Bro, you are not Uranium 235

Yes, you heard it right.
You are not Uranium 235 to stay active day in and day out on social media.

Don’t just simply dissipate your time and energy. Here’s what I do:

Using focus mode.

You can choose which apps are allowed to send notifications and which apps are blocked during the focused period.

Good for some serious work, study, or other important activities without being interrupted by social media, messaging apps, or other apps that may distract you.

The most interesting part is, you can open any blocked app and use it for 5 minutes. When 5 minute is about to expire, the screen turns grey and then it just closes. And at that moment you will realize, how time flies when you are on social media apps.

Using Grey scale or Bedtime mode

Converts the screen to shades of gray, eliminating color from the user interface. Makes it harder to distinguish between various elements on the screen. It becomes less user-friendly.

I use this mode to prepare myself in the evening for reading or to reduce the blue light to aid a better sleep.

Proactive filtering of the notifications

Apps like Instagram have lot of options in notification settings. And most of us don’t know this. You can control every alerts separately, from comment, likes, mentions and requests to anything you can do on Instagram to annoy your friend.

Here is my recommendations:

• Allow floating notifications and don’t allow sound and vibrations. You can see the incoming message and can opt to respond or not.
• Allow message requests (MKBHD want to send you a message)
• Allow incoming audio and video chats (Incoming video chat from Elon)
• Allow comments (Linus Torvalds commented: “Talk is cheap. Show me the code”)

Rest I don’t care.

Instead of blindly following everyone, if I find a good content on social media, I take that 10 second to create a collection for the content and save it. I do keep a lot of them for writing, reading, editing, coding and many more.

When ever I feel like I want to do something like writing, but lack the motivation or inspiration, will just go to the collection and start watching. Since I am watching videos related to writing, recommendations will be similar and in few minutes, I will be in writing mode.

But the problem with this approach is, you might miss the trending contents since you are not following. I do this mostly for irrelevant, but might be useful saves like, videos showing places to visit in Hyderabad, cafe-hopping recommendations etc.

The point is,

Just don’t let a distraction distract you twice

Originally shared on LinkedIn