Notes

# Notes
1. [smartphone-detox-an-antidote-to-the-age-of-brain-drain](https://medium.com/@alltopstartups/smartphone-detox-an-antidote-to-the-age-of-brain-drain-ca6431800b0e)
- Our minds need urgent purification to improve focus, replenish attention, and encourage creativity. The average adult checks their phone 50 to 300 times each day. And we tap, swipe and click on our devices 2,617 times per day.
- Every time you pull out your phone to scan your feeds, your brain is building a habit loop that reinforces itself to encourage the habit. Our lives are becoming more wired all the time, hence the need to take over and control your relationship with mobile devices before they become the only thing you deeply care about at the expense of your relationships.
- “People are always amazed by how different they feel after not being on their phones and that motivates them to want to keep going,”
- **Pause on purpose**
- Digital detox is a nice break from the daily grind of updates, and messages.
- Switching off gives you more clarity for creative work. You can start your digital detox by shutting off notifications. Choose to check updates, feeds at a specific time of your choice.
- I cut off all distractions to focus and work better. “Out of sight, out of mind”.
- **Remember your priorities**
- Technology is meant to improve how we work and make life easier. But smartphones, in particular, are making us less focused. Instead of working on our priorities, we urgently respond to _other_ people’s priorities — our inboxes are full of them.
- Email addiction is a time-wasting epidemic in the digital age. Apply 2 min rule for checking mails
- **Be proactive, not reactive!**
- “Reactive” means, you don’t have the initiative. You let the events set the agenda. You are practically checking things off others’ lists.
- “Proactive” on the other hand is associated with control. You are in charge. You plan and take the initiative in your direction. It’s a way of dealing with things, that you can develop and strengthen. When you are proactive, you react ahead of time, hence saving you time.
- **Final thoughts**
- Starting today, make a deliberate choice to unplug. Remember, detoxing is a habit. It takes time to build new habits. Don’t aim for a radical change. Plan to unplug, and increase the times you disconnect every week.
- These are quick steps to getting your digital detox started immediately.
1. Turn off your notifications when you start deep work
2. Resist the urge to check your email when you are in proactive mode.
3. Check email “on purpose” at your time.
4. Use your breaks think, meditate, go for a walk or read a physical book.
5. Keep your phone out of sight for meetings, get-togethers, conversations, and meals involving other people.
6. Instead of grasping your gadget at every opportunity, replace your screen time with other habits, like starting a conversation, or reading a newspaper.
7. Tidy up your smartphone (once a month go through your phone and delete any unused app). It’s an essential step to using it more efficiently.

2. [The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters](https://fs.blog/2018/09/decision-matrix/)
- **Intro:**
- The decisions we spend the most time on are rarely the most important ones. Not all decisions need the same process.
- I remember once struggling at the intelligence agency shortly after I received a promotion. I was being asked to make too many decisions. I had no way to sort through them to figure out which ones mattered, and which ones were inconsequential(not important).
- I figured most of the urgent decisions could be made by the team because they were easily reversible and not very consequential
- As I was walking home one night, I came up with an idea that I used from the next day on, with pretty good success. I call it the Decision Matrix. It’s a decision making version of the [Eisenhower Matrix](https://fs.blog/2013/04/how-to-work-more-efficiently-the-eisenhower-matrix/), which helps you distinguish between what’s important and what’s urgent. It’s so simple you can draw it on a napkin, and once you get it, you get it.
- **The Decision Matrix**
- My strategy for triaging was simple. I separated decisions into four possibilities based on the type of decision I was making.
- Irreversible and inconsequential
- Irreversible and consequential
- Reversible and inconsequential
- Reversible and consequential
- **The Decision Matrix in Practice**
- I delegated both types of inconsequential decisions. Inconsequential decisions are the perfect training ground to develop judgment. The problem wasn’t making the decision—that took seconds in most cases. The problem was the 30 minutes the person spent presenting the decision to me. I saved at least 5–7 hours a week by implementing this one change.
- Consequential decisions are a different beast. **Reversible and consequential decisions are my favorite. These decisions trick you into thinking they are one big important decision.** In reality, reversible and consequential decisions are the perfect decisions to run experiments and gather information.
- **Consequential and irreversible decisions are the ones that you really need to focus on.** All of the time I saved from using this matrix didn’t allow me to sip drinks on the beach.

3. [How to stay fit forever: 25 tips to keep moving when life gets in the way](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/12/how-to-stay-fit-for-ever-25-tips-keep-exercising-expert-advice)
- **Intro:**
- When it comes to exercise, we think about how to “get” fit. But often, starting out is not the problem. “The big problem is maintaining it,”
- **Work out why, don’t just work out**
- society promotes exercise and fitness by hooking into short-term motivation, guilt and shame. There is some evidence, she says, that younger people will go to the gym more if their reasons are appearance-based, but past our early 20s that doesn’t fuel motivation much.
- **Get off to a slow start**
- is that people “jump in and do everything – change their diet, start exercising, stop drinking and smoking – and within a couple of weeks they have lost motivation or got too tired. If you haven’t been in shape, it’s going to take time.”
- **You don’t have to love it**
- **Be kind to yourself**
- **Don’t rely on willpower**
- “If you need willpower to do something, you don’t really want to do it,” Instead, think about exercise “in terms of why we’re doing it and what we want to get from physical activity. How can I benefit today? How do I feel when I move? How do I feel after I move?”
- **Find a purpose**
- **Make it a habit**
- **Plan and prioritize**
- **Keep it short and sharp**
- “A well-structured 15-minute workout can be really effective if you really are pressed for time.”
- **If it doesn't work, change it**

4. [How to salvage some productivity after a crappy morning](https://www.fastcompany.com/90213215/how-to-salvage-some-productivity-after-a-crappy-morning)
- **Intro:**
- You look up and can’t believe it’s already lunchtime. You’ve accomplished exactly nothing. Here’s how you can recover.
- Getting out of bed in the morning is an act full of hope. Anything is possible. You could be on the road to a great day.
- But, some days the wheels come off the cart quickly. You get to work to find a fire that needs to be put out. A colleague has not finished a key part of a project, and you’re stuck in a holding pattern. You get dragged into a meeting you didn’t really need to attend.
- And suddenly, a.m. has turned to p.m., and you haven’t gotten anything done yet. How can you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?
- **Reset your mood:**
- A lousy(bad/poor) morning lowers your mood and saps your energy. you are more creative and more productive when you’re in a positive mood than a negative one.
- That means you need to reset your day. Before you get back to your desk for the afternoon, do something you really like. The main idea is that you don’t want to carry a negative mood from a morning that got derailed into the afternoon. Otherwise, you can let a lot of time slip by and turn a bad morning into a wasted day.
- **Find a win:**
- Positive mind helps but you'll need some extra motivation to immerse yourself into work.
- A good way to get yourself energized after a tough morning is to succeed at something small to get yourself rolling. Run through your to-do list and find something that won’t take long to finish, but will take care of something nagging at you.
- The key is to put in 20-30 minutes of work on something that actually lets you check an item off your to-do list.
- Completing a small task like this has two benefits. It boosts your mood, which continues your quest to put your morning behind you. It also provides a flow of energy (or what psychologists call arousal that can propel you toward the next task. Now, you’re ready to pick off a bigger task from your list.
- **Be helpful:**
- If you’re really struggling to concentrate on your own work after a bad morning, get social. That doesn’t mean hang out with colleagues. It means find a task you can do that will assist a colleague in some way. Because your brain is wired to cooperate, you may find you are more productive working on something jointly than trying to go it alone.
- Check your to-do list for any task that might require you to interact with a colleague to finish something. Worst case, walk over to a colleague’s desk and offer your help on what they are doing at the moment.