2019.01.03 – Yay for slow tablets

Before Coffee

Last night was a disaster. On the way home I decided to stop by Trader Joe’s in Stonestown and grab stuff to make dinner, or so I thought. The students from SFSU were back in town and that store was picked over of nearly everything I needed. Time for plan b – Smart and Final and even that backfired. The only chicken left were breasts, ether with ribs or boneless/skinless and I needed drumsticks and thighs. On top of that, I have never seen the meat section in such disarray that it wasn’t worth it.

I should have taken a picture and sent something to their HQ since this was rather unacceptable. But instead I decided to just put back the one item I already grabbed and head home to drop off my car and grab some Ramen. Only to find out that the place I wanted to go to was closed for the night for some reason – sigh.

After hitting up a taqueria I head back home and realized I didn’t have much to do. Instead of playing a game or watching stuff on TV/Netflix/YouTube I decided to grab the Kindle Fire that is velcroed to the kitchen cabinet and read.

After coffee

This is something I really just haven’t done in a while. I have been trying to read more on my phone, but I quickly realized tonight it is not the same experience. The biggest change is that the Kindle Fire is so slow that I have nearly no apps on it outside of the Amazon ecosystem (Hey – it is used mainly to look up recipes and for timers).

Before I knew it I was halfway through reading a book that has been on my queue to read. There was something mentally uplifting about this. It has felt like my ADD has taken over my life for the last year and has been hard to just focus. I think a lot of the distraction is the constant notifications or the need to check if someone has responded on social media.

Then it hit me – Technology is one part of why my ADD has been worse. The constant notifications. The barrage of emails. The constant @channel abuse on slack. And worse, the addiction of apps that designers knowingly do to make sure you go back to that application to get your dopamine hit.

Time to face the day

Removing Facebook from my Phone is something I had to do out of keeping my mind sane due to the negative feedback cycle. Twitter is easy avoid since I can’t open it in public or work due to the mass amount of adult content I have on my feed there. Even though Instagram is still there – it doesn’t seem to consume my time or cause the rage I get from Facebook. Lastly, MeWe is just too new to have enough of a distraction aspect to it that I feel like I can safely ignore it (I might have to revisit that if it gains more steam).

Maybe 2019 will be the year of Phone App bankruptcy. Removing all of the distraction whore apps from it. The phone and social media are not 100% to blame for my focus issues, but they are as slice of it.

Just knowing that I was able to sit down last night and read made a big difference.