Okay, next call is about checking her phone way too much. Hi, my name is Lucia. I'm a Spanish law student and I'm very thankful for your student help books. They have helped me a lot. My question is the following. I have gone through a digital minimalism process and deleted all my social media, including three Twitter accounts, which now sounds crazy even to me.

But I still use instant messaging apps, and although I don't use them when I'm with other people, whenever I'm alone, I check them a lot. More specifically, I check them every time I pick up my phone, be it for meditation, for checking my uni scheduling, or time in my exercise, or any other reason.

This has come to the point where I often forget what I have picked my phone for originally because I get too swallowed by the messaging. I feel like Narcissus who keeps returning to his reflection again and again regardless of what's better for him. Do you have any tips regarding this?

Thank you so much. Rachel. >> Well, first of all, it's been a while since we've had a good Greek reference. So I appreciate that. That's old school deep questions, Jessie. Like back in the day when I would record in here, like in the summer, and we had no video, and I had the AC off.

Even though it turns out having the AC on is not a problem because we have gated microphones and I'd just be in here sweating, just by myself during the pandemic recording podcast episodes. We got a little crazy with the Greek references. So maybe you've been a moderating influence, like people have emerged back into the world.

It's a little more reasonable, but I do appreciate the Greek reference. So I want to apply here the digital minimalism philosophy. Everything you talked about was things you quit or things you got rid of. I'm glad you quit things and got rid of things, but in some sense, that's not what I'm mainly interested in.

If you want to become a digital minimalist, what I'm interested in is your vision of the life well-lived. What was it that you discovered when you did your 30-day digital declutter that really mattered to you? What were the things that are important to you and your life? Because that should be the foundation of reconstructing your digital interactions.

When you know what you want to spend your time on, what matters to you? What satisfies, we're going to use some more Greek references here, your Aristotelian notion of the virtuous life, of the ethical life. Then you can work backwards and say, what tech helps these things? If I know why I'm using these texts, what's the right rules to put around them?

Now, I suspect if you go through this exercise, you will find because you're using these instant messenger apps a lot, that there's people in your life that being connected to matters to you, that the relationships in your life matter to you, that you want to be a good friend, you want to be a good daughter, you want to be a good aunt, like whoever these people are that you're connecting to.

You want to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on their behalf, as that is what we as humans are wired to do as social beings. If we're not doing that, we get unhappy, we get anxious. We start to worry about ourselves, we start to worry about our lives. That's probably what you would identify.

If you identify that, you say, "Great. I want to build a life when I'm doing that. Great. What's a good way to throw tech into that picture?" When you ask that question, your answer is not going to be, obviously, the right use of tech to satisfy this goal is going to be checking instant messengers every single time I pick up my phone.

How could that possibly be the right thing there? No. What's the right thing going to be? Well, if you're really thinking this through, you say, "Okay. Well, first of all, these five people, I want to whatever, I want to talk to them every single week and here's when I call them, and I put aside a lot of time for that, and that's important.

These people, we go out and we get coffee every weekend because very important people to me, and I go once a quarter to go see this relative of mine." Some of this has nothing to do with technology, but you're actively saying, "This is important to me. What do I want to do in this?" Then you might be saying, "Okay.

Instant messenger might be useful for talking to these people in other times or these relatives that are overseas who I can't see as much, and that's great. But if you know that's why you're using it, then you can say, "What rules do I want to put around that so that I can, in true digital minimalist fashion, preserve the benefit here while avoiding most of the unnecessary harms?" When you go through that exercise, you're probably going to learn, "Oh, I got to retrain people's expectations about how I use these services.

I probably need to step away from, I will be involved in ad hoc threads that are happening throughout the day." Now, I just got to step away from that. It'll take people a week to adjust and then they'll get it. I want to put aside time, and maybe it's at the beginning of each day over a lunch break where I do check in on things to see what people are talking about.

What I do there is not so much try to just jump into those conversations, but use the Instant Messenger to maybe set up or arrange a call or a meeting, use it logistically so I can see what's going on in people's lives. But I don't think just back and forth asynchronous conversations on there, that doesn't count for much.

I don't feel like that's that significant. I'm not going to spend that much time doing it. You could just completely rethink how you use those tools once you know what your goal is. If your goal is having deep, meaningful connections, you're not going to come away with an answer that says, "I should be on this all the time." Now, why is this important?

Well, when you come at tool usage from the perspective of how do I support a vision of a life well-lived that I seriously believe in, changes are sustainable, and you stop using it the way you did before. You stop checking in on all these threads, you stop using it as a distraction.

Why? Because you have a new way of using it that aligns with something you believe in, deep in your bones to be the right way to live. That is very compelling. Now, suddenly when you're like, "Oh, maybe I should pick up this phone when I have to look up a schedule, at uni and go to Instant Messenger." You're like, "If I do that, then I'm repudiating this whole vision I'm so excited about, about a life well-lived, and I don't want to repudiate that.

I want to live that life. I'm excited about it." So you don't check. That is the power of coming at digital usage from the perspective of supporting the positive, not just trying to reduce or eliminate the negative. That is what I'm going to suggest. Let's give this the full digital minimalism treatment.

Solidify that picture of what matters to you, come up with a plan that really supports that. Be radical about it. Like, "Hey, I'm going to every other month fly to go visit this relative or whatever." The more radical you are, the more you signal to yourself you take that seriously.

But then have very specific rules about your tech inside of that picture. I think you'll find that your digital usage is going to be greatly reduced. I mean, the hardest thing about this, and Jesse, I have this in my own family, is the transition of not being someone who participates in threats.

Because it's basically like a binary categorization. There's like the people you know that for whatever reason, will reliably participate in text or instant messenger threads. Like if you say something, they'll come back to it. They're always there. It's nice because you can be in touch with that person all the time.

But it's not sustainable. People get used to it. Like, "Okay, Jesse probably is not going to just answer back a random text right when I sent it." I mean, unless he happens to be doing other text messages. People completely adjust to it. And you know what? It does not hurt your relationships with people because all of that doesn't do much anyways.

If you're instead prioritizing, like, "How do I really talk to this person? I'm going to call this person every week. I'm going to go see these people once a month." Then the fact that you're not at three in the afternoon answering the random back and forth doesn't matter. So- >> You can always talk about how texting is a little bit different than social media too as well, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah, because it's not the mechanics there are not someone's trying to steal your time. It's not engineered to be addictive. The pressures there are social. So it's a social engineering problem, not an attention engineering problem. The reason why people have a hard time getting away from the texting is because they have configured their expectations with the people they know in such a way that they expect them to be reachable.

And that is very convenient. But once you've configured those expectations, you're going to have to be answering texts back and forth all the time. So like you have to completely rebuild those expectations of I'm not just randomly available, but I do see you and spend time with you a lot.

And if you need to get in touch with me, I'll see it at some point today and I'm reliable. But I'm also not on my phone most of the time. >> But no matter what social media and texting are still context switching if you're in deep work. >> Well, yeah, that's the problem.

It has the same cost. Yeah. So the social media is bringing in you because there's a neural net app that is selecting things to show you the press your brain stem. You're like, "Man, I got to look at that." Context switch, you're in trouble. Texting has none of that, but it's still very powerful because if there's a social expectation that you have established that I will answer.

And now the person you know is sending you a quick question. Like, "Well, I got to keep checking because it's a problem if I don't answer." And then you have the same cost. >> Yeah. Actually, I want to ask you this question about texting. Because a lot of times, like say, you have a note or something that you want to text somebody, you might write that down when you're in like a deep work session or whatever.

>> Yeah. >> Then like say that that session's over, you go to text the person, then you read another text and you forget about it. There's really no way to, well, I've figured out one way. If you just close your texting interface and you pull everybody up by the contacts and you can text them directly.

>> Right. >> But otherwise, like you can't, you're always going to see the main page of the texting. Have you ever thought about that? >> So then what, you're saying the issue is if you want to like hold on to- >> You get distracted because like you say you go, you want to text Elon Musk about coming on your podcast.

>> Right. >> Then you're going to go there and you see Mark Zuckerberg asked you to go to get drinks for happy hours. >> You sigh like, "Oh, Mark." >> Such expectations for accessibility. >> Then you forget to invite Elon on the thing because you sent Mark the response or whatever.

>> Yeah. >> Do you ever think about that or do you have a way around that? >> I mean, yeah. I mean, I think it's the problem. Like text messages are very convenient, but it's the problem of using that as like the primary way. Or like where they're useful is I'm meeting you.

I'm coming to meet you and we have to, "Hey, I'm five minutes late." Or like I'll text you if I'm coming over here and like every single week I'm late. I'll be like, "I'm late or here's what's going on." It's logistical, it's helping us like coordinate. We're about to get together.

It works fine for that or you're like, "Hey, why aren't you here? I'm at the bar." Or something like that. But when it's, I get these type of things a lot and I don't like it where it says like, "Someone randomly texted me during the day." Yeah, and there's like an obligation in it and like, "What about this?" Or, "Can you let me know when you're available for whatever?" I'm like, "Exactly this issue." How am I going to, this is going to be lost in the string full of all these other texts from all these other people.

How am I going to remember? Like typically what I try to do is immediately if I see something like that get into my capture system. Like right away, I get them like, "Yeah, I think it's a huge problem." >> Yeah. >> Like texting, text interfaces are not invented for a world in which there could be dozens of people spontaneously, like that you're engaged in conversations with anyone of which could involve obligations being introduced for you.

>> Yeah. >> Completely asynchronous and outside of your control. >> I found a workaway, I use an Android. So if you go to the contacts page on the Android and you pull up like Mark's cell phone. >> It will show only their text? >> You can text them through that interface.

>> That's smart. >> And then, so if you're disciplined about it, you go to the texting page but you're beyond Mark's individual profile where you're texting him. And then as long as you do that. >> Yeah, that's interesting. That's smart. Okay, so you pull up the contact and then it can just be.

>> Yeah. >> So like if you and I are talking like right before a recording session, we could be just seeing each other. Like I could just be seeing you. >> It brings it over to the other one. But if I just know that I needed to text you, then I could just go into the contact, grab you and text you and I wouldn't be distracted by other texts.

>> Right. If you need to send something. Oh, so outbound. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's a good fix. Yeah. I mean, that's a hard one. People have a hard time with that. And again, I think it's all just, it's expectations because it's a problem. Once the expectation is set, it's true.

You can't just stop using it. Like I think that is harder than people leaving social media. People think it's going to be hard to leave social media because people imagine there's these big audiences that care but they don't. And no one notices when you leave and it's kind of embarrassing.

Text messaging people notice when you change your habit. Right? So like, if you're on Twitter and you quit Twitter, no one cares. Like no one, because you were just being algorithmically thrown in the feeds with other stuff and no one knows. It's all dehumanized and depersonalized and who cares.

But if like your brother stops responding to text, but he always had reliably been doing that, then that's like, oh my God, like people you know. Like it's way more. I learned that working on digital minimalism and working with people that are going through the process of the declutter.

It's way more like personal and fraught changing your text habits or instant messenger habits than it is changing your social media habits. Maybe I should just get my text, my phone number out to our listeners. So they can just text you? Just text me. Yeah. That would go well.

I don't mind. All right. Where are we at? Oh no. I'm going to speed up now. I always say 45 minutes and we've never been under like 57 minutes. Well, I think there's always value in the episode. That's true. Your audience wants to hear you. That's true. Jive on stuff.

I hear you.