How to Use Your Phone... So That It Doesn't Use You | Tim Ferriss

this is tim ferriss and i'm going to share a bit simply on how i use my phone and prevent my phone from using me now if if you look at this you can't see it from here but it's on airplane mode and that will be relevant there are just a few rules that i follow and have followed for a very very long time uh the first is no email app on my phone we'll talk about that the second is no social media apps on my phone that is actually new to the last six to nine

months although we'll talk about the ability to post without consuming social media or being exposed to feeds and then you have airplane mode and silence all right so i'm going to attempt to remember those there are other tips and tricks and specifics we can get into but i'm going to try to keep it simple so the first is no email app on my phone i don't have mail set up on my phone i do not have anything that shows me unread messages in my inbox if i need to check email on my phone which i

will otherwise do at scheduled intervals via laptop then i will do it through a browser how inconvenient is that and that is exactly the point there are friction points that you can use to your benefit when you're trying to prevent compulsive behaviors conversely if you're trying to develop a new habit you want to remove those friction points but if there's something that you do thoughtlessly or compulsively like check email use social media you want to insert friction points all right so in the case of email i use the browser on the phone if need be

otherwise there's no app so i get no alerts whatsoever second social media so i've deleted all social media apps from my phone precisely because i was using them compulsively and these are very well designed and they become more and more addictive over time because there are billions of dollars being put into research and development to ensure that that is the case so i deleted these apps on my phone and one might recognize that i also post to social media so how does one pull this off there are various apps that you can use to post

as a business or as a person who needs to post without actually being exposed to your feed or other people's posts i use as one example only pult o-n-l-y-p-u-l-t to post to instagram without seeing a feed without seeing anything because if i have instagram on my phone i'll sit down i'll say a toilet in the bathroom and i'll be like oh i'm just gonna take a quick look at instagram and then 20 minutes later i'm still in the toilet right that is not actually helpful for my productivity or for my life or anything all right

so only paul is an example having social media off of my phone by the way having email off of my phone has had exactly zero zero irreversible negative consequences sure maybe somebody gets miffed about something small all easily repaired okay and i've tested these for a while now all right then we have silent mode and we have airplane mode i try to put my phone on airplane mode after dinner and i keep it on airplane mode until i'm ready for input the following morning this is important so whenever possible i try to have the first

few hours of the day for meditation for journaling for possibly writing or creative projects before bending my perception and sort of warping my priorities with an assault of inbound all right i'm sure everyone has experienced sort of apnea of picking up your phone and seeing an entire slew of notifications and text messages and pings from slack and so on all right so airplane mode is very helpful for that my phone is always on silent there's not a single close friend of mine i don't think who has ever heard my phone ring okay and there are

a few reasons for this number one i want to be in command of my time and i don't want everyone else's agenda to become my to-do list most calls that are coming in out of the blue can either wait or they're spam and furthermore i do work on my laptop and i can still batch checking say imessage which i don't have pop-up notifications for or incoming phone calls at every few hours as an interval or something like that so the overarching point that i want to make with this is that we dramatically overestimate our own

importance and we dramatically overestimate the urgency and importance of anything on social media i have been nothing but more productive since closing the door on as much inbound as possible and when i say dramatically overestimating our own importance i mean generally speaking people watching this video are not the president of the united states they are not emperor of the world and the world will keep moving people will figure out solutions to their own problems they'll call other people if you don't reply immediately or they can wait an hour they can wait two hours they can

wait three and everything is fine so those are a few thoughts on phone management and using your phone instead of having it use you you