▲ ▼ Protecting one's time
Netflix's biggest competitor? Sleep. Sleep, eating, physical activities, communicating in-person etc.; anything related to healthy lifestyle of an individual has become a competitor to companies dependent upon the screen-time.
Several of the top apps have claimed to have more than an hour of screen-time on average among its consumers, so someone who consumes several such products are forced to make more time for it. Time being constant(at absolute level) for all, only way for an individual to make more time for these new lifestyle habits is to remove time from existing healthy habits.
It's not that reducing or removing smartphone altogether can solve this, the issue is not just psychological addiction but also economical and political. Companies are allowed to grow larger than the governments and their only limitation is an individual's time. Is there a need gap to protect one's time?
I wonder how closely this relates to the need gap "Getting things done at individual level"*. It seems to me that both are indicating the individuals are feeling an urge to spend time on things that they later consider to have been a suboptimal use of time.
It could be interesting to try ActivityRecommender: https://github.com/mathjeff/ActivityRecommender/blob/master/README.md
ActivityRecommender reminds the user (via suggestions, feedback, graphs, analyses, and more) about the things that the user tends to say are valuable, essentially giving the user a stronger voice in deciding what to do next.
*I don't seem to be able to link to Needgap from within Needgap at the moment but I've reported this to the meta discussion
We created Motion ( https://usemotion.io ) for exact this purpose. It's a calendar with to-dos built in that helps you protect your time by letting you blocking it off. To-dos take time just like meetings/events, and having them on the calendar is a productivity game changer.
Probably the most powerful productivity boost I've experience is that when I use Motion my schedule isn't interrupted by all the less impactful work that pops up because my time is already blocked off for the day.
If you're interested in checking it out, mention you came from needgap in the sign up form, and I'll hook you up with an invite: https://usemotion.io.
Motion looks neat, I will check it out once it's available for public as I'm not into invites.
My approach to screen-time changed over time. I try to use it more efficient - less procrastination. There is one browser extension which helped me a lot with this: https://www.deprocrastination.co You start a session and it looks you out from all the distraction. Comes with stats, feedback and tips at the same time. Done the trick for me dealing with the big distractions...
Yes, sadly we all currently surrender our attention (whether to TV, books, or whatever) for about $3 an hour (https://a16z.com/2020/01/27/1000-true-fans-attention-economy-inevitable-kevin-kelly/). The tip from Naval Ravikant (?) was to set an hourly rate extremely high, something your future self would be proud of ike $5000/hour, and use it as a mental tool to always prioritize. Which means that this tip is worth ~$200 🤟🏻 Good news: the stop-gap has always been in our heads, free-of-charge.
In my take, there is less of a need gap more so than awareness gap.
Surely. Time and attention are the new gold. We need to have mechanisms to keep our awareness and save our precious theasure,
not to waste it
inadvertently, otherwise we will be drown with entertainment, and thus, miserable.
I think we might need regulations to prevent corporations from exploiting our lifestyle i.e. those which sell products which can induce addiction(even if they are dopamine triggers via 'Likes' and 'Shares') should be treated like other addiction inducing substance like Alcohol, Cigarette and drugs. Even though self-restraint is crucial to prevent addiction, we do not let free supply of physical drugs for a reason; that reason applies to virtual drugs as well.
That'd be RescueTime, it's on all platforms, including phone. You can set goals and limits.
But again you control yourself, you can pause the app, or uninstalling.
So the answer might be self help books or personal coach.