A couple weeks ago, frustrated by the extent to which I was finding focus once again very hard to come by, I deleted a bunch of apps from my phone. This is — obviously — not a novel idea. Many people have done this dance. I report here simply that by deleting the following from my phone, my temptation to look often at it throughout the day has plummeted:

• Mail
• A feed reader¹
• Strava

My temptation has not fallen to zero, of course. I can still log into social media via their mobile websites on Safari (though I may just go ahead and perma-block these for myself on my iPhone, too). But it has fallen significantly, and the results have been very good for me.

Now, reading my email or catching up on RSS feeds is not a killing-time or an early-in-the-day thing I do easily and thoughtlessly. It is something I go to my laptop to do actively and consciously. It is a task rather than an ongoing habit. That goes double for Strava, because its web app is unbearably slow and therefore quite tedious to use.

This has had exactly the effect I hoped: it has opened up time and concentration to spend on other things I care about much more. To wit: reading, writing, and composing. More on all of those as they go, but I finished three books this week and made progress on another, and I chalk a lot of that down to the simple reality that it was much easier not to flip over to a phone that had many fewer “easy” reads on it than to just keep reading the book I had willed myself to begin, and the reading of which profits me much more.

(Bonus: I also started clearing out subscriptions from my feed reader on my desktop app: Look, if I haven’t read any of the articles from that feed in the past three months, maybe I’m not actually going to. I don’t have to unsubscribe. But I probably should. So I did. This, too, was freeing and good.)

None of this is new. We all know this at this point! But each of us does now need to decide, from observing our own habits, what can stay and what has to go. For lots of folks, even folks who enjoy endurance sports and some light “social media” around it, Strava wouldn’t even make the list of distractions. Why it does for me, I haven’t a clue, but it does, so it got the axe.

Here’s to getting our focus back and to doing work we care about more. I think, and hope, I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the months ahead.

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Notes

1. I was bouncing between ReadKit and NetNewsWire ↩︎