Tag Archives: infomagical

Yesterday’s Infomagical Challenge centered around the joy of tidying up your phone. The idea was to take a look at every app on your smartphone and think about whether or not it made you happy and productive. If it didn’t, see ya! The app is gone and your home screen is a little less cluttered. The remaining apps were then all placed into a single folder that made your phone a sparkling monument to minimalism.

The first time I took the challenge, I couldn’t bring myself to stuff all of my apps into one folder — but I did bring it down to six: iPhone Apps, Google Apps, Self-Improvement, Entertainment, Capitalism, Other. And it wasn’t a bad system. I pared down so many of my apps and seriously cut down on the number of times I got an app just to try out for something. But still, I couldn’t quite understand how much pushing my phone to its bare minimum would change my experience with it.

Now, I have to search for every app that I want to open. I have an iPhone, so there’s a Spotlight-type feature that brings up a search bar, my most recently opened apps, and a few other “suggested” items from Siri. It actually works quite well — if I’m dipping into Twitter or Telegram via my phone it’s right there, but if I want to play a game or dig up a utility app it forces me to engage the experience with intention and purpose. Which is great. It cuts down on the ease with which I can distract myself through my phone, which makes me pay attention to not only how often I have that impulse, but how often I act on that impulse.

Here’s my home screen now. Beautiful, simple, with just the cutest face staring back at me reminding me to “Be mindful.” I may not keep my phone like this forever, but I’ll definitely aim to cut down on the clutter.

Now that I’ve conquered my phone, I’m thinking about doing the same with my tablet and desktop — minimalism for all of my devices! Making sure that there’s only one application open at a time will help with single-tasking, and getting rid of the ‘default’ apps on my taskbar will help remove distraction and cut down on automatic behavior…which is the whole point of the Infomagical Challenge. For someone like me, this is a godsend.

Which brings us to today. The challenge is to avoid memes, articles, videos and anything else online that does not get you closer to your information goal. If your goal is to be more creative, anything that stirs the muse within you is fair game — but nothing else. If your goal is to become more knowledgeable on a topic, read or watch to your heart’s content…as long as it’s about the topic you’re trying to learn about. Everything else? Resist it. Imagine there’s a little Gandalf holding the bridge to your attention. And the Big Bad Balrog of Distraction is trying to consume your precious synapses. Will Gandalf let that slide? HELL NO. And neither will you. Engage with the Internet mindfully today. With a single-minded productive purpose. See how it feels to confront your fear of missing out. It might not be so bad!

If you’re just learning about the Infomagical Challenge, here are a couple of links that will get you up to speed really well:

Day 0: The Case for Infomagical
Day 1: Single-Tasking
Day 2: A Magical Phone

Also, shout out to Note to Self (a wonderful podcast) for organizing the Infomagical Challenge as well as their previous project, Bored and Brilliant.

See you lovely folks tomorrow! Did you minimalize your phone or desktop? Share a picture with me. 🙂

Yesterday for the Infomagical Challenge we were supposed to single-task: throughout the day, we choose ONE thing to do and carry out that task to completion. For those of us who are really used to bouncing around from webpage to Word to chat program, it might have been pretty difficult. How did you do? What did you notice? What was the most difficult part of trying out doing one thing at a time until it was done?

Since the first Infomagical challenge way back in February, the feedback that the Note to Self team has gotten seems to indicate that single-tasking was the hardest — but most beneficial — exercise of the whole week. And I’d be inclined to agree; yesterday, as the afternoon wore on, I found myself self-interrupting more and more as my focus waned. I had to remind myself to stay on target with a deep breath and a reminder to “stop interrupting myself”. I’m so used to reflexively clicking on every blinking icon or making sure there are no red numbers on any of my phone apps that it was really easy to slip back into that behavior. But it was so worth it to resist the impulse.

My biggest take-away on the benefits of single-tasking is this: training your brain to finish what you start. When we’re “multi-tasking”, what we’re really doing is training our brain to drop whatever we’re doing for the new or more immediate thing. It doesn’t matter if this new thing is less important, or can wait until you’re done with your current thing. It’s new, and it’s demanding our attention, so that’s what matters. When you train yourself to satisfy that instant curiosity, you’re also training yourself to abandon the things you’re working on — no matter how important they are to you.

But by staying focused until the thing you’re working on is done — or by setting a goal to get one step closer to completing it and not stopping until that’s achieved — you’re training your brain to do something far more productive: finish your shit. There is a really great feeling associated with knowing that you’re working towards a goal you’ve set out before-hand, and actually achieving that goal before you move on to something else. By building the expectation that you’ll work on something until a goal is met, it becomes easier to actually see yourself finishing all the things on your to-do list. And that’s a wonderful world I would like to live in.

Today’s challenge: tidying up your phone. So this is actually pretty cool, and it’s based on the organization method thought up by Marie Kondo in her book The Magical Art of Tidying Up. Take some time to look through the apps on your smartphone. If it helps, touch until all of the icons shake (iPhone) or open it up. Then, right then and there, decide if this app brings you joy. Does it help you become your best self? Is it a huge distraction and time-sink? If it doesn’t bring you joy or is more hindrance than help, thank the app for its service and delete the sucker. Once you’ve gone through every app on your phone, put them all into one folder on your home screen.

This simplifies the home screen on your phone something fierce; you can actually SEE that gorgeous phone background you’re so proud of. And by putting all of your apps into one folder, it becomes easier to simply search for the app you want when you pick up your phone — one subtle way that using your device becomes a more mindful action. It’s not a matter of swiping and tapping to get that quick fix of what you want. If you want to play a game for five minutes, you’re going to have to make the decision to type in the name of that game and open it.

You might find that the work involved in opening those time sinks is all that’s needed to break the habit of messing around with them. Maybe the extra moment or two it takes to type in the app you want is enough pause for you to realize you’d rather, I don’t know, open up the Word app and type up some flash fiction instead. Or maybe not. It’s your choice — that’s the whole point. Yes, you’re sacrificing a little convenience. But you’re regaining conscious action in return.

If you’ve joined Infomagical, I’m glad you’re on this journey with me! If you haven’t, it’s not too late to sign up here. Be sure to listen to the Case For Infomagical, and if you can double back to the Day 1 Challenge.

That’s it for me, folks. See you tomorrow. May you live mindfully today.