Since when I first read So Good , Cal Newport has been the first name popping out during my Career-centric conversations: the aforementioned So Good they can’t Ignore You and Deep Work are the must-read couple of books for a young student willing to delve in an intentional and well lived career development path.
As soon as i finished reading Deep Work (at the end of 2024), I felt a bit sad: I realized how superficial my approach to focus and study had been until that moment.
Quoting the last part of my Deep Work notes:
“””This book talks a bit about me.
Since I can remember, I struggled with focus, and beyond the possible inborn cognitive hiccups, I never really cared of setting my brain in work mode, which is probably what brought me down (in terms of degrees) through the school years and (partially) university.
The second part scares me the most: my fight with attention during the first two years of university may have already signed my contract for a lifetime looser career, and that’s even more frustrating when I consider that all I had to do was to put the phone down. Of course, not so simple, but still I won’t forget the old me for being so superficial and not strong enough to face the mathematical challenges i needed to face. I learned a lesson.
That said, God Bless this book, i mean it. It starts by showing you that there is a problem and it serves the solution 50 pages later. The practical part is obviously arguable, since it mostly contains author’s opinions, but that’s what makes it inspiring: I had the chance of observing how a true genius built his “genius brain”, without being a genius (we should argue the “geniusness” of these people as well).
For the second time in a row, Cal managed to inspire me and complete the way I look at portions of my life, and slapped me in the face enough to see how some modern world dynamics are 100% obstacles in my happy life path.
I needed those 200 pages to tell me “put the phone away, YouTube isn’t real information, grab a hell of a book, son.”
To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few!”””
As you can read, when I just finished reading that book I felt super inspired. I was immediately down to applying Deep Work concepts and ready to live a Deep life of intentionality and focus!…
…do I need to tell you?
It wasn’t going to be that simple. But it was a good start!
As soon as I started applying deep work methodologies (fixing some “deep” time windows among my study plan, fixing a place for deep work,…), I suddenly realized that I felt the urge of checking my phone, and I’m not talking about thinking “Let’s see if somebody texted me, let’s pick up the phone”: it was rather my arm doing the job without even asking my brain, every minute or so.
I felt addicted! I’ve never been addicted to anything in my life! Me, the one who has always made fun of people who smoked cigarettes and said “I wish I could quit but I just can’t”, and now I was one of them!
That felt horrible, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It took at least a year to create a correct smartphone routine, and I’m still quite far from my goal:
~3 Hours per day of phone time (I only use YouTube at night and it keeps going after I fall asleep, until the phone turns off at 1:00am) is still a lot. As you can see, the main issue is Text messages. We’ll discuss my relationship with them and with FOMO later.
If you could see my phone usage time back in the High School days, you would struggle to see a number below 10 hours per day, with at least 3-4 hours on YouTube, 2 on Instagram, 2 on Whatsapp, 1 on Clash of Clans/Clash Royal,… At least I have never had TikTok!
Let’s analyze how my (and my generation’s) Smartphone usage has been for the first 19 years of my life.This will make it much easier to understand how I managed to have my arm automatically picking up my phone, and why it needed a huge effort and a large dose of willpower to get (for an 80%) rid of the cursed arm gesture.
Born with a Phone
Lg L3 II, my first phone! My grandparents’ Christmas present when I was 12. I loved it (it was as small as it looks, some 10cm).
Until I was 12, there was no portable “entertainment technology” around me. Some friends had a Nintendo DS (something I could have killed someone for having), which my parents (luckily) never got me, someone else had a PSP (losers), but my parents were always pretty strict, thinking that I couldn’t go around (both indoor and outdoor) and have videogames in my pocket all the time. Good bless them.
But then, during a happy Christmas day, after my grandparents asked if it was ok for my parents, I received my first smartphone (I never had a “non-smart phone”, they were not a thing anymore 😁). 2 hours later I was playing “Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland” on a GBA emulator. 1 week later I was quitting reading: what’s reading for when YouTube is there? 1 month later I landed on Facebook and Whatsapp. It was over.
An Addiction
Fast forward to 6-7 years later: I’m checking my phone every 60 seconds, mostly when bored, of course. Two reasons brought me doing that:
- I wasn’t able to embrace boredom anymore.
- I needed a dopamine rush per minute in order to live
Following this order: before the cursed Christmas, boredom was a normal part of my childish life. I hated doing homework (the boring ones), and I couldn’t stand waiting outside of the dentist’s door to get my teeth checked, but I could somehow accept it.
If anything, boredom was the #1 reason to fight boredom: knowing that I had two hours of boring homework to do was motivating enough to try to get rid of them them as soon as I could, then going back to real business (hardcore Topolino reading), doing something fun.
What happened when an anti-boredom device landed in my pocket? Well, I wasn’t bored anymore, cause I wasn’t doing boring stuff at all! Doing homework became something like:
“Ok, time to get job done, what’s for tomorrow? 30 first degree equations, k, but let’s see what’s up with this new Minecraft mod first, and then it’s time to rush those equations”.
1 hour later:
“Dam, 3000 throphies and a maxed TH11, I’m the king of this village!”
As you could expect, my degrees didn’t exactly skyrocket, (it must be said that nobody has ever even tried to educate me to a responsible use of that device) and focusing on “boring” stuff became increasingly tough.
The big problem? “Boring” became an increasingly popular word for my brain: everything that wasn’t very emotionally relevant became hard, stuff like following a two hours university lecture became impossible. This brings us to point number 2!
One phone check every 60 second. At least. That was it for around 10 years. And it still is what I struggle with the most: my brain learned that when struggle/boredom/no extremely relevant info are around, I have to bend my arm and grab my phone to check emails, or YouTube, or Whatsapp, Telegram,…
It took me ~10 years to realize how addicted I (and everyone else) was. Most of addicted (especially younger ones) people, when talking about this, would simply reject the alternative hypothesis “I’m addicted”, until I said them “Ok, try forcing you to not doing that for a day then”. Everyone felt the same way, me included:
- Extreme FOMO: fear that mom texted for something really important, like life or death situations.
- Realizing that arms kinda gained free will, moving to pick the phone out of the pocket, and so did fingers, autonomously scrolling.
- A subtle anxiety layer on the background of their entire phone-less timespan.
It must be said that leaving our phone in our bag won’t only make us feel like heroine addicts, and we’ll discuss the positive outcomes later: the point is, we’re 100% addicted, and feel such, and just like any other addiction, the main problem is to recognize ourselves carrying on addicting behaviors.
The Realization
Fast forward to 8-9 years later: I’m completely addicted to my smartphone, and 0% aware of that. YouTube is always on something’s background (yes, even studying sometimes, you can’t even imagine the shame of writing this), 4-5 hours per day are allocated to Social Media (mostly Instagram and Whatsapp), 2-3 to gaming,… and repeat. My brain looked pretty much like the one in the notorious D.A.R.E. commercial.
How, and when, did the first awakening occur? Sadly, I have no clue, but I’m sure I was scrolling something in that moment, anyway, some day I decided I was done with Instagram and all of that cr*p.
That was my first awakening, the least one in terms of changes’ magnitude, but still the most important one: I realized that I couldn’t care less of looking at other people’s pics, or some weird meme. I was done with that, all of a sudden. An epiphany.
Bu I deeply remember my second awakening, because it was one of the strongest (virtual) punches in the face of my life, and it (ironically) arrived through YouTube:
While watching this livestream (you can see a couple of times my name popping out in the comments), I felt sad. Reeeeeally sad.
Why? Because I realized, in 5 minutes, that, until that moment,I spent 20 years in one of the worst ways I could: I’ve been putting a black tape on my creativity’s mouth just to listen to Podcasts and play GTA V, becoming dumber and dumber, until activities such as reading a book or listening to a 1 hour school lecture felt literally impossible.
I passed the rest of the day looking at my future self, poor and unsatisfied because of Clash of Clans. I felt like an idiot.
The Hill Climb
Let’s set my former “I am Here” mark, like Dave and Bill suggest:
- 10-14 smartphone hours per day
- Unable to focus on slightly boring tasks
- Addicted to grabbing the phone and checking every app
Luckily, TikTok wasn’t a thing back then, otherwise you wouldn’t probably be reading this post.
Where am I now and how did I manage to get here? Well, sadly, I still feel addicted. Much less, of course, but I still feel in the “I’m quitting smoking” phase, where you’re always one inch away from smoking again and having to start back.
While I write this post, I can feel my left arm willing to grab the phone. It’s a Poltergeist-ish situation.
Anyway, I still feel addicted BUT I made some significant progress, that are:
- A 100% intentional use of social media
- 0% Multitasking
- Less than 3 hours of active Smartphone use per day
Quitting the average social media experience has been the easier part, but it requires some philosophy first: I saw many people that deleted Instagram to avoid using it compulsively that simply started using the browser version.
I didn’t stop using Instagram just because I knew it was making me dumber: I did it because I actively recognized it as a source of evil, and I quit.
I didn’t delete my account because, as Cal says, if you’re able to avoid being Social Media companies’ product by mindlessly using their products, you’ll have a pretty powerful (and free) tool at your disposal.
That’s what I do. I use Instagram only when I need it, or if I have to promote my band’s shows. That’s it. A free and powerful tool to check some standup comedian’s tour dates and to advertise yourself. Everything else is trash.
The toughest fight was the one again Multitasking: for years my brain had a 1:1 association: boring stuff is done listening to YouTube. For the first 7-8 months of my Digital-Intentionality (f**k minimalism!) journey, my hands would open YouTube every time I started feeling bored, making me thinking “why did I do that?”, closing it. This happened several times per day.
How did I win this fight? No cool way to do that, just stop it. Don’t listen to anything while you’re studying, and don’t make a YouTube break every 45 mins or so: in my experience, that would reset the focus-meter.
Anyway, I’m still a YouTube user. My two YouTube rules are:
- Only use it in the evening or during long commutes. In short commutes (15-20mins) I prefer to make my brain rest.
- If I’m watching a video, focus is towards that video and nothing else. No Multitasking, ever again.
YouTube is never allowed during the day: it’s full of interesting things out there, and I actively risk my focus to be kidnapped for hours. Daytime is for active things, not for passive entertainment. The only form of “passive” entertainment allowed during the day is reading. Reading replaced the smartphone during every “10 minutes of boredom” situations that occur during the day: toilet time, waiting for lunch to be ready, queuing for the doctor,…
Evening, finally, is for gaming, or YouTube, or chatting, or whatever can be considered as pure entertainment.
Conclusions and Further Work
Just like any scientific paper, let’s sum up where I am and where I want to go. Let’s start from the bad stuff, to leave optimism for the end of the post.
I’m still addicted, mostly to chat services. I feel the urge to check Whatsapp and Telegram, say every 10 minutes. That is the most significant (and last!) threat to my focus. Cal Newport recently posted a video on this topic, in which he highlights how the real problem is your smartphone being 100% available throughout the day. Sadly, when I quit bringing my phone around with me when I’m at home, I started to mindlessly opening Whatsapp and Telegram web. You might struggle to believe that, when I say that my hands do that as normally as my legs walk, I really mean it, but that’s pretty much how it is.
What will I do about it? I’ll just probably disconnect both my accounts from the web versions, using them when actually needed. I should set a, say, 2 minutes-per-hour moment of checking what’s up (xD). Does doing so mean that the intentional me has been defeated by Whatsapp and Telegram? Yes, 100%, I give up. I tried dealing with them “intentionally”, but I’m just too addicted right now, there is no way i can use them “right”. It’s just like drugs.
So yeah, I’m still far from the monk-mode, bullet-journaling, second-brain-building, Pomodoro-slaying productivity warrior I sometimes dream of becoming. But the thing is I’ve started. I stopped pretending I was immune to all this, stopped making fun of “addicts” from my own little dopamine palace, and finally looked in the mirror. The person I saw wasn’t broken, just miswired. And the good news about wiring? You can rewire it.
I’m not where I want to be, but I’m not where I used to be either. And that’s huge. Because once you see the problem, once you really understand how deep the rabbit hole goes, there’s no going back. You start catching yourself before opening YouTube. You choose a book over your phone. You sit with boredom and realize it won’t kill you. Little wins, but they add up.
My focus muscle is still weak, but it’s no longer atrophied. And every day I resist that phantom arm movement, every time I choose to be present instead of distracted, I take one more step uphill.
The journey is long, sure. But for the first time, it feels like I’m on a path worth walking. And I’m bringing Cal’s voice (and that slap-in-the-face wisdom) with me.