How to avoid time confetti by defusing your weapon of mass distraction

Last week, I wrote about how calling it a day goes a long way to make us more efficient, recharge our ability to focus – and even boost our creativity. I recommended employing a shutdown ritual to check out of work at whatever time your weekly plan and workload permit.

Here's the problem: That ritual is necessary, but not sufficient for truly restorative downtime. While we have more leisure time than 50 years ago, there is an important twist: According to Prof. Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School, "leisure has never been less relaxing, mostly because of the disintermediating effects of our screens".

Whillans has popularized a concept known as time confetti. As our leisure time gets fractured by digital technology, we use our free time for tiny bits of easy, fast distraction, or even occasional work. Thus, our free time only comes in tiny snippets. This time confetti makes us experience time famine, or feeling hungry for time. Like in a hunger famine, we're constantly triaging and stressed – even in our leisure time. 

One major factor contributing to time confetti is our smartphone. It's the biggest “weapon of mass distraction" in the arsenal. As Cal Newport argues in "Digital Minimalism", this is due to two reasons: First, smartphones are ubiquitous. Thus, they turn every occasion into an opportunity to check our email or social media feeds. Second, some of the most distracting attention traps – such as the "slot machine" action of swiping down to refresh a feed or alarmed notification badges – are smartphone-only.

If you want to get more restorative downtime and avoid time confetti, you need to defuse that weapon. This includes minimizing both work-related and leisure-related stressors. To minimize work-related stressors, don't carry your office in your back pocket. Instead, stop using email and group chat on your (private) smartphone, and train yourself to do so from your computer only. Remember that with your shutdown ritual, you've made sure that there is nothing left at work to worry about. A complementary practice – and one that I use, too – is letting your colleagues know that they can always call when there’s an urgent issue.

To minimize leisure-related stressors, three things give you the most bang for the buck. First, turn off all notifications except from people. After you’ve done that, feel free to later reactivate those that you really can’t live without. Second, switch your smartphone to grayscale. This might seem odd, but it makes your smartphone much less seductive. Third, remove social media from your smartphone. That might feel impossible, but as with work email, training oneself to use it only from your computer is not only feasible, but also tremendously improves the quality of downtime.

If that last one is too rigorous for your, don’t despair: Over the next weeks, I’ll take a deep dive into getting restorative downtime and avoiding time confetti when using social media. I hope you’ll like it (no pun intended)!

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Until next week,
Christian