Here’s a funny thing…
As I wrote that subject line, I paused and thought, “Is ‘stupider’ actually a word, or should I be using ‘more stupid’ in this context?”
I even looked it up on Google to make sure that I wasn’t sending out my first formal Substack post with a grammatically incorrect subject line.
I blame Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg for this.
To be fair, it’s probably not their fault in this particular case, but pretty much everything else is.
And what do I mean by everything else?
Well, I feel much stupider than I did a year ago and that’s because of the amount of time over that period that I spent using their platforms instead of focusing on creating my own content.
Just Over A Year Ago…
On June 17, 2018, I wrote my last daily email after 872 consecutive days and somewhere north of a million words.
I was mentally worn out, couldn’t work out why I was writing them anymore, felt like I needed to do something different, and that part of my online business had frankly become a bit boring.
So I stopped that daily habit… and immediately proceeded to pick up a new one…
Twitter, with a side of Facebook.
I’ve had a Twitter account for 12 years and over that time I’d made 16,500 tweets. Unfortunately for me, about 7500 of those were in the last twelve months.
Most months, my tweet impressions were in the high hundreds of thousands and sometimes, north of 1m - I won’t lie, it was like an endorphin hit to see that many people seeing my stuff.
On Facebook, it was the same - I would post something and get a bunch of comments and likes, but in my FB Messenger, I would often get double the number of replies from people saying stuff like, “Dude, I totally agree with you, but I can’t comment or like it in case my friends see.”
I Don’t Even Like People
The funny part is, I’m not a HUGE people person - I’m a bit shy for the most part when you meet me in person, and in social settings, I really have to make an effort to be outgoing and gregarious.
For the people who do get to know me, they will almost 100% agree that the idea that I would give a crap about what other people, particularly randoms on the internet, think about me and what I’m saying is laughable.
But that’s what social media is engineered to do - those apps are designed to get you hooked on microdoses of positive affirmation.
It is 100% addictive, even for people like me who aren’t really wired to care about what other people think about us.
I didn’t really even notice it until maybe a month ago when I posted something on FB and only five people liked it.
I sat there thinking, “Is there something wrong with Facebook? Did I publish this at the wrong time of day?”
Yeah, it’s true - I thought my lack of engagement might be a sign that Facebook was broken!
It took me a minute or two to recognize what was going on, and I’m not kidding, this cool sweat broke out on my forehead - I was like the addict who had his coming to Jesus moment with his addiction.
The Problem Gets Much Worse
If only it were the addiction to likes, retweets and comments, that would be easily fixed - delete the apps and stop using them.
The actual problem was that Twitter and Facebook, with total enablement by Apple, had rewired my brain.
I don’t say that lightly.
Over the last seven days, on average, I’ve been getting 300+ notifications on my phone and picking up the device over 125 times!
I sleep 8 hours a night pretty much all the time because I track it via my CPAP machine, so I was picking up my phone and doing stuff about 8 times an hour, every hour, of a 16 hour day, 7 days a week.
I also noticed that I had developed the attention span of a goldfish - every spare minute where I wasn’t being “entertained” I would grab my phone and scroll through Twitter and Facebook.
Can It Get Any Worse? Oh Yeah.
What I also noticed is that my ability to focus on getting things done had really diminished.
A year ago, every single day I would sit down and smash out a 1000 word email to my list in an hour or so, plus do some work on my other online businesses or create some course content for whatever I was working on.
I could easily put two or three hours of solid work in AFTER a full day of work in the office at my full-time job.
But recently? Nah.
I could do a half an hour or so and then my phone would get a notification or I’d hit a spot where I was stuck and immediately grab my phone.
Any type of hard mental graft proved challenging and so subconsciously, I just started avoiding those activities and working on easier, more fun things.
Shallow vs Deep Work
My friend Scott recommended that I read Cal Newport’s book, “Deep Work”.
Interestingly, I’d already read it and found it a bit too focused on the workflow of an academic, but I figured why not.
I’m glad I did.
My day job is pretty interesting, lots of challenging problems, but because of what I do, it’s largely what Cal Newport calls, “shallow work”.
Shallow work is things like reading and replying to email, phone calls, meetings and even workshops with clients.
That probably makes up 95% of my average work day - I’m a senior technology strategy consultant, so I sit in rooms most of the time and talk to people, sharing my ideas and solutions as it relates to their specific situation.
In my job, “deep work” would be putting together client presentations, creating a delivery framework, reviewing a technical design document or writing a proposal.
Again though, about 5% of my time is that deep work stuff because clients pay for me to effectively talk to them.
In my online businesses, I’m required to do MUCH MORE deep work.
I write content, create courses, work on websites…
This stuff requires long stretches of intense concentration without distraction.
And I stopped being able to regularly do this.
I’d Become Stupid and Lazy
Over the past few months, even when I would manage to sit myself in a chair and do the work for an hour or two, the quality of whatever I was producing seemed below what I used to creating.
I would notice that I wasn’t really happy with the work, but I couldn’t figure out why, and to be honest, my brain was excited to just be done so that I could get back to getting my Twitter and Facebook endorphin hits.
While I was reading Newport’s “Deep Work” it struck me…
Social Media Had Made Me Stupid.
It was kind of like an epiphany.
I immediately opened up Evernote on my phone, went to my “blog post ideas” note and wrote "Is social media making me a dumb?”
The answer was completely, “YES!” and I knew it as soon as I’d written it.
I’d found the root cause of my problem and now it was time to craft a strategy to slay the beast.
Getting Back On Track
That realization, and the simple update to an Evernote note, were the genesis of why I’m here writing this, right now.
It made me reflect on how I’d ended up at this point, where I wanted to be int he future, and then finally, what was the plan to get there.
One of the most interesting things that I realized was that giving up the daily emails had removed a significant amount of structure.
By having to write a daily email, I knew that I had to sit down, put the work in and churn out the content.
And as most of you know, once you start producing stuff, it becomes a habit of its own, so I would always have new ideas and structure around working on them.
The habit of writing every day simultaneously created a bit of time scarcity and momentum.
I knew right away that I would need to get back into the habit of writing again on a more regular basis.
I needed to focus on getting back to “Doing The Work”.
Pretty easy to see where the name of this email newsletter came from, hey?
Being Deliberate and Purposeful
I’m rather fortunate for the most part that I’ve been pretty successful at work and business, so having a year where I lose a bit of focus didn’t really hurt me.
For some people, if they veer off path into the land of playing around on Facebook and Twitter for a year they could very well end up bankrupt and living out of their car.
I have the luxury that it only cost me a bit of mental anguish.
At the same time, I recognize that it also cost me a year that I can’t get back.
My mom passed away about six months ago, and the truth is, the death of a loved one makes you realize that you only get a very small number of trips around the Sun on this rock, so wasting them is probably not ideal.
The long and short of it for me is, there’s some stuff I want to achieve, I’m not going to get there debating politics and climate change on the interwebz, so I have to stop spending so much time doing that.
I need to be more deliberate in how I spend my time and be more purposeful with the things I am doing.
At the end of the day, I just need to stop messing around and get back to business.
Having A Plan That Take You Towards Something
The one smart thing that I did over the last two weeks is that I didn’t just dive into trying to get myself off using Facebook and Twitter.
That would have been the knee-jerk, simple thing to do - BREAK THE CYCLE!
But it would have been wrong.
What I did instead was that I spent some time putting together a plan for things that I want to do with the free time that I’m going to create by getting those distractions under control.
There’s a pretty subtle mindset thing at play there.
Rather than “giving up” these social media things, I’m “taking on” these exciting projects that I want to work on.
I’m going towards something better, rather than trying to leave something behind.
I really think that’s an important aspect to this effort being successful.
How Did I Pull This Plan Together?
I’m one of those people that has about 20 different business ideas and projects on my mind at all times.
As a result, I’m prone to two particular problems:
Overwhelming myself with too much work
Doing bits of many things and completing none
I’m self-aware enough to appreciate these limitations in myself, so I decided to accomodate that and plan for it.
I went into Asana and I created a “Project” for every business or project that I am currently working on or would like to.
I added a few “Next Step” tasks to each project about what I need to do next to move them forward when, and if I choose to progress with them.
Then I colour coded each project with red, yellow and green - obviously red is “stop”, yellow is “caution” and green is “go”.
My primary focus is on the green projects and putting tasks in each of those that I need to knock over. I’ve also put a hard limit on my number of green projects.
If I have some spare time or I want to noodle around and do some shallow work, then I can look at the yellow projects, but I can’t do deep work on them unless they are made green.
And with the red projects, I told myself that unless something significant changes unexpectedly, I won’t look at them again until the end of next month and then I’ll review them monthly thereafter.
In essence, my projects and businesses fall into the “Now” and “Not Yet” categories for how I apportion my time and I can’t take on a new project without dropping an existing one.
The Last Important Thing That I Did…
One area that often gets overlooked is your family.
It’s funny you know, we often take the people closest to us for granted and don’t realize that when we make these kinds of decisions, it will inevitably impact them.
I was conscious of this, and so I spoke to my wife specifically about spending more time in the evenings writing and doing work.
One aspect of my “lazy year” is that she and I spent more time “together” watching TV and chatting.
The truth is, I spent a lot of that time playing on my phone while the TV was blaring away in the background.
Now, we’ll still spend time together in the evenings watching some TV, but, and I TOTALLY hate using this term, I’m going to be more present - less phone, more talking.
To be successful at just about anything you do, you need your family onboard with your plan, so if my situation has resonated with you and you’re thinking that you’re going to emulate my strategy, I HIGHLY recommend getting your significant other across what you’re trying to do right at the beginning.
Do I Think I’m Going To Succeed?
That’s the question that I’ve been batting around in my own mind for the past couple weeks as I’ve worked this all out.
It would be unoriginal, arrogant and disingenuous to say, “Absolutely, that’s why I’m doing it!”
So my answer is… “A qualified, yes.”
I’m both stubborn and determined (there’s a difference), so now that I’ve set my mind to it, I’m confident that I’ll give it a serious effort.
But things and circumstances change, so you need to be willing to go with the flow and not be obtuse.
I’m less concerned about conquering the social media stuff - I decided to get stuck into the deep work on Saturday and my total use of my phone fell by 2/3rds over the past three days.
Simplistically, I recognize their toxicity at high dosages now, so I’ll be aware of it.
And I’m not quitting either Twitter or Facebook, I’m just savagely cutting my usage and participation patterns - how you use those platforms is what drives the volume of time you spend on them, so again, I’m across the problem.
Thinking about it another way - some people don’t like eating gluten because it makes them feel bloated.
Well, I find that the way I was using social media was making me lazy, stupid and unable to concentrate, so I’m going to change the way I use them.
Probably the biggest portion of the “qualified yes” is around some of the ideas I’m working on.
This one, “Doing The Work” will get the appropriate attention because I know that it’s important for keeping my routine - idle hands are the Devil’s Workshop, and all that.
The other ideas I’m refocusing on, those are going to be more subjective.
What Does This Mean To You?
Like anything one does in life, there are both selfless, and selfish motivations, and I suppose, this is no different.
I’ve shared this story and am committing to getting back to writing more because hopefully you can get something out of it.
I have to say, when I said yesterday in my email to everyone that I would be publishing more content via email on a more regular basis, the overwhelmingly positive response was, I have to say, beyond what I was expecting.
The number of people who said they missed my daily emails was… surprising.
In a good way of course, so I’m grateful for that.
My hope is that if you’re not spending your available time doing things that move you towards your goals and ambitions, this will inspire you to become more purposeful and deliberate with you time.
Remember, it’s not just social media.
I was talking to someone about this last week and he said my ideas resonated with him because he was spending too much time at the gym working out. Lifting weights had essentially become an escape from having to deal with some relationship issues he was having.
To be successful at life in general, never mind just business, personal relationships or whatever else, you need to be committed to doing it properly.
And when you’re not committed, you gravitate towards distraction.
Personally, I’d rather be focused on achieving my goals than wasting time and I suspect that you would too.
So let’s agree to stick with it and crack on with becoming better versions of ourselves!
Some housekeeping...
I hope you like this first post… It probably was a bit longer than I had originally intended, but that’s ok - I’d suggest most will be a bit shorter than this.
Keep an eye out for these emails, I’ll do another one tomorrow for sure - if you don’t see it, check your “spam” folder and mark it “not spam” so that your email provider puts it into your inbox.
If you want to reply to me or share a comment, just hit “Reply” in the email and Substack will redirect your reply to me automagically.
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Thanks!