Steps to Simplify My Life

Recently, I have felt dissatisfied with the way I have been chosing to live my life. Overwhelmed, overworked, stressed, you name it. I could just feel at the end of most days I had wasted so much of it. I now have three girls and I want to maximize my time with them while they’re still young.

I have read a lot more since beginning this journey. And some of the most influential blogs I’ve been following for years, The Art of Manliness, loves to hammer the concept of action. I finally reached a breaking point in my passivity that I knew taking action and making changes was the only way I would be able to get out of my funk.

This is not a recommendation for you. This are the steps I took after evaluating my life, my triggers, and what made me the most dissatisfied either in the moment or after.

Wearing a “dumb” watch more and my Apple Watch less

I’ve consistently been wearing a watch since middle school. These were always in the $10-$20 range from K-Mart, Walmart, or somewhere similar.

In 2014. I started working for this up-and-coming startup, Apple Inc. I was an AppleCare advisor for over 3 years. The one and only ‘new product launch’ while I was there was the Apple Watch. Being passionate about my job and wanting to know what using one was like, I used my employee discount to get the original Apple Watch at launch in 2015. I even still have my later dubbed “Series 0” as a memento of my time at Apple.

Even though I switched from AppleCare to going to a full-time software engineer in 2017 after graduating from Ohio State, I have continued to wear an Apple Watch nearly every day. I later got a couple of newer models. Over the last 10 years, there have probably been fewer than 10 days where I haven’t worn one of my Apple Watches. It’s been a constant in my life, allowing me to always get notifications no matter where I set my phone down as well as a fitness tracker and it has helped me on the golf course.

After evaluating my life, I realized always having that tether to my phone was actually draining mentally. I would be constantly checking notifications, checking things that didn’t really matter.

I decided it was time I pull back on wearing my Apple Watch. I’m not throwing it in the trash. I’m just not defaulting to putting it on first thing in the morning. In fact, just by being intentional and thinking about whether or not to wear it, I wear it maybe 1% of the total time per day I was wearing it before. I go days, even over a week at a time without even turning it on.

This has the added benefit of giving me a chance to look at more classic watches. It’s gone far enough that my wife would call it a flavor of the month. But it’s more than that for me. I’ve always liked watches. I’ve just neglected anything that’s not an Apple Watch for the last decade. There is the problem of not having infinite income to get every watch I want, which is a lot, but that’s a problem for a different time. For now, an all black Timex Expedition Chronograph will have to do.¹

I Deleted any time suck apps

I get the feeling that it’s becoming more and more common to discuss the detriments of people always being on their smart phones. It’s a known problem #1, #2, and #3. And I have recently completed a multipart podcast series on one of my favorite podcasts, Chasing Excellence, where Navy SEAL turned mental health advocate, Chris Irwin, gave some very helpful tips. One of my major takeaways was I just needed to stop. Here’s the episode guide for episode four of the four part series.

How did I handle this? I just deleted any app that has an algorithm or an infinite scroll feed. This has typically been any app that adds itself to the ‘Social’ category on the App Store, but because I am avoiding algorithmically served-up content instead of just ‘social media’, it also includes YouTube and Reddit. Reddit especially used to only show you content from subreddits you followed with a few ads here and there. Few enough ads that it seemed in line with helping offset their costs. But I cannot go on Reddit anymore; it is mostly ads and community suggestions for subreddits I am not interested in. This content it suggests will typically leave me feeling stressed out or anxious long after I close the app and I don’t even remember why.

It was hard to pull back and realize this. I would watch TikTok videos, or even Instagram reels for hours without even realizing it. And when I would stop, which would usually be caused by some real-world thing that needed my attention like my kids were so bored they started to actually fight and scream, I would never feel any benefit from my doom scrolling. But it’s more or less just an accepted part of society right now. You’ll stay up late watching 6-second videos that you won’t remember 3 videos later for hours. I got to the point where I just cut it out entirely. I cannot trust myself to use these apps responsibly. They’re designed to trap you in by really smart behavioral scientists. So my only course of action as an individual person is to just avoid it.

I wasn’t able to go straight cold turkey. No, I was able to use my own knowledge of how my brain works to help myself out. I turned on screen time on my iPhone for a total of 5 minutes a day for those apps I wanted to avoid. I eventually got used to not using them as much. Then I would try to game it and see if I could go the whole day without hitting the 5-minute mark. After weeks of doing that, I eventually just deleted the apps and did not really miss them.

Being an old web engineer with a design background, I hate how those apps intentionally make their mobile sites a poor user experience to try and push users to their apps. It is easier to collect more data on people in native apps instead of through a website. So I have never had the problem of using the mobile websites endlessly.

Unsubscribe

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Like a lot. I use an app called Pocket Casts which has some great features, like custom playback settings per podcast, increased (or decreased) playback speed, and, the one feature that’s not in Apple Podcasts, a setting called ’Trim Silence.’ Which as the name suggests, analyzes the playback and any long stretches of silence, it just cuts out.



Here are some stats for my time using the app. I am constantly listening at about 2.2x speed and, up until recently, carrying a large queue that’s been around 600 episodes waiting for me to catch up on. This would stretch back about 6 months, so any episodes referring to events around the release such as holidays were basically irrelevant to me at the point I would listen to them.

This was…silly. I had way too many, irrelevant podcasts auto adding to my queue. So I cut that list down. There were a lot of podcasts that I wasn’t getting anything from besides entertainment. So I made the choice to make my podcast listening more educational. I kept only a couple of entertainment ones. Doing this let me eventually catch up to completely clear out my queue. Not having any episodes in my queue affords me the opportunity to just put my phone away, get the AirPod out of my ear and be present where I am.

Tech free times

I had to force myself to stop always either looking at my phone or a TV or having a podcast in my ear. Luckily, before I also did a mass email list unsubscription tour, I saved a link from an email I had gotten with 50 ways to be more analogue. Going through the list reignited my love of card games and I have also read way more books in the last couple of months than I did in the first part of the year.

I even briefly considered paying for a newspaper to be delivered. I’m not quite there yet, but it’s still on the table.

Pen and paper

One part of my life that never went away, is my love for pen (or pencil) and paper. I love the following quote from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci:

“Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts.”

I really enjoyed the book that relied heavily on Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. I don’t think I will ever write anything as profound as Leonardo did in those pages, but it helps my memory to physically write things. I always carry a Field Notes notebook with me, or something of that size. I slowly just fill it with notes, phone calls, to do lists, sketches, drawings, my kid’s scribbles and I will be able to look back on them years later as a time capsule.

One thing I haven’t tried yet, but that really intrigues me, and may intrigue others is paper apps by Gladden Design. I love the idea of these, and getting back to ‘Analog play’ is just something I have enjoyed so much as I have gone through this journey.

I Stopped caring about generating data

I can go back and look at heart rate and movement data from every workout I had for 10 years thanks to my Apple Watch. And I just stopped and asked, why? I never go back and look at it. I was just generating large amounts of useless data.

Similarly, I cancelled my Arccos subscription. Admittedly, this coincides with them again raising the price. But why do I need every golf shot tracked? I’m never going to go pro. At this point in my life, a single-digit handicap is looking to be a stretch. Why do I need all these stats about my golf game? I’m a very casual, in-it-for-the-fun golfer. Cancelling was just the right move for me at this point in my life.

Conclusion

As I stated before, this is just an explanation of the journey that I went on this summer and early fall. I am not saying anyone else should do any of the things that I outlined here; these are just some available options and possible steps if you are feeling similarly to me. Rather than just continuously complaining about wanting to change my life, I reached the tipping point for me to just do it.

Post-script

In the editing stage of this blog post, I began listening to Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport which makes it obvious that I am not the only person feeling the way that I do. If none of my methods clicked for you or if you want a better explanation and better methods for fixing how you feel I’d direct you to that book as a start.