Newsletter › #14
My Digital Detox Experiment | Atomic Habits
【What I've been up to】
Hi, Reader.
Good morning — I hope this Monday letter finds you well.
How was your week?
It's been so cold lately,
but at least I finally got to wear a coat in Kaohsiung 😆
Take care not to catch a cold.
On Sunday I went to a book club
run by 朝顏療癒,
held at a bar in Tainan: AIC BAR.
At first I thought it was funny —
a book club at a bar, at nine in the morning.
Who drinks at nine in the morning? 😂
It turned out the bar is closed in the morning
and lends the space to the book club.
The Japanese-style room was bright and lovely.
After Kaohsiung,
Tainan is my favorite city:
old buildings turned into new spaces,
and lots of arts and culture.
How could you not love Tainan 🫰
If you know of book clubs in Tainan,
let me know.
Here's a video of the event
(if the link doesn't work, you can find the Reel on my Instagram).
【My digital detox experiment】
Let's talk about a big change in my life lately:
“I turned off LINE notifications.”
Yes, you read that right —
LINE (the messaging app everyone in Taiwan uses) no longer notifies me.
It may be the best decision I've made recently.
If you follow me, you'll know
I've been doing a digital detox.
Instagram, Facebook and Threads combined
are limited to under 30 minutes a day.
Even so,
my daily screen time was still 4 hours 11 minutes.
When I checked, the biggest culprit was LINE:
56 minutes a day on average.
LINE was taking up a huge share of my attention.
I started to think:
how could I spend less time on LINE?
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, says:
“The secret to change is: don't rely on willpower; rely on environment and design.”
So I thought about
how to change my environment and my process
to spend less time on LINE.
What if I only received messages at set times —
would that help?
So from January 4 I experimented
with setting LINE notifications to a “scheduled summary,”
delivered only at 12 noon
and 7 p.m.
(iOS lets you schedule notifications
so they're only delivered at set times.)
As of today, January 10 — seven days in —
my daily screen time
is down to 2 hours 38 minutes,
with LINE at 43 minutes a day.
Wait — didn't I just say
LINE was 56 minutes a day before,
and 43 after?
That's only 13 minutes less on LINE,
so why did my screen time fall by 93 minutes?
Because whenever I pick up my phone,
I don't just open LINE — I open other apps too (this wretched hand 🫵).
Opening LINE less often
also cut my time on other apps.
Two birds with one stone.
Now I do most of my work
at my computer,
and avoid picking up my phone while working,
because once I pick it up, it's hard to put down 😂
My goal this month:
less than 2 hours of screen time a day.
At first I was skeptical too:
wouldn't not getting LINE notifications
make me anxious?
So I thought back
to 20 years ago, before smartphones,
when we had Nokia 3310s and flip phones (how nostalgic).
I'd have to get home,
turn on the computer, connect to the internet,
and use Yahoo Messenger or MSN to contact friends.
(Don't pretend you never used them!! 🙄)
We lived like that back then,
so why not now?
And anything truly important
won't come by LINE —
people will call me.
Then I thought:
what about people who don't have my number?
Hmm…
people who don't have my number
probably don't have anything important for me.
After thinking it through,
I happily turned LINE notifications off.
Now I treat LINE like email
and only open it when I want to.
From passive use to active use.
Control is back in my hands;
I feel freer,
and my attention isn't so easily interrupted.
In short:
if you want to try a digital detox,
open your phone's Screen Time now,
see how much time you spend on your phone each day,
and which app takes the most.
Then create an environment
where you can't easily use that app,
or schedule its notifications.
You'll find
lots of small pockets of time in your day
that you can give to more important things.
【Book share】
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- Author: James Clear
- Key quote: “The secret to change is: don't rely on willpower; rely on environment and design.”
Today's book is Atomic Habits.
Even if you haven't read it,
you've surely heard of it —
it's been a bestseller for years.
Let me start with a story:
from 1908, for 110 years,
no British cyclist
won the Tour de France,
and the team won just one Olympic gold in cycling.
They performed so poorly
that one bike manufacturer refused to sell to the British team
to avoid damaging its brand.
That tells you
how low British cycling had sunk.
Things only changed in 2003,
when the British team hired Dave Brailsford as performance director.
What set him apart from his predecessors
was his obsession with “the aggregation of marginal gains” —
finding tiny room for improvement
in everything
and continually optimizing it.
Besides the obvious things, like
redesigning the seats for comfort,
rubbing alcohol on the tires for grip,
and having riders wear electrically heated overshorts
to keep their muscles at the ideal temperature,
there were details others overlooked:
testing different massage gels to see which helped muscles recover fastest;
having a doctor teach riders to wash their hands properly to avoid colds;
having custom pillows and mattresses made for each rider
and taking them to every race;
even painting the inside of the team truck white
to spot tiny bits of dust that would otherwise be missed.
Five years after the new coach took over,
at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, British cycling
dominated both road and track events,
winning more than 60% of the gold medals.
Four years later, at the 2012 London Olympics,
the British cycling team
set nine Olympic records and seven world records.
The story tells us:
a 1% improvement
may not bring a big change right away,
but accumulated over time,
the effect is astonishing.
Here's the classic line:
get 1% better every day,
and after a year you'll be 37 times better.
Get 1% worse every day
for a year,
and you'll decline to almost nothing.
I love the British cycling story;
sport always stirs our emotions.
The NBA's San Antonio Spurs
have a quote from the social reformer Jacob Riis on their locker room wall:
“When nothing seems to help,
I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock,
perhaps a hundred times
without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred and first blow
it will split in two,
and I know
it was not that last blow that did it,
but all that had gone before.”
In any sport, the goal
is to get the highest score.
But the problem is,
winners and losers
often have the same goal.
The biggest difference between them
is their system.
And habits
are how you build a system.
The author makes another key point:
goals are lagging indicators;
systems are leading indicators.
What's the difference?
A goal is the result you want;
a system is the process that gets you there.
The author also tells a story
that hit close to home for me.
Whenever he had a spare moment,
he'd scroll social media,
and over time
it became harder and harder to concentrate.
So while writing this book,
he designed a new environment and process for himself.
Every Monday his assistant
would change the passwords on all his social media accounts,
and on Friday
send him the new passwords.
That way
he could use social media freely
on weekends,
and on Monday
his assistant would change the passwords again.
That's how he
designed a new environment
and built a new habit.
By now, the point of Atomic Habits is clear.
What really sets people apart
was never how hard you try or how strong your willpower is,
but whether the environment you live in every day
quietly pushes you in the direction you want to go.
We often think changing our lives takes one big decision,
but in fact
life is shaped, bit by bit,
by countless tiny choices.
How you design your environment and systems
determines the habits you build;
and the habits you have
determine the life you end up with.
If you want to change your habits and build systems,
I recommend this book.
This week's episode
#60 | Why people make irrational money decisions: The Psychology of Money #2
No one is crazy: our money choices are shaped by when and where we grew up. Why some generations hate debt, why a lottery ticket can be 'buying hope', and how I came to understand my own past choices.
Read the full show notes in English › (the episode is in Mandarin Chinese)
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That's it for this issue of the FIRE Life Weekly.
If you have any questions about the show or the newsletter,
just write to me at doug@firetw.com.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely day,
and see you next time.
Doug