Going Full Kondo

Time for spring cleaning. 

This year, I will go full Kondo. 

If you don’t know who (Marie) Kondo is, read here and there about her.

This is where I’m going:

Why not going full Kondo and move beyond just decluttering my house from belongings that don’t spark joy? How about decluttering my life from activities, content and people that don’t spark joy?

So, the next time you’re doing something, like right now, ask yourself: Does this bring joy?

You will probably point out now that snorting a line of cocaine would do that. 

Even cheating on your partner, when you’re giving into the temptation. 

Point taken. So sparking joy alone is not precise enough. Let’s add time to and subtract your ego from the equation. Ask yourself: Does this bring consistent joy to you and people you care about? Because snorting cocaine and cheating usually turn out to be destructive over time to you and the people you care about.

Going full Kondo means therefore to be rather selective about what you make your own by buying, picking up, taking in, and associating with.

Material objects can clutter your space. Can human beings do the same?

I think they can clutter your mind by taking up a lot of your time, especially when leveraging emotions like shame, guilt and complaining to get your attention. 

If you haven't so far, understand soon that your undivided attention is the most precious gift you have to offer. Everyone (family, friends, neighbors, Facebook, Netflix, Google, TV, and the list goes on) wants yours because that’s the most valuable commodity of the Information Age. One of the tried and tested ways to get your attention is to appeal to emotion. How is that done? 

By those little dopamine bursts you get from all those "likes" online. 

By using a drug like cocaine. 

By activating your fear response, claiming something is so, so urgent, you have to listen, watch, do, now, now, now! 

If you can activate the evolutionary older emotional pathways of your brain, they will take over and draw your (cortical) attention to whatever is triggering this emotion. 

That’s a sustainable business model:

Netflix is here to make money. 

Netflix is NOT here to make the world a better place. 

Netflix needs your attention to make money. 

Netflix will vie for your attention and use whatever they can to get it. 13 Reasons Why anyone?

CNN is here to make money. 

CNN is NOT here to make the world a better place.

CNN needs your attention to make money. 

That’s why there is a new urgent, fear activating story coming down that pipeline of new urgent, fear-activating stories. Every. Single. Day. 

Remember that urgent and important are NOT the same. 

Eisenhower is often cited with saying: "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." This was in 1954 he was quoting J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University.

Have you ever noticed that the urgent stuff demanding immediate attention is usually brought to you by someone else and associated with achieving someone else’s goal? And that few, very few of the urgent demands for your attention are actually also important at the same time?

What is important? That’s what helps you to be the person you want to be, your behavior in line with your principles. Principles (call them values if you like) determine preferences and preferences would make a good place to determine importance. A rather individual affair but something that is very likely to spark joy. Consistently. For you and for the people you care about. 

The bottom line: Consider what you are feeding your mind, your body, what you let into your personal space with scrutiny. It won’t be perfect, you’ll have to make compromises and accommodate negative emotions temporarily. Life is not all joy all the time. Strive to make is joyful more often than not.

PS: The picture above works on the principle of eliciting an emotional response and catching your attention. How did that work for you?

Your iPhone Is A Weapon Of Mass Distraction

Multi tasking is dead. 

Actually, it was never alive, dead on arrival so to speak...
Single tasking is all you ever needed.
So how do we focus when we are glued to our "devices":

Glad you've asked.
Rule Your Devices. Stop Being Your Devices' B*&ch.
See, your phone can be very helpful when you use it as a tool instead of letting it become the single most destructive weapon of mass distraction (WMD).
The following step will help you return to being a productive and mindful human. In addition, you will live a longer and happier life. I have an iPhone and the following steps are written for iPhone users but I bet Androids can figure out the same steps on their platform.
Lastly, what you find here works for me. I trust that you can adapt it to your situation. That said, err on the side of less.

Here's the most important step: Turn off notifications.
Notifications fake importance by coming across urgent. But not everything that is urgent is important. Notifications are disruptive, they have taken me and will take you away from the goals we fave. Have you every been working in a flow state? Good. Know that notifications will kick you out of it. Repeat after me: "I Am the Ruler of My Phone." 

To do this, open Settings > Notifications. Now go through every app listed and turn off all notification:

• For most apps, you can safely switch off "Allow Notifications". 
• If you need to leave notifications on, minimize their detrimental effect:
• Switch off sounds
• Switch off badges - those annoying white numbers with a red background in the upper right hand corner of the app indicating that a new message, email, voicemail, or notification is waiting.
• For really important notifications, you can allow alerts in the Notification Center.

I will repeat myself here: Turn all badges off. Except a for a very few apps, turn all notifications off as well. 

• Only a few apps can have notifications on, for example:
• Your calendar app should have notifications on.
• Google Maps should have notifications on
• The phone app should have notifications on.
• Leave notifications on for delivery or transportation apps (Grubhub, Seamless, Uber, Lyft). Even for those apps: No badges allowed!
• For text message, leave banners on and turn badges off. You will see most of your text messages on your home screen when they come in. You don't need the badge for text messages, it will just give you FOMO.

And Now to Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... Hide them all. 

• Open a folder, they all go in there. Name the folder "Dilly Dally".
• The most addictive apps go on the 2nd screen of the folder. If you keep them on the first screen, they are still sirens calls luring you in. 
• Ideally, most apps are on the 2nd screen and  the first screen only shows a couple. 
• If you really want to push the limits: Delete your "Dilly Dally" social media apps. LinkedIn is okay.

All Messaging Apps Need to Get Out Of Your Face As Well. 

• All mail maps, the Messages App, WhatsApp go into another folder an on the second screen within the folder. Again, NO BADGES. If important, they can alert you via banner. 

Thou Shalt Not Steal

Have you every wondered why all these apps prompt you to rate them and write a review?
They want good ratings to get more customers and more sales. Stop giving them reviews! 

• To get out of this, go to Settings > Apple ID > iTunes & App Stores > In-App Ratings & Reviews

How to Catch Butterflies - On Thinking Original Thoughts

Spongebob SquarePants 

I haven't spent much time evaluating SpongeBob properly - I doubt he would make it through a full session. From what I can tell, he's not the most psychologically minded creation. It's a mystery to me how he's catching butterflies at the bottom of the Bikini Atoll. Maybe the radioactive fallout has created not only Spongebob SquarePants but also deep-sea butterflies. 

The reason Spongebob SquarePants entered my mind is that I thought about how to become more aware of my own thoughts, especially those fast, not automatic but high-speed cognitions that easily go unnoticed. That is what Daniel Kahneman describes as system 1, I propose SpongeBob only operates there. 

How to catch your own thoughts, let alone the thoughts of my patients? 

Is it like catching butterflies, armed with a huge net, you frolic in your thoughts and bring that's how you become aware of them? For sure, one of the exasperating but depending on the situation saving traits of our thoughts is that they are rather elusive. It's probably not as tricky as catching the Higgs Boson but difficult nevertheless. The constant urgent and unimportant, meaningless noise from our beloved "devices" has made it even more difficult to catch our thoughts.

That's an issue of modernity - that everything tries to catch our attention, because attention is a most precious commodity.

Not trying to catch your thoughts and not engaging in deep, effortful and focussed thinking we keep us shallow and reactive to whims of whatever and whoever succeeds in grasping our attention, chipping away from our ability to understand ourselves and our place in this reality.

And if that wasn't enough, our emotions interrupt our thinking as well. One of those emotions is anxiety, which often puts a quick stop to original thoughts. Thoughts that easily trigger anxiety are everything that is ad odds with what we think people around us do and should think about us. Thoughts that are forerunners of realizing that some decisions have led to unfortunate consequences. Thoughts at odds with current commitments and habits. We might not want to catch every thought. How about the ones that bring loss, failure and disappointment into our awareness? Very few things in our life elicit thoughts and emotions with the same emotional value, that is all good or all bad. With most people, events, even ourselves, we are ambivalent as there is light and shadow, qualities we cherish and qualities we abhor. 

So, catching butterflies seems to be a trivial pursuit compared to catching our thoughts. "What was I thinking?" is one of the crucial questions to ask repeatedly but to sit in silence and to simply think harder would we the equivalent to swing the net more furiously through the air when catching butterflies - probably not the best strategy. Our mind does not do too well when all we allow a mind to do is thinking and it can do a terrific job in keeping cognitions that might elicit negative emotions such as anxiety in the depths away from the conscious "surface". 

But we can help our mind, the trick is to lower its guard with benign distraction and solitude. That could be a journey alone, a train or bus ride. Or we could go alone to a cafe, take a walk in the park or the countryside, sit next to a stream or the ocean. A few things help us here: For once, distance allows our mind to be more willing entertaining challenging ideas. When outside walking, we do that automatically while we have to also take notice of what's going on around us. This might be enough "distraction" for our emotions to guard towards the outer world and allow original thoughts to slip unnoticed.

When I was a child, I took long walks with my best friend around the small town in Germany I grew up in. I realize now why that was so helpful for our development as independent thinkers. 

I suggest you take a walk now.