This is the final portion of a three-part series documenting the negative impact social media and smartphone addiction have created in my life, the temporary break I took from both, and the lessons I learned. Please refer to part 1 or part 2 if you’ve landed here first.
The Algorithms are Here to Stay…
If you’re not currently developing or maintaining a social media strategy as a business owner, you have no business sense. That’s reality and it will persist as algorithms get smarter and more effective. Predominantly online and savvy businesses saw profits surge during the recent COVID-19 lockdowns because they knew how to leverage the attention of their collective audience. We were all at home, bored out of our minds… on our phones. The opportunity was ripe for engagement. I did not reap those benefits because at the time my business model was mostly reliant on architectural photography and branded filmmaking that required travel, often internationally, which likely won’t improve until America gets its act together and earns the trust of the international community once again.
I am not just preaching here. I need to make the marketing potential of these platforms work for me as I transition my business to serve local clients, and as I do so in a completely new market void of any personal contacts, network, or SEO presence. I will be moving to Southern California in about ten days and have no professional reputation there. I literally cannot afford to go back to the terrible social media and smartphone habits that robbed me of my productivity and enabled my anxieties.
I accept that I need to exist on these platforms, but I have to hold myself accountable and limit their use to ways that leverage their reach without succumbing to the addictive, destructive, emotionally impoverishing behaviors they’re designed to awake within us. That is of course easier said than done. Anyone who has ever tried to stick to a fitness plan or a new diet can tell you that bad habits can be stubborn, even after months or years of progress.
It starts with building rituals. I am definitely in no position to lecture anyone as I’ve always lived my life at the whims of my impulses. But clearly, I need structure, and I have to start somewhere. My brief hiatus gave me a bit of insight into how to proceed effectively going forward. I am sure I’ll learn more along the way, as I continue to experiment, practice, and learn from those much smarter and more disciplined than myself. I highly recommend Deep Work: By Cal Newport, whose research and teachings have been instrumental in my own personal growth, as well as, a lot of the smarter sounding stuff you’ll find in this series.
It starts with leaving my phone behind altogether. When it is time to work, I simply leave my phone in another room: out of sight out of mind. I have gone as far as locking the phone in my safe to create an extra layer of resistance. It’s currently there as I type. You might not have to take such drastic measures, but clearly, I need adult supervision. You’ll be amazed at how this one simple action can boost your ability to concentrate by eliminating the expectation of interruptions.
Leaving your phone behind also lays the foundation for the construction of your own little Bollingen Tower. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung built this tower on the shores of Lake Zurich as a retreat from the distractions of his regular, distracting life. He’d spend months there when he needed to get shit done. It was a space dedicated to deep work, silence, and heavy thinking. Writing and distraction do not mix. Granted we don’t all have the luxury to fuck off to a cabin in the woods as we please, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find or make your own little space in the world where you can isolate yourself from emails, solicitors, social media, phone calls, friends and family drama, and all the little pings that can snap us out of our state of flow. I already have an office in my house perfect for that purpose. I just needed to remove the distractions. For you it might be a park bench under a tree, a library, a conference room nobody uses, or if you’ve got the funds, renting a penthouse in a 5-star hotel like J.K. Rowling when she needed to finish The Deathly Hallows.
I need to embrace boredom. I was bored often as a kid as I am sure many of you were. I quickly learned that whether I was at home or at school, complaining about it would earn me extra chores or homework assignments, so I got pretty damn good at finding ways to entertain myself. I’d ride my bike outside and pretend my neighborhood was a new frontier of an undiscovered country. I created my own wrestling federation using all of my Batman and GI Joe action figures complete with tournaments, rivalries, and championship belts. Even playing video games, as demonized as they are, improved my problem-solving skills and hand-eye coordination to some degree. Boredom fertilizes creativity. I’ve had some of my best ideas come from doing nothing other than staring into space. It’s here where we unconsciously solve problems as we engage alternate portions of our brains while we allow the areas used for conscious work to rest.
Boredom doesn’t exist anymore. There are kids alive today that will never know what it’s like to not be distracted. The damage to my mental health from my addiction to my smartphone is damning and measurable. I can only imagine how screwed I would be if I had unsupervised access to these devices when I was ten. I am grateful for the memories I retain of the days when information had to be earned in a library and engaging with other humans required a bit of effort and thoughtfulness.
Deep concentration is a skill no different than learning Photoshop or shooting a basketball. It needs to be trained and developed. Efforts to do so will be compromised without the ability to filter out irrelevancies. It isn’t enough to just put the phone away while working and then gorging on content when it’s time to clock out. That would be like working out five days a week without improving your diet or getting adequate rest for your muscles to recover. What kind of progress would you expect? When our brains become accustomed to receiving stimulation on-demand, it becomes almost impossible to shake off the cravings. Studies have shown that people who insist they can “knuckle down” when it’s time to get shit done engage much larger parts of their brain to do so and expel a considerably higher volume of their finite mental energy. And their results pale in comparison to those who can tune out distractions. One researcher referred to them as “mental wrecks.”
I know I am not out of the woods. These negative habits are resilient and my detox was only ten days. The “real” work started when I exited the bubble and resurrected my social media accounts because I now had a reason to be tempted again. I am much better at managing my usage, being aware and motivated has gotten me that far. But as my therapist says: success often lives in inches between motivation and commitment. I admit that I am starting to slip. Last night I intended to catch up on some reading on my Kindle before bed but instead spent an hour on Wikipedia researching the history of the Green Lantern Corps after I wanted to “jump on Facebook really quick” to respond to some comments and ended up getting sucked into an ad-riddled article about hypothetical superhero battles. The subject matter isn’t the issue. Green Lantern is awesome, but it wasn’t serving my goals of improving my concentration and getting adequate rest to be at my best the following day. I tripped and stumbled down the rabbit hole and failed my mind as a consequence. Anyone who ever trained a dog can tell you that those habits don’t stick if you don’t reinforce them.
Detoxing is not a “one time fix.” It requires a lifestyle overhaul, not a fad diet.
An incredible, well timed reflection of sunset against the Conrad in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood. Caught a glimpse of the potential for this shot on a casual stroll to get some air during my social media detox, and quickly raced to a nearby parking garage to set up my shot. I am still an architectural photographer, after-all.
There is good news.
You don’t have to abandon your digital vices. You can watch your Youtube and jump around the Twitter feed. The key is to schedule blocks of time that you’re allowed access to them and be militant about avoiding them otherwise. Whether it’s five minutes or an hour, you’re free to indulge as long as you’re within your scheduled block. When time is up, you need to step back and banish them.
This means sitting still with your thoughts at the next red light or while you’re waiting in line to get your groceries rung up. I am not going to lie: This is not easy. If hell is of our own creation, then my afterlife will consist of an eternity waiting in line idiots at the front argue with the clerk over the coupons they can use or can’t figure out how to work the credit card machine. You know the type: The ones who know they’ll need to present their membership card to gain entry into Costco and yet insist on waiting until they’re at the entrance to rummage through their purse to find it, holding up the rest of us. Or the mouth-breathers who don’t realize they need a recipient’s zip code to ship something at UPS and then spend five agonizing minutes sorting it out with their clueless relative who then decides it’s a great time to casually ask “how the kids are doing.” And there I am with my package already boxed with a label because I have enough respect for everyone’s time to do it online. All I need is a scan and a receipt. My phone tunes out my frustrations. It keeps me from bursting into flames during such trying times. I don’t know how I ever managed to wait in a line without one, but I have no choice but to remember how, even if it means sitting there and fantasizing about procuring telekinesis so I can launch the stupid humans into space. At least my creativity will get some exercise.
Being “bored” doesn’t have to mean doing nothing either. Yes, meditation and stillness are encouraged. Definitely make time for that. Just avoid mindlessly consuming junk content. Reading, gardening, folding laundry, learning a new recipe, jogging, stretching, tinkering with your car, etc. are all perfectly accessible substitutes. You can even listen to an informative podcast or watch a Youtube tutorial showing you how to smoke a chicken if you want to make dinner for someone special. We all need hobbies that take let our brains recover from the stress of our work. The intention is what matters. It’s about negating your smartphone’s power to hijack your attention so that you’re not driven to the point that cutting yourself off entirely feels like the only choice.
It’s not impossible. I am the most easily distracted person I know. My ears are currently in a sound-isolating cocoon within my Meze 99 Classics headphones listening to instrumental music. This always gets my creativity moving. Unfortunately one of the songs had some familiar notes to the theme song from Star Trek Picard and it took everything I had had not to jump on Google “really quick” to see if there’s a release date for season 2. Crisis averted. If there’s hope for me, then the sky’s the limit for anyone else.
Social Media is a tool
You do need to be intentional about your social media use. Don’t just log onto Facebook or Instagram because you’re bored. Go with a purpose. That could be creating a post or a story, or responding to comments or questions from your audience, or maybe making it a point to seek engagement from accounts with who you might want to collaborate with or who you hope to do business.
A blacksmith doesn’t obsess over his hammer. Yes, skilled professionals can be very particular about their tools, but never to the detriment of the craft. A chef will never credit his knives for a meal, and nothing rattle’s a photographer’s ego more than hearing “that’s an awesome photo, you must have a great camera.”
Social media has a place in our professional and personal loves. I do encourage you to use it and abuse it. And then ghost it when it no longer serves a purpose for the day’s work. It will not be the reason your business succeeds. It will not be the reason your personal relationships stay strong or why you finally finish that manuscript no matter how much you insist your writing group is “crucial.” People wrote stories and maintained friendships long before it. Give yourself a little more credit.
Go in with a plan, execute it, and then get out of Dodge before you’re losing your mind over what other people are doing or just lost in yet another “Europeans react to twenty-five disgusting things Americans eat” article on Buzzfeed. Your iPhone will let you set limits on how much time you can spend in an app a day to keep you on track. If you’re better than me, you won’t be tempted to press “ignore for today.” If not, buy a small safe to lock your phone during the hours you know you’ll need to concentrate or whenever your discipline needs a little boost.
Control who has access to you
We now live in a world of instant messaging, 24 hours news cycles, and endless notifications, so the thought of not responding immediately to a DM, text, or email can induce some dread. You might not want clients or friends to think you’re leaving them hanging. Communication is now so easy that it entitles others to expect constant availability from us. There’s “no reason” to not respond immediately, right? Our cortisol levels spike if we see someone that someone has left our text on “read.” I promise you, 99.9 percent of people out there will respect your time enough to know that they’re not entitled to it at a moment’s notice, and you should extend them the same courtesy. Intense conversations are better left for the phone or in-person anyway. As long as you’re not ghosting anyone, most people will be reasonably cool with a timely response instead of an immediate one, especially if you set expectations and boundaries ahead of time.
I recommend disabling all notifications on your phone throughout the day. I’ve done it for a while. It’s such a massive relief to not have my time indebted to others. I check my phone during my scheduled phone breaks and then it is back to silence. I do this even when my phone is not locked away for my “deep work” sessions because even if I am not actively working on something, I don’t want to be interrupted from being present in whatever it is I am doing. Mac users should also just go ahead and disable iChat to remove the temptation of checking your text messages.
I am not out of touch. I understand that not everyone has this luxury. Workplace culture plays a heavy hand in expectations of availability and many can’t afford to ignore bosses and colleagues when they need something asap. I am not trying to get anyone fired. If you have kids or need certain people to have access to you immediately, you can always customize your settings to let their calls and texts through for urgent matters. There are levels to this. Even if you can’t isolate yourself for extended stretches of concentration, you should be able to make some efforts to carve a little time and space for yourself, even if it's waking up an hour earlier or finding twenty minutes here or there throughout the day to zone out. Just because your boss needs to reach you at all times doesn’t mean you need to answer every DM or Tweet. And if your boss has a clue, he should know that he’ll get more value out of you being productive and not distracted.
Our time now belongs to the highest bidder. We need to be willing to outspend the distractions and prioritize access for ourselves. It’s easy to forget that our capacity for higher learning and thinking was designed to protect us and give us a competitive edge over stronger, faster, hardier animals. If you’re too generous with what your time distribution, you’ll have none left for yourself to create or accomplish the things in life that are important to you. Do yourself a favor and take a long, hard look at what occupies most of your time. Whether it's social media, gossipy co-workers, video games, or fantasy sports, you’ll be surprised to learn how much of it they might disproportionately demand it and what it is costing you.
Awareness is power. Being wise to the manipulations of these apps and algorithms will empower you to manage your impulses so you can experience the vast, productive world beyond the touch screen.