This month, we've been exploring time. This is a continuation of that endeavor, starting with my latest experimentation:

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I quit social media.

(More on that in a minute)

​In last week’s newsletter, I shared that I had been tracking my time to keep track of my priorities, and how eye-opening it had been in certain aspects of my life. One of the tricks to time tracking is that you have to stick to one item at a time for the tracking to be effective.

We bounce around from task to task like a kangaroo hopped up on mountain dew, twelve browsers open, one eye on the email tab, and the other on the phone notifications coming in because we’re multi-tasking, for goodness sake.

So how does multi-tasking fit in when you’re tracking your time?

It doesn’t.

The same way it doesn’t actually work. Multi-tasking is a myth— our brains can really only, truly focus on one thing at a time, any other inputs or items of focus forces our brains to toggle back and forth, creating scattered outputs.

Even if you don’t want to track your time (I get it— it was a temporary experiment for me), focusing on one, single task will teach your brain to access a true state of flow and creativity. Once interrupted, it can take 20-30 minutes for us to get back on task which means, on average, very few of us are actually accessing this flow state, or deep working part of our brains. As a result, we feel spread thin, and the quality of our work suffers.

One of the ways I’ve used to combat this is to set my phone on a “focus” setting (I named mine Focus Focus, so you know I’m for real)— and set a timer for 100 minutes to focus on ONE task.

Sometimes it’s hard: I feel myself wanting to check for messages, order those snacks I forgot about, or check the National Hurricane Center to make sure things are still quiet in the tropics.

Other times, my alarm goes off in what feels like five minutes later.

I check my email once a day (usually), and I batch this, too, sitting down and knocking out as many responses as I can in one go, deleting and archiving what’s no longer relevant. Some days take longer than others, but the task I’m focusing on is email— not email and writing and doing research and getting distracted by the old Florida folksy article that popped up— just email.

It’s not “time management” — we cannot actually wrestle time into a box and have it do what we want— it’s more of attention management.

Enter my social media experiment…

Social media had trained my brain to crave constant stimulation, and it haunted me when I needed to be able to sit down and Get Things Done. Or simply have more patience with my children.

Some examples of what the mental hijacking looked like:

• Sucked into the algorithmic design (my go-to was Instagram) and had no idea how I got there.
• Even when opening the app intentionally, I found I spent minimum 10+ minutes there. Usually more— a lot more. That’s time doom scrolling that I could have spent reading something of value, or simply taking a five minute breather.
• Immediately post scroll-hole binge, I noticed I felt out of sorts: frazzled, drained, feeling like there was so much to keep track of.
• It was hard to stick to things without incessantly task switching— a classic symptom of an overstimulated, social-media addled brain.

I needed to subtract things from my life in order to amplify the things I want: connection, presence, clarity. So, I deleted social media from my phone. All of it.

It may not be a permanent thing, but within a few days, I found I could focus better, my fingers weren’t twitching to swipe over to the purple icon to procrastinate.

So yes, I quit social media. But that's not the point.

The point is this: Every notification, every open browser tab, every 'quick check' of your phone is a vote for scattered attention. And scattered attention creates scattered results.

Most people are trying to manage their time while checking their phone 200x per day (yes, really). It's like trying to fill a bucket with holes in the bottom— ineffective and frustrating.

The solution isn't another productivity app or a better calendar system. It's ruthlessly protecting your attention like the finite resource it is.

Start with one thing: Pick the biggest attention thief in your life—maybe it's social media, maybe it's checking email every five minutes, maybe it's the news. Remove it for one week.

Then watch what happens when your brain remembers how to focus on one thing at a time.

Your future self will thank you.
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Fair weather and following seas,
Kara

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​Read it on my website​
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Other Posts in the September Time Series:
1. Later​
2. Stuck​

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