Own Your Phone: Small Decisions That Add Up to Real Focus

Welcome to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. I'm Josh Negron, and this show's all about sharing lessons, ideas, and strategies that sharpen your thinking, strengthen your habits, and push you to grow beyond comfort zones. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the show. Uh, today I'm coming to you on location from MCO, Orlando International Airport. And there's a conference down here that I'm a part of. And so why not record an episode in a beautiful hotel room? Today, I wanted to talk about continuing to optimize focus. And we talked about this in previous episodes, but specifically I want to hone in today on the usage of your cell phone. Now, this isn't going to be an episode where we're going to talk about detoxing from our phones and putting them away. Let's approach it with the mindset that it is a device that we are going to use. If you want to go and get yourself a flip phone, Then hey, who am I to stop you? But for the rest of us that need our smartphone, or at least let's face it, we're going to use them. I'd like to talk about a few things that I thought were really helpful in allowing me to slowly optimize and changing it from the device using me, seemingly so, to me using the device. Now, I think you know what I mean. There's been times when we've picked up our phone, you had something in your mind to do, and then all of a sudden, You didn't know what you were doing, or maybe you were getting to that app. Maybe it's your to-do list or your email. You needed to send something, but then you saw one notification or one popped up, or maybe you saw a banner notification come down and you're like, yeah, I gotta answer that text message. And then you answer the message. Well, what was I actually doing? There's other times where you pick up your phone, you open it and you just start doing some stuff. And 5 to 10 minutes later, you're like, man, why did I even open this? So it's instances like this that we want to be aware of and start to build systems to optimize ourselves back to a place where we're controlling our device more often than it's controlling us. One of the ways you can do that is through things like Screen Time. Now, if you're an iOS user, you may know what Screen Time is. It's something they've had for several years now where you can go in and look at your usage. Android phones have their version of this as well. And my encouragement to you in step 1 of this is awareness, just going in there and looking, because people will say, well, I don't spend that much time on social media or whatever. And I think sometimes when I look at those weekly reports that it sends me that notification, it's usually on Sundays. There are times where I'm like, man, yeah, that's more than I expected, to be honest. And so just go in there and look, look around. It'll show you things like how long you've been on your device altogether. It'll show you the most used apps. You can go by day or by week. And then you can see pickups, daily pickups. That's an interesting metric. Which just shows you how many times you picked up your phone in a day. Sometimes mine has been as high as 160 pickups. What am I doing? And so at that point, we're not, we're not making any judgments. We're just looking to see if we can identify what are opportunities for improvement. Like we talk about, this is a natural thing for us. We talk about this often. So what are those things? What are those apps? What are those notifications that are triggering those pickups? So these are the things that I think need your most attention. So remember, This is data before decisions. You just want to get the information so that you can make the best decisions moving forward. Identify your lowest hanging fruit, the easiest things to change. And if there's an app on that list of the most used apps, is it one that you're like, yeah, I'm okay if I give that up? That's easy. Now, it's most likely that if it's in the highest used apps count, you're probably not going to delete it. But there's going to be others where maybe they're part of your pickups or your notifications. Are any of those ones that you're like, nah, I'm good if I don't get notified of that app, then that's a great place to start. This is going on the concept of making permanent micro decisions. And so these are decisions that are meant to create a compound effect over time. So if there's an app that you decide, you know what, I don't need notifications from this app anymore. Once you delete and deactivate those notifications, you get all of those microseconds back From now into the future. Now imagine if you do that for multiple apps, multiple days, you see where I'm going with this. So this can create kind of a flywheel over time that gains momentum. So you're like, I don't know where to start. Well, Screen Time's gonna be a great way for you to do that. Identify certain ones that you're like, yeah, I don't need these. Another one's gonna be going through your phone and seeing where the red badges are. Now, some of you are so OCD, you're like, dude, you're implying I have red badges right now? That's crazy. Anyone who has those is a psychopath. Well, hello, I must be one because I just can't keep up with them all. And so that's a great exercise. And some of them I feel like are just geared against you. Have you ever gone into an app, cleared all the notifications, gone out of it, and it's still got a badge? I mean, that's crazy, right? So they're really trying to keep you in their ecosystem, in their app. They don't have your best interest at heart at all in this deal. So if it's an app that you're like, I don't really need those, go in there and deactivate at least the badges because whether or not it drives you crazy, it could draw your attention. It could distract you on your phone. The next step is, is just dealing with notifications as you get them. So when you receive a notification from an app, pause for just a second and ask yourself, is this a notification that I need or I want? Or if you want to kind of do it in a specific session, a lot of times, unless you clear every single notification that you receive, you can just swipe up in the lock screen of iOS, and you'll see a bunch of notifications from that day. And I want you to ask those questions. Is this an app that I want notifications from, from now into the future? If the answer is no, swipe left, and you should be able to clear those not just now, but also stop all future notifications altogether. You don't even have to go in the settings anymore. You can just do it right there from the notification. Huge game changer. Because when you swipe left, you're going to get view options. And then at that point, you can put turn off. Huge advantage for you. Another one I like to do is going through my my app updates occasionally. So about once a week, I'll go in my App Store and then I go into app updates and just check out the apps that have recently updated. And that's a perfect opportunity that I can take to see apps and I'm like, I didn't even know that was still a thing. And then I can again, just swipe left, hit delete, boom, and I can delete the app right there. Another good one is in your email. Man, email will suck your soul if you let it. And if you're like me, I have like 9 different email accounts for different places and different purposes. And so it can be super, super time And all of them get junk mail all the time. And so I kind of do the same approach with email as I do with notifications. Now you can go into your email and just triage and go into a bunch of them and highlight them. And usually most email clients now have advanced ways for you to unsubscribe from things. So you don't have to go into the email, scroll to the bottom and do that old school thing. They have buttons that you can just click. And some of them even have buttons that you can click that simultaneously unsubscribe you and delete all past emails from that source. Pretty sweet. One button does it all way faster. So that's something I love to do from the notification side. But also if I got a little extra time, you can clean up a lot of stuff in your email. And again, you're getting that off your plate from now till forever. All of these things, what we're doing are like just tiny little micro tweaks to get ourselves an extra couple seconds back. Every couple days, over time that adds up and just kind of clears the digital clutter, if you will. Another one I've started doing recently is I get a lot of marketing texts because I've signed up for things of like, hey, you get 10% off, 15% off, get on our text list, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then I might not use their service for years. So when I get those texts, then I ask myself, have I used this app? Have I used this service in 6 months to a year? The answer is no. All right. Guess what? I'm texting stop. Chances are if I need something from them again, I'll just go search for them and get what I need. And I think this is a good semi-passive system of all of these things to take action as they come, 'cause they're already distracting you. Now take them reaching out to you as an opportunity for you to claim your time back. They're essentially raising their hand for you to judge them. And then you get to say, you know what? No, I'm good. And so try it out this week, do it with some emails, do it with some notifications, and even maybe see if you need to delete some apps. Again, this isn't about digital detoxing and putting your phone away, but it's about knowing where your time is going, what is distracting you so that you can own your phone. Now, this next one is an interesting one that I had not heard of before, but it was something that I thought was interesting. So recently iOS got the ability to have tinted icons and even like scaling it down to have way less color. than what they all come with stock. And I was somebody that did that early on because I thought it looked cool. But this was something that was suggested as something to try to make your phone less fun-looking and less gamified. So they said, find a way that you like to grayscale out your icons, tint them a certain way, or even make them with the Liquid Glass, make them, you know, closer to clear or just less colorful. And that this is a way for you to kind of make the phone itself way more boring because it's less colorful, less distracting, And then you're looking for only what you need and what you're looking to do. It's an interesting idea. I don't know if that's how it worked for me, but I thought it looked cool at the time. Sometimes it made it harder to find apps because sometimes the pattern recognition in your brain is actually looking for a certain color combo. And when you get rid of the color, you realize that those things are things that your brain uses to map out your phone essentially. And so when those things are gone, it can make it, you're like, a little more frustrating to find an obscure app, especially when it's inside of a folder and it's that tiny little guy that you're like, wait, is it in that folder? Is it in that folder? Your mileage may vary on that, but I thought it was an interesting thing to try, so I wanted to mention it. So this last step is where we really get into throttling some things. So let's say on the very beginning when you did your audit and you're like, man, the time on social media was much more than I thought. What can I do about that? Well, Thankfully, there's amazing tech in our phones these days that you can really leverage. In Screen Time, you can go into limiting apps individually themselves. So if you notice that it's, you know, Instagram itself that's really bleeding your time or TikTok or whatever, you can go in there and limit the time for even particular times of day or durations or all sorts of things that might better fit your schedule or your life. Or there's also categories. So you can map out certain things to fit categorically, whatever it fits for you. If there's, if you're like, no, it's all social media. Like, I need to stay off of it until whatever. You can go in there and really customize to your heart's content. There's also, like we've talked about in the previous episode about Focus, taking advantage of Focus modes. You can control which apps and which app types are allowed to notify you. You can make it really, really narrow or maybe widen it out a bit, just depending on what your purpose is. And so those kinds of things can really help you kind of customize what your phone is doing, again, to keep you in the driver's seat. Sure, the easiest solution is just, you know, leaving it in the other room, But if you want to have more control while having the device, again, these small, tiny decisions that you can make are ones where you can get your time back one app, one notification at a time. Because remember, we're not just stopping that notification today. We're stopping from getting it 7 more times that day and then 7 more times tomorrow. You get the picture. Now, that's not to say that putting your phone in another room is a bad idea all the time. There's plenty of people that I know that part of their nightly routine or even their family routine is, hey, phones go over here. After this time, no phones at dinner. That's an awesome one. I have been working on getting my phone off the table and then getting it away from the dinner table because that's such a special time that you can have with your friends and your family. And so the phone can really be a distracting thing. There's a lot of articles out there that talk about what it does psychologically for someone who's eating with you when you have your phone on the table. And how much worse it is if the phone's facing up. It's like, hey man, you're important to me right now, but if that thing buzzes, it's more of that, you know? It just sends a psychological quiet message that I don't think most people intend on communicating to the people they care about. So this whole episode was practical step after practical step. Let's review. The first thing is taking a look at your phone and looking at what is taking your time and where are you putting your time. There's going to be a difference. You're going to know if, you know, sometimes YouTube is 4 hours a day and I'm like, yeah, I know. I watched 4 podcasts today. Makes total sense. Or, you know, 2 long podcasts. So just look at that. And if it's something that you're like, yeah, no, I know that's totally, yeah, you know, I had a billion people text me today. So I know that was a couple hours in text messages, whatever. Maybe you were in a particular AI app building something or having conversations with, yeah. Totally makes sense. But then there's other things that you may not expect that might surprise you. You're like, oh man, didn't know that was there. That's interesting. So even for the first couple days, just do some observing, see what the patterns are, and then you'll know. Now, some of the things, like I said, some of them will be easy decisions. You're like, I don't need notifications from that app. Let's turn those off. But inform first, then start making these micro decisions, and then just make it a habit. The more you do that, the more you're going to get in the habit of catching those things in the moment as they happen. When you download a new app, If it asks for access to notifications, maybe say no at first, unless it's something you absolutely need. You know, like you're downloading Slack for communication at your work, probably want to turn those notifications on. They may not be too happy with you if you don't. So we're just looking at ways we can make those micro decisions every single day, one badge, one notification, one app, one marketing text at a time. So a great way to view this is we're not talking about going back to a Nokia brick, although that is pretty nostalgic and indestructible. We're talking about how we can make sure that every time we do pick up our phone, it's on purpose. We're doing it for a reason, and there's something we have to do. People say all the time, I'm too busy. I don't have enough time. Well, that single device, this one thing, is responsible for stealing so much of our time. So the more you're in the steering wheel, I would argue, the more time you will get back. And that is so valuable. Thanks for listening to the Optimizing Beyond podcast. Remember, growth happens when you take action. So subscribe, share this with a friend, and most importantly, put what you learned into practice. And until next time, remember, daily anything changes everything.