TJ Walker argues that in the attention economy people must intentionally carve out screen-free time to ‘listen to yourself’ and enable original thinking. He describes his daily routine as concrete examples: a 10-minute guided breathing meditation first thing in the morning, a one-hour to 1h15 phone-free walk with a paper pad to capture ideas, short daily hot-tub relaxation (~15 minutes), and an evening rule of no screens one hour before bed (typically 9:00 pm) plus no electronics in the bedroom so he can wake naturally. These practices are presented as ways to protect attention, foster creativity, improve sleep, and design one’s life rather than react to others’ content.
Questions this video answers
10 minutes
About one hour to one hour and 15 minutes
One hour before bed (typically 9:00 pm)
He ventures "99%" of the world
Chapters
You must listen to yourself. Today, the biggest asset you have is your attention. And we live in a modern economy where our digital overlords are making fortunes out of us by controlling our attention, by selling our attention, our eyeballs, our ears, to marketers at Amazon, and I love Amazon at Facebook, and I love Facebook, YouTube and Google and Instagram and Netflix. Everyone is going after your eyeballs, your attention. And it's extraordinarily easy to go through every waking moment surrounded by other people's ideas, other people's content, other people's information, what other people want you to look at. The problem is, if you do that, you can't really listen to yourself. You cannot listen to other people's ideas, other people's content, and listen to your own brain foam in ideas, gestate ideas, play with ideas, all you can do is react and absorb other people's ideas. So it is critical. It is absolutely critical, I believe, if you want to be a successful person, an intelligent person, a well rounded person, a well adjusted person and a fulfilled person, to carve out certain sections of your time each and every day so that you can only listen to yourself. And what I mean by that is time when you're not looking at any screen. And I do realize there's a certain irony here because I'm asking you to look at this screen right now and listen to me. But I do want you to figure out, even put it on your schedule, set times every single day when you can just listen to yourself, that own voice in your head telling you what you think about the world, ideas, your profession, your personal life, listen to yourself. So many people get obsessed with the idea. I can't possibly be bored for even one second. The second I get up, I have to look at email. The second I get up, I have to check social media. The second before I go to sleep, I have to see how many likes my most recent post got on Instagram. And what that does is it just destroys your ability for your own brain to communicate with you, for your own brain to even create new ideas. And it makes you and me willing pawns in other people's games, in other people's life success stories. Now, I have no problem with other people being successful. And yes, Mark Zuckerberg deserves to be a billionaire. But I don't just want to help other people. I want to help you and I want to help me live our own lives. We can't do that if we don't sit down and fundamentally listen to what's going on in our own brain. Listen to our own ideas percolating up. So let me give you some very practical tips of how I do this. And so much of it just revolves around carving out time where you know, you're not going to be looking at a computer, at a cell phone, a screen, an iPad, or even listening to music. You're going to be listening to yourself. That is key. So I'll just walk you through a typical day of mine. For starters, early in the morning, after I get up to have one cup of coffee, no sugar, I will meditate. Now this is slight aberration from the other things I'll tell you about because I do have headphones on. I am plugged into my cell phone, but I'm listening to a meditation tape that I made in my own voice where all I'm doing is telling myself to breathe in, breathe out, to relax, think of nothing and just focus on my breathing. It's just 10 minutes long, but it's a classic meditation technique where I'm trying to just clear my mind, not think of anything. Do other thoughts pop in? Sure. It's about trying to push them away and to just focus on the breathing in and breathing out. So that is one part of my day right at the beginning where I'm not looking at any other screens. I'm not letting anyone else's ideas in my brain. I am just meditating. Absolutely. An important way to kick off my day. Now typically after I do this show with you, I try to do a one hour walk without a cell phone. Seeing nature. Some people could call this a meditative walk. I don't know if it's that intense, but the whole point is I'm in my own thoughts. And I take a little pad. I think I have one right here. I just take an old fashioned piece of paper, a pad and a tiny little pen. And when I have ideas, I write them down, people. So that's one of the most important parts of my day is going for that walk. Hour, hour and 15 minutes a day. It's great exercise too, but this is where I can listen to myself come up with creative ideas. Absolutely critical. Now, you might not have the time or interest in walking for an hour and a half a day. For you it could be just sitting in a chair, closing your eyes and not listening to any kind of music or sound or looking at any screens. There's different ways of doing it. I relax in a hot tub when the bubbles on full blast. I try to do that for 15 minutes a day. This I have found helps me sleep A lot better. I used to, when I'm in the hot tub, check iPads and cell phones and make calls and all sorts of things. Now I don't do that. I give this time to myself to just think, relax, focus on big picture issues, reflect and listen to myself. Now moving towards the end of the day. You've heard me mention this before. In order to foster good sleep and sleep patterns, I do not look at any cell phone, any screen, any electronics one hour before going to bed, typically 9 o' clock at night. I then read a book. Now that's not completely listening to myself because I am looking at the ideas that someone has put forth in a book. But at least I'm getting away from screens and it's a more contemplative experience to look at a book. You can stop, think, write down a note and then the final act. In many ways, the most important act is once I go to sleep, absolutely no electronics in the bedroom. I don't have a cell phone, I don't have an iPad. Well, TJ, how are you possibly going to wake up if you don't have your iPhone alarm right there? Well, guess what? I go to bed in time so that I can wake up naturally. I'm not short changing my body's natural rhythm of when it needs to sleep and wake up. So you don't need an alarm clock if you actually go to bed at the right time. Are there medical exceptions? Sure, but the vast majority of the world, I would venture 99% of the world, if you just went to bed when you should, you won't ever need an alarm clock. Therefore you won't need that cell phone in your bedroom. Electronics free, no screens in the bedroom. So that's really nine hours because it's the hour before I go to sleep and then eight hours of sleep. So when you add it all up, there's a lot of time every single day when my brain has the luxury of not being bombarded by other people's ideas from cell phones, from laptops, from ipods, from iPad. I'm dating myself. Ipod, iPads and TV screens. This allows me to listen to myself, to come up with my own ideas, to figure out what's important to me, to try to plan my own lifestyle, to design my own lifestyle, to figure out what habits do I want to keep, what do I want to get rid of, what do I want to create new for you so that you've got new courses and books that I have to offer to help you, which also helps me. That's why I believe it's critical for everyone. For me, for you, and for. And anyone who wants some semblance of sanity in this world to carve out time where they can listen. Where you can listen just to yourself. You cannot listen to yourself and be listening to other voices coming from the black mirror, from your cell phone, from any other electronic dev.
