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Addicted to Your Mobile Phone or the Internet? Make it Stop

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Update 2017-02-02: Article by Geoffrey A. Fowler and link to Time Well Spent and embed two of their videos.

I stumbled over an awesome Atlantic article about Tristan Harris which I urge you to read.

Tristan is a well-served Silicon Valley pro who likes to think about reducing interruptions, stop the addiction to mobile devices or cloud services, eat healthy food, and try to live in the present, focusing on stuff that really matters.

He has some very good points, some of which I also try to spread for many years.

The article gives some great insight on motivations of companies like facebook, Google, Apple, and LinkedIn. They design interfaces to get people addicted. Sometimes this is done deliberately, sometimes this is just coincidence or a by-product.

The Wall Street Journal featured this article by Geoffrey A. Fowler which lists many opportunities to reduce interruptions, distractions, and triggers.

I am guilty as hell to be addicted to too many things. This has come to my mind not just in recent time but it is starting to bug me more and more. Some things are very easy to adapt to my personal life such as disabled notifications, app choices, and app settings. Some things are really hard to change: Twitter, too many items on my org-mode agenda, large number of cool blog articles stuck in the pipeline, too many (good) ideas and hardly any big outcome, not writing the PIM book I am dreaming about for years, and so forth.

You will read about my journey to reduce addictions in the future. I'll keep you informed on my blog which will stay my main online communication/publishing focus. Yes, I am looking at you, Twitter addiction! There is a movement called Time Well Spent which tries to «align technology with our humanity». Surely interesting stuff to follow. The embedded videos are from this web page.

Feel free to send me an email or a Disqus comment below and drop me a line on how you are defeating IT addictions and start living in the present more intensely.


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