Absolutely Nothing
Part 4 of my series on what I'd tell my 17-year-old-self in vain, because he thought he knew it all, about time, and how he was not immortal
Today we'll continue with part 4 of the series about what I'd have said to my 17-year old self making Jet Set Willy, and this time, it would be a warning rather than a lesson, an attempt if you like, to rewrite a future I never lived.
When was the last time you did nothing? I don't mean the last time you wasted, because we all do too much of that, I mean absolutely nothing. Like staring out of a window, as I just did, not day-dreaming, just witnessing; not judging, just observing; not analysing, just seeing?
Why not try it now? Look out of a window, or just relax your focus if you don't have a window. No objective, just relax. Notice how as the noise in your head recedes, how time slows down? If you don't feel it, you're still attached to analysis, reduction and judgment. Keep practicing. Increase the time you do it. Some people call this mindfulness, but it's really mind-emptiness, and in those rare moments you achieve it, time slows right down and you can almost hear the echoes of childhood, when your day wasn't fractured into a million pieces so that there was no whole to ever pick up again and examine, let alone to reflect upon or re-examine.
I'd tell my 17-year-old self to remember this feeling, because one day, you'll rob yourself of it and you'll wonder where the decades went and by the time you realise what you've done, you'll be writing letters to your 17-year-old self and you'll feel a bit silly.
There are two things I'd say. First, enjoy doing nothing, absolutely nothing. It's crazy that I have to describe "nothing", and I doubt my younger self would understand, but my God I'd try. I'd be trying to explain a madness that I had yet to experience: The madness of always-on-devices; of a 24-hour news cycle whose food is human anger and misery; of infinite entertainment on demand, available anywhere, at any time, on any device; of always-on-availability — forget taking your phone off the hook, people will be able to reach you in a million different ways through a million different means and you will have welcomed it and then you will want to run from it, but it will be too late and you will never be able to go back to not having a smart phone, despite all the glossy Punkt adverts.
So what have I tried to help me recapture some of that feeling of space, of time, of undiluted focus?
Well, my iPhone has been my drug of choice for many years, so I took the following deliberate steps:
I started using Screen Time for a few weeks so that I could effectively perform a self-intervention. This told me what I had feared, that I was wasting too much time on this seductive device.
Then I took a sledgehammer to my notifications and badges, reducing the amount of haptic, visual and auditory interruptions to a bare minimum.
Then I removed all the “Infinity Pools”, an idea that I had written about, but had never been able to articulate succinctly until I came across the definition in “Make Time”, a thoroughly useful and actionable book by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. This meant no Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or Amazon apps. Pretty much every single game, bar the ones I’m actively developing were removed too. Once I understood what an Infinity Pool was, I realised that the overwhelming sense of paralysis that comes from more choices than one can handle had no place in my life. Too much choice meant no choice.
I simplified my home screen massively, more on this later.
Oh and of course, and this was hard, and probably not necessary, but I ditched my beautiful iPhone X and bought a refurbished iPhone SE. This made the phone harder to operate and less appealing to just gaze at. That I then went to an iPhone 11 Pro Max is neither here nor there, I used the cameras mainly, and I liked the larger screen because I'm an old git. Another note to younger self would be "look after your diabetes, so that your eyes don't get trashed, because they will, and once they are, you'll never get them back the way they used to be and you'll have to read large text". Then I recently ditched it to go to the recent iPhone SE.
I now use the iPad more, but I tend to be deliberate about how I use that too. My iPads have notifications disabled too, with a focus on productivity apps on the home page. I put everything in folders and name them with verbs like "Create" and "See"
I have all notifications automatically turn off at 9pm when I go upstairs to bed for a 10pm lights off, and they don’t come back on again until 7am. We just don’t need to be bothered at these times unless it’s an emergency, and unless it’s family; so-called emergencies are rarely real emergencies. On the iPhone, you can set it up so that favourite contacts can call you outside of your disabled notifications period. I'm sure all this is possible on Android devices too.
My next evolution will be to turn off notifications from 5pm to 11am. I haven’t been bold enough to take that step yet, but it’s coming.
I tend to use the search function to find what I need when I need it, rather than letting the seductive screen of my iPhone SE let the tail wag the dog. I don't want to be driven by what's there. I want to be driven by what's in here.
I keep my home screen fairly empty for this reason. I like a clean desktop so I figured, why not take the same approach with my iPhone? Everything else is mostly in folders on the second screen and barely gets looked at.
I am trying to reverse the role of technology in my life to its original promise and premise, which was to be a tool, not the end. For so many of us, technology is the beginning, middle and end. I am focussing on it being the middle, that is, the thing that I use and choose to get from the beginning to the end. Sometimes I will choose other, non digital tools, like good old fashioned pen and paper.
For planning, I still use paper. Why? Well it's outside the frame. I don't want everything to be in the frame, even if that's where most of my stuff is created or lives.
I have stopped beating myself up about life not turning out the way I had planned, even an hour in advance. The idea that we are in control of just about anything is becoming increasingly absurd to me as I grow older. Sure, I can control how I think about things, and sometimes, you hit your plan, and that's wonderful. What's the saying? "Man plans, God laughs". That said, it's important that I plan, otherwise nothing gets done, I'm no advocate of drifting.
I have had a growing sense that I was not using my time as intelligently and as carefully as I wanted to. With every passing year, the life ahead of me shrinks and the life behind me grows. That takes options away, which means fewer of the things I had hoped to do are now possible.
That said, I welcomed Screen Time on the iPhone. I knew I was abusing my iPhone, or if you like, I was allowing it to use me. I was its willing victim. Screen Time told me that the problem was far worse than even my worst case estimates had prepared me for. Once the results were in, I took immediate action, and continue to chip away at the problem of unconscious time. Life is not about what I spend my time on, it's about how conscious I am. Remember to do absolutely nothing and just notice that you are here, now.
I've learned that before I climb a ladder, I need to ensure it's leaning against the right building. For example, I paid for YouTube Premium so that I wouldn't have to sit through or skip ads when I watched YouTube videos for an hour at a time. The trick was to take YouTube off my phone and stop watching videos mindlessly. What's the point of not watching adverts when you'll end up watching someone a third your age teaching you how not to waste your time? Galling doesn't begin to describe it, and more fool me.
I love the services I've minimised. They're not to blame. The iPhone is not to blame. Apps that exploit our weaknesses are not to blame. There is no blame here. There is only responsibility and I am responsible for how I spend my time.
I use my iPhone camera a lot less. I use my Sony mirrorless camera for photos and a DJi Osmo Pocket for video instead, and less frequently. I have become more mindful about their use. We spend so much time capturing moments that we forget to experience them.
A problem I thought about for a long time was the problem of curation. I have over 70,000 photos in my close to 2TB iCloud Photo library. My grandfather probably only had two or three photos in his house. Ever. I wondered when I'd ever find the time to select the best of those photos for review and realised that the time would never come, so the real problem was not curation, but over-capture. Over capture, over tracking, just kicks the can further down the road. So I don't capture everything digitally. I try and write about it instead, often on paper.
I am more conscious today than perhaps I was a decade ago which means I have more time, which in turn means that I get to do more of the things I want to do, rather than what I feel compelled to do. If you can't say "no" to things you'd rather not do, or "yes" to things you would, then you're not free. In that sense, I have engineered a life with more freedom. Enough freedom for me anyway.
Life is longer to the extent that we are conscious of each moment. You know how sometimes you wake up and feel like you only went to sleep a minute ago? With modern devices a whole lifetime could pass like that. I'm determined for that not to happen to me. So I'd tell that boy that one day, his dream device would be made, and he'd love it and it would be called a smartphone, but to never pick up that device without conscious intention. If you can master that, you con do pretty much anything.
It’s not hard for me to have no apps in my iPhone’s homescreen. After I’ve read this a couple of times, it became clear I needed to change my habits, homescreen and apps too. The only apps I have in my dock are Phone, Bullet Journal (companion app) and iMessage.
But, when it comes to my iPad Pro, it becomes hard what to put in my dock and homescreen. I mainly use it for sending emails, study the Bible (using an app for that) and do research on certain websites using Safari. Also, for my volunteering work, I use Files a lot do to high use and reference pdf documents.
I’m wondering what your, Shahid, iPad homescreen looks like. Could you shed some light on that? Thanks for your articles. It really inspires me to use technology for what it is; a tool. And spend time on what matters most.