Maybe it’s time to take a different road

Photo by Demi-Felicia Vares on Unsplash

I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I feel like a zombie (or at least like the squirrel in the picture above)- dead inside and my mind on autopilot. The reason for this? Aimlessly wandering through the Internet hoping to find the next big thing. Whatever the fuck that means.

Now you see I mostly already fixed my issue by switching to a dumb phone and installing restricting extensions on my Macbook. The only puzzle piece that has been missing so far was my iPad.

When you go online and type in the search bar “restrict iPad usage” you’ll likely come across suggestions such as:

• uninstall the distracting app
• enable screentime restrictions
• set your screen to black & white

While these solutions might work as a quick fix- at least in my experience they won’t work in the long term.

Consider my little cousin for instance. As you can imagine my aunt removed on his phone the YouTube app and set some quite strict screentime limits. Yet he still managed to gain access to YouTube shorts by exploiting a loophole in to be frank in a quite creative way. Apparently you can bypass the screentime restriction by opening the official Apple News app, searching up a sports article with an embedded YouTube clip and navigate through to the YouTube main page.

What I am trying to say here is that I believe that our brains have become so used to instant gratification that we rarely open up to actually new mentally challenging tasks. In other words, we rather try to figure out how to overcome the screntime limit instead of finding something else to do.

With this in mind I thought: “Well, maybe it’s time to take a different road”.

You see, initially I bought my iPad to take notes in class, maintain my schedule and prepare a few presentations. However, by now I am pretty certain that I spend more time on YouTube alone than on Goodnotes, Google Calendar and Canva combined.

Knowing that I didn’t want to to continue living my life like this I looked outside the iPad bubble and eventually settled for the reMarkable 2. A digital notebook which from its inner core gets out of you way and lets your mind actually breathe. It has not auto correction, no web browser nor other features which might distract you.

But to be completely honest, in retrospective, a couple of old school paper notebooks would also have done the job.

Either way, I went back to the drawing board and tried to recreate the apps I used to use on my iPad. I’ve come up with my own Bento-like to-do list, installed a linked PDF calendar and started notebooks for the topics that interest me. Some might suggest that you buy or download more templates for your specific needs online, but I would advise against it as it acutally can be a lot of fun to browser Pinterest for inspiration and draw your own templates. Plus you’ll harvest the Ikea-effect, meaning you’ll value your notebooks even more because you’ve “made” them yourself- even if you only made a simple grid layout.

So now here I am- taking notes, filling up my calendar and creating to-do lists. And yes, my life has become fairly more organized, yet still I don’t think that this should be the key take away here.

Limiting the amount of information one takes in, truly engaging and reflection the information and thoughts one has and writing them physically down with a pen has, at least for me, re-thought me how to enjoy the process rather than the final outcome.