Killing My Phone

Or at least crippling it

This may look like a post about writing, but it isn’t. Not really. It’s a post about productivity. So, a little bit of background for you…

If you’re a writer, and you’re not listening to the Novel Marketing podcast from Thomas Umstattd Jr, then you should be. Add it to your list. It’s one of the three writing-related podcasts that I listen to routinely in the car these days, along with the WriterDojo and Your Next Draft.

The Dojo and YND are new enough that, if you really wanted to, you could binge-listen to all their older episodes. Not so with Novel Marketing, which has been around for more than a decade.

Oh, wait. You’re a GenX type, like me, and you’d rather poke out your eyeballs than listen to Yet Another Podcast?

Never fear, Thomas has us covered. Every one of his podcasts gets turned into a blog post as well. Which is frickin’ awesome, because he often references previous shows and other resources on the web. You can listen to the show if you have the time, read the blog post if you don’t, and you always have the links to the resources you need.

Anyway! I often find myself listening skipping around and listening to older shows. So I wasn’t surprised to see that I’d missed an episode called “Why Your Book is Still Unfinished (Hint: It’s Your Phone’s Fault)”

It’s a really short listen—less than 20 minutes—but it’s possibly one of the most impactful writing podcasts I’ve heard to, period. Absolutely take the time to go listen to it at some point. If you don’t have time for that, like I said, you can go read the blog post. If you don’t even have time for that, let me play Inigo for you…

"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

1. Your phone is primarily a tool for consuming information.

2. The more time you spend consuming media on your phone, the less time you spend on other devices (like your laptop) that are geared towards production.

3. The average person spends four hours a day on their phone.

4. If you want to be more productive, you need to get off your phone and back onto your laptop (or typewriter, or notepad, or whatever it is you use to create).

OK, let’s circle back to that “four hours a day” claim. It can’t be that bad, right? I mean, maybe it’s a little bit extra here and there, but surely…?

Go, check. Apple phones will show you Screen Time; Android phones have something similar, I’m told. Thomas said to go check, so I went. I checked.

Four hours and seven minutes a day, on average, for me.

… crud.

Sure, you can say, “Oh, that’s just replacing TV.” Fine. How many of you come home, eat dinner, and spend the entire evening, every evening, watching TV? No books, no conversations, no writing?

Here’s what happens. You phone is designed to be attractive (duh!). It has super-saturated colors to draw the eye, because that’s what we respond to. So it’s birghter and more colorful and more exciting that anything around us.

On top of that, it is always clamoring for our attention. There’s frequent dings, chimes, and other notifications to distract you from whatever it is that you’re concentrating on. It’s never just one thing, either. Once you pick up the phone, too, there’s plenty of things - badges, unread message counts, and the like - to draw you in to other activities.

What that all means is you go to read a message from your spouse, then you read your email, check the weather, pop into Facebook to catch up, shared a funny cat meme, and suddenly it’s twenty minutes later. Whoof.

What can you do to fix that?

Option one, you can just “man up” and be strong, I suppose. Except that’s frickin’ stupid. Seriously. You’re going to use your own amazing willpower to fight against a host of UI designers and behavioral psychologists who are purposefully hacking your perception and response systems to suck you in? Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen. Besides, there’s good evidence willpower is a limited resource; how about we save it for when we need it, eh?

Option two, you turn off all the things that let your phone manipulate you. Get rid of the bright colors. Get rid of the constant interruptions. Stop picking up your phone when it tells you to, and start using it when you decide you want to. In short, take advantage of two amazingly simple suggestions:

Turn on grayscale, and turn off all notifications.

Simple. Remove the colors, remove the interruptions, and see what happens.

Turning on grayscale is pretty self-explanatory. “All” notifications calls for a little more details. It means lock screen notifications, banners, and badges. So my phone doesn’t tell me on the home screen when there’s a new email. When I open the phone, it doesn’t show me there’s a new email. There’s nothing on the lock screen, home screen, or on any app icon to encourage me to go use it unless I want to do so.

Now, I didn’t turn off all notification. I already have things set up so that I get texts and calls from my wife, no matter what. There are a few security-related notifications I get on my phone that I still want to know about. Aside from those, though, I locked down just about everything that wanted to beep, buzz, or warble at me.

What’s that going to mean for you? I can’t really say, but I can tell you what happened for me, because I did this Monday morning.

This week, my average daily screen time is down to about half of what it has traditionally been. I’ve gone from over four hours a day to a little over two hours on my phone. The biggest culprit and time suck is still Facebook. The time I’ve spent on that app is steadily decreasing, though, and is less than an hour a day. Still a lot more time than I’d want, but it’s trending in the right direction.

Even more interesting is tracking the number of times I’ve picked up the phone every day. I’ve gone from about 350 pickups a day (once every two and a half minutes!) to 70 pickups a day (once every fifteen minutes).

Now that I’m aware of my usage, I’m going to continue to monitor it. I do use my phone a lot when I’m out for a walk (talking pictures, catching up on Discord, etc.) so I don’t think I’ll ever really get to the point where I only use it a couple of times a day. I do think it’s entirely possible that I could get my average usage to under an hour a day, though. Maybe I just need to uninstall Facebook. We’ll see.

Anyway! If all that sounds interesting—if you’d like to use your phone less—why not give it a try? Whether you’re an author or not, listen to (or read) “Why Your Book is Still Unfinished (Hint: It’s Your Phone’s Fault)” and see what works for you.

The Business of Writing

A mid-week update on my three major commitments: to write, to edit, and to read.

I’ve been working hard to set things up so you can follow me on your Favorite Social Media Platform (TM).

• You can follow me on Facebook, and even join my fan group, the Secret Squirrels of the Apocalypse.

• I’d appreciate a follow on Amazon and Goodreads, if you can.

• I’m even on LinkedIn and Twitter/X, though be warned, I do tend to get more political on X. I’m a libertarian, it’s part of the contract.

On the writing front, things continue to happen. We were on vacation last week, and that’s turned into “Let’s try to get some small projects banged out”.

This year, that included a fantasy noir-ish short story about gods, paladins, and a city that’s a bit more strange and gritty than I expected. If you see me yammering on about “Rose & Thorn”, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s about half done, and the remainder is outlined. With any luck, I’ll polish it off and you’ll see it next year as part of the Brave Nights: Heroic Courage anthology from Three Ravens Publishing.

I’ve got a working outline for a sequel to Recall Notice as well now. You can describe the Dresden Files as “Harry has a really bad day that ends with him being the Big Damn Hero”. With Eddie & Sasha, I’m going for a slightly different vibe. More of “Eddie has a really bad day that ends with the Benny Hill theme.”

I got an update on My My, Hey Hey, too! That’s the superhero(ish) short I wrote for in the Five Second Rule universe. Looks like that should be out in a couple-three months. I’m excited to see this one in print.

Edits continue on the second Tull anthology. Final stories are in, revisions are back from the authors, and we’re entering the final stretch. I’m working on layout, then we move on to copyedits. Whoof. This one feels like it’s gone on much longer than the first volume, but I think that’s largely an artifact of doing it over a very busy summer.

Don’t worry, there’s novels in there too. Yes, multiple. Yes, I’m somewhat terrified about that. More in the near future, I hope…

Other Stuff

I mentioned vacation. We were down in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which is generally awesome. It was a little wet this year, though, what with tropical storm Debbie and all. We had rain every day, for a good part of the day, and not a whole lot of sun. I got into the water twice, I think, and… that was about it. C’est la vie.

We’re preparing to send the girls back to college in a week or so. They’re both upper-classmen now, so they get to go back on the same day, a week after the poor freshmen have to show up. They try to hide it, but I can tell they’re both excited to be heading back. Maybe a little bit scared, too. What with the whole “impending adulthood” thing, you know. I’m a little bit anxious for what the future holds as well. I do know that God is in control, though, which helps. What will be, will be.

In the meantime - fall is upon us. Get out and enjoy one of the best times of the year! Have fun, and I’ll see you next week.