Episode Details

It’s time to be honest with yourself...when is the last time you and your smartphone were more than 5 feet away from each other?

If you’re not staring at it right now, it’s probably in your pocket.

When it’s not in your pocket, it’s charging within arm’s reach.

If it’s not within arm’s reach (or God forbid you can’t find it), you most likely feel anxious and can’t focus until it’s in your grasp again.

When you’re driving, it’s either in your lap or the cup holder next to you.

When you’re sleeping, it’s most likely charging right next to your head.

If any (or all) of these sound familiar, you are not alone. Smartphone addiction has become an epidemic, and that addiction is no accident. Smartphone users now check their phones upwards of 150 times per day¹, and the top 10% of users touch their phones over 5400 times per day²! Your smartphone apps are specifically designed to hold as much of your attention as possible. The longer you spend inside the apps, the more money companies like Facebook and Twitter make off of stealing your attention. Unfortunately your attention is a finite resource, and every second that you give it away to your smartphone you are losing exponentially greater amounts of your creativity in return.

If your livelihood depends on your ability to generate creative ideas consistently, being distracted is bad for business.

Addiction by Design

Have you ever wondered why you feel so compelled to continue scrolling through the latest posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or the hundreds of other social media apps? If you think that it’s “just me,” and that “I have no willpower or control,” you couldn’t be further from the truth. The reason you are so drawn to your smartphone is called ‘The Slot Machine Effect’ and it’s 100% intentional, deliberate, and precisely calculated by app developers to ensure you never want to leave. This desire you have to see if there is “just one more” cool picture or funny post is called “intermittent variable rewards,” and according to Tristan Harris, founder of the Time Well Spent movement and former Google Design Ethicist, it’s why you are okay walking around with a slot machine in your pocket all day long despite the fact that it’s hijacking your creativity, training you to live in a constant state of distraction, and possibly even hurting your personal relationships (Note: Those would be relationships with “real” people, not avatars or people with “@” before their name). “When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got...what new emails we got...to see what photo comes next. If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action with a variable reward,” according to Harris. Every time you make that gentle swiping motion with your thumb to refresh your feed, you are pulling the lever of the slot machine hoping that the next image, the next post, the next email will give you that oh-so-pleasurable dopamine hit...all while your ability to step “into the zone” and experience a state of “creative flow” is all but destroyed.

The Cost of Distraction

Before I go any further, I already know that you’re “different.” You’re good at multitasking, right? You can do intense creative work while also keeping up with email, text notifications, your Twitter feed, and all “breaking news” notifications. But here’s the thing...you’re not good at multitasking. The human brain is simple not capable of focusing on more than one