Today’s modern gold: the ability to NOT get distracted. Some practical ideas to help you never get distracted (by crap you don’t care for):
- Don’t use Android: Android (Google) makes their money by distracting you. Why? They want to “nudge” you to making more Google searches, for you to spend more time on websites and blogs with their Google Adsense ads, to get you to watch more YouTube videos (and advertisements). All advertisements distract.
- Disable all advertisements and tracking with your devices: Don’t use Google Chrome, use Safari. Enable all the ad blockers for “content blockers” on your iPhone. For your laptop also use Safari, and install all the “do not track” plug-ins like Ghostery, Adblock Ultimate, etc. Don’t let Google track you, don’t let Facebook/Instagram track you. The more you’re tracked, the more accurate the advertisements will be to you, and the more distracting these advertisements will be to you. Why? They will actually know what you really want, before you know it!
- Don’t watch the news, read blogs, use YouTube, watch TV, use Netflix, or use Spotify. All these things end up distracting you with “related content” or “recommendations”. Instead of Spotify, purchase your music and use iTunes to listen to it.
The distraction economy
There’s a fight to get inside your brain, to distract you. Tim Wu calls them the “attention merchants”. I call them the distraction crack dealers.
Even worse, you have all these Richard Thaler “nudge” artists who try to put in very subtle and sneaky ways to distract you; once again, distracting you with “targeted” advertisements.
Are advertisements bad?
I don’t think there is any moral or ethical problems with advertisements. They’re just distracting.
Because my goal is to NOT get distracted by external stimuli, I do everything to remove as many distractions, notifications, etc from my life.
More anti distracting ideas
- Don’t drive to music or podcasts: Easy to get distracted when changing the station, skipping a song, or trying to fast forward through an annoying podcast advertisement. Here, distraction can lead to death. Texting while driving is probably the biggest death factor in today’s world. Now whenever I drive, I listen to nothing.
- Disable all notifications on your phone: This includes text notifications. For phone calls, just flag your family members as “favorite”, and only allow their calls to go through to you.
- Uninstall all social media and email from your phone: Just use your phone for calling, texting, Google Maps GPS, Uber, shooting photos etc. If you’ve ever found yourself mindlessly refreshing your email on your phone, Uninstall your email from your phone immediately. For iPhone, unsync icloud email from your phone. Also uninstall YouTube from your phone, fewer distractions.
Don’t consume any media with advertising in it
This includes sports TV, the news, magazines (all magazines), podcasts, etc.