the news media that claims to keep us informed and complains about Facebook designing addictive technologies actually thrives on hijacking our minds, sucks our time and energy. And directly makes us more stressed, negative, stupid people.

Do you really want to spend your days and limited attention resources worrying about what Kim Jong-Un will do? Why. The fuck. Do you. Care?

(If you think worrying about Kim Jong-Un in fact does provide value, I challenge you to post in the comments a list of specific decisions that reading the political news helped you make in 2017, and what concrete, valuable outcomes resulted from these decisions).

Here are some ideas on how we can approach this challenge:

• This is my iPhone Home screen. It is deliberately designed to be uncluttered and trigger me to read books (Kindle), listen to podcasts and audiobooks (Overcast, Audible) and use my latest product (Mirror Emoji Keyboard). Consider removing Safari and messengers from this screen because although they are indispensable, we do not want to cue our mind to use them. There was a noticeable effect — after I got them out of sight, I stopped checking them without a good reason. Also my iPhone is switched into greyscale and dimmed (but I can’t screenshot it). The idea is to make everything less colorful/attractive/addictive (you can do this in Accessibility).

• My desktop is similarly uncluttered and minimalistic. • All my phone notifications are off except Calendar and Uber. Facebook, Instagram and similar apps are deleted.

• I have a VPN both on my Mac and on my iPhone that bans web traffic to social media and all news sites at all times.

• I add this blacklist of sites to the Mac Hosts file so that it is harder to get around the ban. Here’s a guide to doing this.

• I do use messengers/email, but no notifications. Trying to get to no more than 2–3 blocks of responses a day. I rarely pick up the phone, and never from unknown callers. Sure, we can lose some opportunities, but really, who gives a fuck? Life is full of opportunities if we have a lot of time and energy.

• I live in hotels. But if I ever buy a house, it will also be designed to trigger correct behaviors. From uncluttered rooms that cause focus, to pictures of sugar next to cancer cells in the kitchen. This shit works.

• I have not turned on a TV channel a single time for at least 10 years. Not exaggerating.

• There are physical hacks that can help stay focused by reducing incoming sensory data. My favorite are Etymotic earplugs + Bose Active Noise Cancelation headphones on top; and hoodies to reduce visual field. Useful when attractive women are around :) . I read somewhere that those of you who go to memory competitions buy blacked-out glasses and drill holes in them to further minimize vision field when focused. Want to try this, it actually makes a ton of sense given how much brainpower our vision uses.

• I ignore nearly all requests; meet with people only if I can learn something from them or they are friends; and almost never have meetings before 2pm.

• There’s lots of other things. The key point is that I relentlessly seek out reasons why I couldn’t get enough flow on a particular day and prune these reasons.

Some of you might feel this is extreme and not worth the time investment. Track how many hours you waste away on procrastination, social media, news articles etc. in a typical month. For me that number used to be several hours a day and is now approaching zero. Our investment in controlling our infospace pays for itself many times over. And it is easy once habituated.