What Tim Ferriss says about social media and phone addiction

“my phone is on airplane mode, I would say, 80 plus percent of my day. It is particularly critical post dinner all the way until I finish my morning routine the next day. My phone is almost never on, or say off of airplane mode, when I’m in bed.”

“Another unusual habit – I don’t think of it as unusual, but people have told me is unusual, is leaving my phone on airplane mode 80 to 90 percent of the day to avoid distraction. This is particularly important when I go to bed. So, I will put it onto airplane mode, and it doesn’t come off of airplane mode until I’ve finished my morning routine because if I wake up and I see a barrage of texts and emergencies, real or manufactured, forget about mediation.”

“I do not have notifications on my phone for most things. I do not have e-mail notifications. I do not have news notifications. I turned off all news notifications. I have no social media notifications.”

“On my iPhone, I do not have email notifications or social notifications of any type. So there’s no number count associated with my Facebook app, my Twitter app, or mail because I don’t have mail set up.”

“Yes, I do follow this. The screen-free Saturdays is now I usually refer to it. That was yesterday for me. Right now, I am recording this on a Sunday. It’s turned into, I would say, I still call it screen-free Saturday for myself. But it is mostly referring to no laptop and no social media. So I will still use my phone for texting, for using apps like Uber, for instance, to get around. […] I try to go the entire day without any exposure to laptop and any exposure to social media. You will occasionally see things pop up in my social media on Saturday that have been scheduled in advance with the understanding that I’m not going to be on social on Saturdays. So yes, I find the screen-free Saturday to be an incredibly important part of my weekly routine.”

“An example of that would be screen-free Saturdays, when I am avoiding, for instance, laptops, social media, and so on. I may still use my phone for Uber and other apps – maps and so on – that are necessary for me to function in a city.”

“I also deleted all social apps from my phone four weeks ago. […] Yeah, I have missed exactly nothing of great importance that I’m aware of. Meaning, I talk to friends, I will occasionally on laptop, look at, say, things that are trending on Twitter that might be relevant to anything that I can affect positively or areas where I can mitigate risks or something like that. But the vast majority of news is going to make you either anxious or really pissed off. And if you’re not prepared or able to take action on something that is within your sphere of control, it’s really just creating energy leaks that will drain you. And I realized somewhere between, I’d say six and eight weeks ago that I was extremely fatigued. I was very tired. And it was I think because I had so many stimuli in the form of different notifications or apps on my phone, social, et cetera, which were creating these powerful emotions without any ability to direct them towards something positive and actionable. […] And so I deleted them from my phone and talked to a lot of friends and also will talk to members of my team, employees. We do team calls, various types, and feel like the signal-to-noise ratio has improved so much since I did that. And I will occasionally, probably twice a week, look at replies on Twitter because my listeners and readers are extremely helpful in helping me to find high-signal articles or research studies that are really relevant to things they know I care about and focus on. But outside of that, it has been such a freeing experience. And I really feel like social by and large has been a huge net negative.”

“So what that allows me to do is I can take a photo of something I think is beautiful or useful, put it on Instagram, and do so without ever being exposed to my feed in any way. So in other words, it is write only instead of read only.”

“I use Gmail offline a lot. So, I will process email, batch process email, offline so that I do not have the psychological trauma of feeling like I am doing whack a mole. Where is end off two emails and I get five back and I am just like, I cannot. I am drowning. I cannot do this. I should watch Game of Thrones or whatever you use to procrastinate. To avoid that, batch processing offline hugely valuable.”

“Boomerang, which allows me to not just automate follow up reminders if I do not hear back from someone, but to set parameters and secondly, this is very underused, there is a feature to send in the future. So, the way you train someone, just like training a dog or a manatee or anything else, is the same stuff. There is a great book called Don’t Shoot the Dog which you should all read about for training humans also. Is you can extend the time between which you respond to certain types of people and it just teaches them you are not on IM. Email is not messenger for you.”

“Then I combine that with Boomerang. What Boomerang allows me to do is send email responses in the future. So I cannot send the response now but send it in a week or seven days. What this does is it minimizes the likelihood of catalyzing an instant messengerlike exchange. What I don’t want to do is reply right away, especially if I know this person wants to talk.”

“And I will say, though, that there are a few things. One is looking at my calendar on an annual basis, and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline. And by extended, that’s one, two, or three weeks, and ensuring that I have, hopefully, something of at least a week, once a quarter. So I’m actually leaving tomorrow for three weeks off the grid. And I will have no Wi-Fi, and no phone for three weeks. And that’s important to me on a multitude of levels. Number one, it allows me to check in, and see how comfortable I am with myself when I am not over-busied. It provides me with time to reflect without the ability to indulge in the temptation to go on Twitter, or check something. So I don’t need to rely on self-control. In other words, I’m saved for myself. It allows my system, physiologically, time to reboot and recover. And it also forces me to put in place, or revisit, systems that allow me to be gone for three weeks.”

“And I will take shorter trips, and be typically completely in the wilderness or the jungle, or somewhere with nothing. No electronics for a period of time. I do that generally, at least once or twice a year.”