Rethinking “Default” Options

Americans now check their phones 96 times a day.

That means once every 10 minutes we pick up our phones! 🤯

(Had to do the quick math on that because I didn’t believe it…But it checks out. Wow.)

Check your iPhone settings to see your own daily averages. 

Let’s say we have 16 waking hours (960 minutes) each day. Why would anyone waste PRECIOUS time mindlessly picking up their phones?

Likely because it’s become instinctive. We don’t even realize it. 

Does this sound familiar? 

*Bing* 

*Receives text and picks up phone to check*

*Sees push notification and opens it. 5 minutes later… forgets why phone is in hand*

Any SINGLE “pickup” of the phone is harmless. But in aggregate… it turns into death by a thousand cuts. 

And a thousand cuts can get bloody quick. 

It’d be great to somehow be more protective of our time. But… how? 

Especially since the default mode is being connected and ONLINE. Only once in a while can we muster up the courage to go OFFLINE.

I used to periodically disconnect by flipping on the Do Not Disturb (DND) iPhone setting. And it felt GREAT. 

It was actually quite liberating. 

I’d get stoked after going on DND for an hour. And often get a lot done too. 

But then I wouldn’t do it again for the rest of the day. Maybe even a few days. 

Just a single hour on DND made me more productive… yet I still wouldn’t do it often. Why not? 

Friction. 

When the default is online… there’s friction to manually switch to offline.

And friction is the enemy of positive behavior change. 

So what if we flipped this around? 

What if our default mode was OFFLINE? Then for an hour or two each day we went back online. But on our own time. Not mindlessly picking up the phone once every 10 minutes (ah that stat is still crazy to me). 

I tried this out recently and it’s been a GAME CHANGER. 

The end of 2020 I read Deep Work by Cal Newport. It’s already one of my favorites and one of the most impactful books I’ve read. (5-minute summary here).

The research details a convincing case to simply make “offline” our default. So I tested this out.

I set my Do Not Disturb hours from 1pm to 12pm (next day). So the ONLY times my phone isn’t on DND is from 12pm to 1pm (same with my laptop). A midday break I come “online.”

Now this sounds wayyy more cutthroat than it actually is. I’m not saying only touch your phone 1 hour a day.

Instead, the point is to NOT have the phone ping you all day and divert your attention. Focus is limited. The more moments we can protect, the better. 

It actually turns into more of a treat. I’ll grab my phone periodically if I go on a walk or the bathroom and I check to see what’s happened. Then I see notifications/texts and check in on things. It’s fun. 

When I don’t hear the “bing” (or feel the vibrate) my mind becomes unfettered. I feel more in control of my time. I treat text message replies more like email. I’ll reply when I get to it, but am in no particular rush. 

The added productivity is nice. But that’s not the only point. 

What’s MOST interesting about this exercise… is taking a step back for a moment. And to actively take control of otherwise “default” options. Stopping for a moment to think for ourselves instead of blindly conforming. 

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth.”
– John F. Kennedy 

Anti-Conformity 

Wharton Professor Adam Grant wrote a book I love called Originals: How Non-conformists move the world. 

It mentions a study predicting employees’ job performance based on their web browser of choice.

Those who used Chrome and Firefox significantly outperformed at their jobs relative to the Internet Explorer and Safari users. They also stayed in the role for 15% longer. 

This seems random…? 

The insight here is not that just by downloading a browser it makes one better at their job. 

INSTEAD, the browser choice represents one’s approach to life. Safari and Internet Explorer come pre-installed on computers (Mac and PC respectively). They are the default options.

Firefox and Chrome, however, need to be downloaded. So these employees didn’t just accept the default options. They recognized the default options weren’t best suited for them. And they sought out a better alternative. And these were the people most successful in their roles.

So where do we go from here? 

The first step is to just be aware of some default options that might be running in the background of our lives. These are options we likely don’t even think about. 

It could be a browser, a push notification, the city we live in, or literally anything.

Similar to the concept of “we don’t know, what we don’t know” — same can apply to default choices when we blindly accept. 

Oftentimes they’re so ingrained they don’t even feel like an option at all.  

But in reality, everything is an option. Choose wisely. 

Ps. Want another crazy settings stat? Look at your Instagram minutes per day (same settings menu). The average is 53 minutes a day. Where do you stack up?