Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day

by Jake Knapp

1. Delete social apps. First, delete Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on (including whatever else has been invented since we wrote this). Don’t worry. If you change your mind later, it is very easy to install these apps again. 2. Delete other Infinity Pools. Anything with an infinite supply of interesting content should be deleted. This includes games, news apps, and streaming video like YouTube. If you might refresh it obsessively and/or lose hours without meaning to, get rid of it. 3. Delete email and remove your account. Email is both an alluring Infinity Pool and the beating heart of the Busy Bandwagon. And because it can be difficult to write proper replies to email on the phone (because of time limitations and the challenges of typing on a touch screen), it’s often anxiety-provoking as well. We check email on our phones to catch up, but the result is usually just a reminder that we’re falling behind. Remove email from your phone and you’ll remove a lot of stress along with it. Email accounts usually are deeply integrated into the device, so in addition to deleting any email apps, you may want to go into your phone’s settings and actually remove your email account. Your phone will issue a dire warning about this (“Are you sure you want to remove your email account?”), but don’t be deterred. Again, if you change your mind later, it’s simply a matter of reentering your log-in info. 4. Remove the Web browser. Finally, you need to disable the Swiss Army knif...