I have a bad relationship with my phone.

My high school pre-calc teacher used to deride calculator-use and focused on good arithmetic skills. He said, “Do you think you’ll have a calculator in your pocket all the time?”

Well, Mister McCulloch, I submit to you: one raspberry. However, I do thank him for my reasonably good mental-math. It’s one more post-apocalyptic skill to put in my tool belt. I’m sure it’ll be very useful.

I love my iPhone. It’s magical in its capability. In fact, the only crappy app on the phone is the actual Phone app.

But it’s in my hands too damn much. Ya feelin’ me?

So, here is a pictorial view of how I combat my compulsion.

Like social media, it’s designed to be an addictive attention-retention machine. It beeps, it buzzes, and it has shiny colorful red dots with numbers on them. All of which are carefully engineered to make me look at the device and keep looking at it.

It’s a matter of instinct
It’s a matter of conditioning and a matter of fact
You can call me Pavlov’s Dog
Ring a bell and I’ll salivate
How’d you like that?

Much digital ink has been spilled on “digital minimalism” and Cal Newport is the biggest evangelist of the movement. I’m not going to pontificate upon it.

You can Google that stuff if you like.

The TL;DR short-version of all that is to:

Be intentional with where you place your attention.

Home Screen

App Menu

Settings and Tweaks

Turn Off the Bells & Whistles

Next Week…

We’ll spend some time on project management, both big and small and everywhere in-between. Sometimes you have to get stuff done that’s bigger than a To Do list, but smaller than a full-blown Enterprise Project.