Practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
Narrowed down
31 practicesHow long you have
Who it is written for
Where you are right now
On your own, or with someone · On my own
Theme · Screens and attention
What you are on there for matters more than how long you are on. Scrolling to keep up with people you love is a different activity from posting and then watching to see who approved.
Use aimed at status, at likes, at managing how you come across tends to sit alongside feeling worse. Use aimed at staying in touch and sharing what…
Online you can draft, delete, reply an hour later or simply leave. None of that exists in a kitchen, and plenty of people now find real conversation unbearably fast.
So the ordinary friction of talking to someone in person, the pause you fill badly, the thing that comes out wrong, gets read as proof that you are…
Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.
Rudeness online is loud, cheap and rewarded, so it fills the space out of all proportion to how common it is. The trouble is that we generalise.…
Check, feel the small relief, put it down, feel the pull again a minute later. If your phone use has that shape, it is running like a compulsion, whatever else it is.
The structure matters more here than the label. An urge rises, checking brings it down, and every check teaches the urge to come back sooner. Which…
Sitting with one long unrewarding task has got harder for almost everyone. If you are planning work for yourself, or setting it for someone else, build the variety in rather than hoping for stamina.
In practice that means breaking a long stretch into shorter ones with something marking the end of each, changing what the work looks like part way…
A whole evening can go into recording an evening. It is worth asking, with no scolding in it, whether you were there for the thing you now have a photograph of.
This lands better than a rule about hours, because it is about something you would miss rather than something you are doing wrong. Try leaving the…
If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.
Subtracting an hour and leaving the hour empty is the version that collapses by Thursday. If it was company, the replacement has people in it. If it…
Write down three to five things you actually enjoy, small ones, and do one of them a day. That is the whole instruction.
They have to be yours rather than the ones that sound impressive. Sitting in the garden with tea counts. Ten minutes on the guitar counts. Keep the…
Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.
This is not really about being permissive. If you do not know that the feed is chosen for you, that one worried search brings a fortnight of similar…
For a week, jot down what was going on just before you picked up the phone, what you were thinking while you scrolled, and how you felt when you put it down. Nothing cleverer than that.
What usually surfaces is not that screens are bad but that two or three specific things are: one account, one time of day, one mood you always reach…
One client took two years of steady work to get a single app off her phone. If you are three weeks in and it is still there, you are not doing this wrong.
Change here is slower than nearly everyone expects, including the people helping. Saying so early protects both sides: you do not read a slow month…
Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.