MFYZ

I firmly believe screen-less or no screen time is a necessary concept for digital dwellers. Screen-less / No screen is very much like sabbatical practice where you don’t interact with technology as much, or to be more specific don’t interact with screens.

Let’s deconstruct this little bit.

Working with screens

I’m an internet worker which is my job to produce stuff for people to consume on their technological devices. It’s my job to think, create and bend the rules with computing and make technology smarter. Most of my day goes into research, write, plan, manage and do all of these on computer. Usually spend like 12-15 hours on screens.

There are so many occupations not centered around creating technology but using technology to create. By nature many jobs are very similar to mine, spending almost all the time behind screens while working.

Couch potato with screen

But there are a good chunk of humanity just “watching”. Probably majority of the people spending time on screens is just consuming. It’s a natural transition from non-interactive television era to screen time. Kevin Kelly has a great definition for this and he calls it “screening” not watching, not reading… We just scroll endlessly.

Too much screen time, too many screens to look at

Not just having A screen, we have screens everywhere. Phones, tablets, computers, tv screens for constant information for some jobs (like stock tickers, performance dashboards etc..) and finally wearables. We carry multiple screens with us all the fucking time…

Not a surprise everybody is ADD now

I’ve been doing reads on many different topics related with technology’s impact. Recently how screens affect little children since I have two little babies now, more curious on this topic these days.

What I see as a consistent pattern, mostly conclusions on these reads is screens are bad for certain period of childhood causing loss on attention span, making our brains more distracted. I understand the reasoning that our brain is designed to “see” stuff in graceful progression. Especially movements we expect from nature is not suddenly disappearing or suddenly appearing stuff. Sudden movements is “danger” signal for brain. We produce minimal stress hormones when stuff happens fast because naturally fast movements trigger us to “escape” from danger by it’s biological nature. The fast moving images and flashing visuals that makes brain to jump between things is essentially damaging. This sounds so familiar – think a random tv program 🙂

It’s growing number of kids, people have ADD (attention deficit disorder).

Keep it cool, keep it under control

Best way to cope with this is to have regular “stops” from screens. It’s just plain straightforward plan. Don’t look at screens, don’t use your gadgets for a while. To me once a week for a day is just perfect. Maybe once in every 6 months or once a year it can be weeklong stop. It’s not new concept guys! We call this just weekend and holidays 🙂

Cool it down a little…

Getting lazy with technology

Not interacting with screens or more broad with technology completely for a day is also about breaking the pattern of technology supported laziness where we lost the connection and need for retention of basic information like directions or shopping list.

When I first did no screen, without realizing, I got into a situation that I booked a yoga class the day before for Saturday and when the class time came, I realized I never knew the address of the studio I went twice. It was a little scary that I didn’t know this information, I managed to go out and try few different streets until I remember the correct street. Following week, I started to note the directions of the places I wanted to spend my day.

Getting creative with no screen time

A lot of good came out of no screen days:

• read much more,
• workout in many different ways, running, yoga, biking, hiking,
• farmers market, vintage shop, random exploration of my neighborhood,
• having less serious plans and schedule for Saturdays,
• catching up with friends more,
• meditating,
• writing, life planning

It’s been over a year now and it became part of my weekly routine.

Exceptions

I have few exceptions that I don’t practice no screen Saturdays, when I travel, when I have a deadline that shit really happened and it’s very important (I try to keep this 2-3 times a year max, otherwise there is always important stuff). I only interact screens very very briefly (not longer than a minute or two) to open music, I also keep “kindle” out of “screen” category because you can’t do much other than reading.

Writing represents pretty much the biggest leap in human history. We started to make great things after we started documenting our wisdom and make it portable. Anything was written is made for communication even if it means communicating by yourself. People write, scribble to solidify their ideas, thoughts and there is no better format than written or drawn materials.

It requires a skill to write. And writing is definitely an amazing skill set that requires time, patience and practice to develop. A lot of people writing blogs which is a great way of sharpening this skill and one of the primary reasons I keep my blog open for years.

When it comes down to communicating with multiple people, written communication thrives. In many real-time communications, speaking, listening, discussing (etc), we listen/watch/read and “interpret” more than understanding things at that second. And in a lot of cases, people misunderstand things. A lot of details can be lost because of the immediacy of the communication. Writing and reading provide the best version to both sides. It allows communicator to materialize their ideas in plain form and it gives enough time to the writer to think, rethink, make errors and fix them on writers own pace. Same stuff happens on “receiver”s side. All of us take stuff differently and there is no better format than a written message, document etc…

This speed thing and difference is a very underestimated thing about how each one of us functions. Some of us think very deep and it takes time, some of us are very fast processors but may oversee things and miss stuff. It’s all normal, it’s what makes each one of us, us. But when it comes to two people communicating, it can cause errors.

Personally Writing

As I mentioned above, writing is a beautiful way to shape your thoughts. A way to make floating half-baked ideas to become complete or easy to follow. All writing stories has to be connected well in between of each sub-stories or sub-thoughts. So writing gives very creative ways to connect the dots. Therefore it makes you think better, thinks more connected and almost always makes you speak better because you train your brain to think that way. It rewrites your brain for that way of thinking. I see great benefits of writing stuff down even if I will temporarily collect them somewhere.

I use note taking apps on my digital devices, carry Moleskine notebooks on my backpack all the time. When you need to write stuff down, you need to have materials to do so.

Repeating same point above, writing speed is always slower than how fast we think. Some people (like me) thinks fast and because of we don’t have enough practice to speak, we mix our thoughts when we try to speak (without enough training) as we think. Because our thoughts fly fast, we try to speak fast and screw up sometimes 🙂 Writing gives perfect sight of slowly building sentences and progress on a topic in order, it builds the great skill to how to organize thoughts.

Bonus, if writing in a foreign language it gives the best way to practice vocabulary. Also, there are millions of tools on computers, mobile devices that correct and highlights misspelled words, even grammatical errors that trains you slowly. If you type same error 5 times, you start to fix it and it will be gone very soon. So, when learning a new language. I encourage you to write stuff in that new language.

Writing in Business and in Teams

Written communication is one of the essential elements of running a business. This is a skill that every professional has to master. This becomes vital especially if you are a manager or an executive of a business. Is the extreme side of this example, we can think about legal matters. In the legal world, there is nothing other than written evidence and explanations. In some cases, we write anything happened between two parties in “contracts”s. Of course, legal writings has its own category and maybe a boring example but it magnifies the importance of this in business.

On the less legally binding but still important matters like business decisions, business plans etc, written documents are the best way to inherit any information that needs to be implemented in the business.

Written artifacts in business and team communication also brings consistency of the communication. If you are trying to build systematically designed process around communication, the consistency can be varied a lot depending on the leader. Agreeing on a format and treating that like a template is the best way to bring consistency of repetitive tasks. I’ll write more on this later in specific cases.

Another reason of written docs use in running a business is the scalability and mobility of the information. What I mean by the mobility of information is how easy to move a know-how from an individual or a group of individuals to another. Let’s say you trained someone to be a killer project manager or marketing person. How much of know how can be moved to another person? Does it require the same amount of training? How much of that information can be documented and requires a new trainee to read an learn early on? Or when implementing a business process change to 10 different people in different teams, how easy to train multiple designers at once? At the end of the day, written documents become the guidelines, archives and historical artifacts of the business.

The last point on writing communication in business; if you are an open and transparent team, written communication is a must because of availability and accessibility of written communication is unmatched. Especially, digitally communicating teams are already halfway there. Having slack to talk, quip or google docs like tools to document and trello like project management tools are already very easy to search, scan, monitor, track progress of anything written.

For last 2 years, we have re-structured our company and teamwork process to become very (digital) nomadic. We have reconfigured all of our communication and project management processes to be remote-friendly. In fact, 7 out of 10 of our team members work completely remote. 2 of the team members that I’ve been working for last 2 years that I haven’t met in person 🙂

I took parental leave from my company last few weeks and now I’m back to work. Before I was fully coming back, I was trying to figure out how my early baby-care schedule will be working out with my work schedule.

First I re-read some of the old topics that I used to research about sleep patterns, work and focus management experiments I used to do. I’ll talk about them in this post. Then I started to create some alternative ways to define work, baby care and sleep blocks around the clock. This planning can get so anal if you want to. I kept it logically working with my existing baby-care schedule that I adapted last few weeks (since the babies arrived). Now, let’s dive into them.

Thinking about sleep schedule

Sleep is probably the #1 topic for new (or repeating) parents when it comes to newborn or young babies. I think people are doing this wrong for uncontrolled reasons. Having required working on certain hours definitely makes this harder to manage because if you have a full-time work that required you to be on-site or on specific hours, you don’t have any option to work and have to be concentrated within those hours and continue doing your baby care shift at evening, night.

Since I have the luxury to define my own hours of when to sleep, when to be awake, when to be working and when to be resting, I approached this from the “mad scientist” mindset. This actually comes from the “creative” or “scientific” geniuses that are well known in living or experimenting with alternative “sleep patterns”.

For people are foreign to the topic, there are very analytical methods of different ways to plan your “resting” hours for your day. Sleeping is not always necessarily has to be 1 block of time for 8 hours of sleep for everybody. A lot of people does multiple blocks of sleeping. Well-known example of this is “siesta” in Spanish/Italian/Latin cultures. This falls under biphasic sleep (twice daily). But there are more challenging and weird versions of this pattern as known as polyphasic sleep pattern (more than 2 times a day). The main reason for many people trying alternative sleep pattern is to decrease total hours of sleep and provide similar/enough resting time for the body, so you can save extra hours to live longer days.

This is why many scientists or creatives try these patterns to get more hours of working/thinking/creating for their peak creative years. Some of the well knows are Da Vinci, Edison, Tesla, Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson. There are many ways to do this alternative sleep patterns but there are know models:

To learn more about polyphasic sleep patterns: https://www.polyphasicsociety.com/polyphasic-sleep/overviews/

So here is my formula that falls under Biphasic Sleep Pattern that I worked out with my own schedule:

Thinking about work schedule

Our team works in different timezones from different continents and with our clients being almost on the other side of the planet, everybody works in their own hours except our team synchronizes once every day at 10:15am EST. We do a very short standup usually averages around 5-6 minutes. Other than this we only focus on the deliverables and weekly milestones that are usually set up at the beginning of the week. Rest of the week, we keep collaboration between team members based on people’s availability without a strict model.

This allows me to define my own work hour blocks and breaks that I want to work at. So based on the splitting my sleep, I split my work hours into 2 main blocks with a long break in each work hour blocks. So I designed 4 blocks of hours on the remaining hours of the sleep to focus on my work.

The drawing below shows the work blocks and their sprints in it. I’ll talk how I think about these sprints when I sit down to work below.

How to create focus in work hours since baby-care can be super distracting

This is pretty much how to focus, how to plan your own time and this topic itself is a separate topic to cover with many alternative methods. I’ve been working in tech almost 15 years now and I’ve experimented with many many methods including the ones touches to the project management, provides team focus and better collaboration. Last few years the methods that is remote work friendly become more appealing for me.

I like the pomodoro framework with adding few extra tools and adjusting the strict-pomodoro with few changes. This was a model I worked many years ago and we did the team-pomodoro for a while couple years ago in our team with busy lights and team dashboards that plays well with our adjusted-Kanban style project management.

So, essentially I split my work hours to pomodoro blocks. Which is 25-minute work + 5-minute rest (30 minutes) sprints that gives me 15 pomodoros a day. Pomodoro is just a mental checkpoint for me. To me more important to think about, how to minimize distractions. With many “screens” that we carry and wear, it becomes so much easier to get distracted even if you lock yourself in a room to work. Below, few tips I follow when I execute my pomodoros.

1) No mobile device to be vibrating, flashing screen or making sounds while working in pomodoro. A simple way to do this is, disable your notifications – using don’t disturb on mobile phones is the easiest way to do this. Put your phone/tablet etc facing screen down on the table is enough way to achieve this. Don’t use wearables that vibrate – or disable everything. I only use apple watch in airplane mode for the timer.

2) Define with pomodoro blocks that you will use communication tools, email responding, slacking, trello, social network etc… Only allow yourself to use these apps/sites. Use a tool to restrict your access to social networks, email sites even apps to use on your mac/windows. I use “Focus” app to block distracting apps and sites that show an alert even if I forgot and try to open these apps or sites.

3) Stop when pomodoro ends. 5-minute breaks are essential and don’t look at the screen on your break. Drink water, stand up, lay down on the couch but don’t interact with screens while on your short break. Use a visual or strong vibrating wearable for your pomodoro to make you annoyed if you don’t walk away from the computer. I use apple watch and it’s basic timer to get me very very aware of the timer is up with haptic feedback. I tried jawbone up and other alarms – phone alarm or pomodoro timers on mac. Nothing is as strong as my solution for me.