Christopher Philp

Staying Engaged

The attention economy is big business. The total market cap of the 10 largest social media companies stands above $6T¹, with TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook all totalling above 3 billion users².

They all rely on your eyeballs being glued to the page. The daily average screen time for someone in the UK sits at 7.5 hours³, while more than a third of UK adults have given up on reading for pleasure⁴.

My own daily phone time is pretty disgusting as you can see below (admittedly I did receive my 3D printer on Sunday and went a bit wild):

Starting today, I'm making a conscious effort to get this under control, and I'll be using this public post as motivation, periodically updating it with a new infographic (hopefully showing a downward trend). This will be aided by a number of tools.

LeechBlock

A browser extension that I've installed via FireFox that instantly blocks any visited website based on a preconfigured blacklist.

Mine is currently set to:

reddit.com
youtube.com
bbc.co.uk

The final entry to try to curtail the repeated visits I'm getting from the TV licence folks.

WellBeing Limits

I've set 3 application timers on my phone:

• Instagram: 15m
• LinkedIn: 15m (the only way to offset the prior 15 minutes of racist content, via 15m of egotistic fan-faring)
• YouTube: 0m (my brain can only take so much MapMen)

Charger Location

I've moved my phone charger to be in a separate room. There's only so much self-control I have before I convince myself that a 3-hour Wikipedia deep-dive on the downfall of Stalin will be the content that will send me to a blissful slumber.

The sheer amount of effort to walk 5 metres to get my phone is hopefully enough of a blocker for my half-dazed lizard brain.

WebTime Tracker

My phone is not the only source of my shortcomings. My day job consists of imitating the posture of Mr. Burns as I mindlessly copy-paste story summaries into Claude-code and pray it can land enough one-shots so that I can return to finishing Neon Genesis:Evangelion.

I admittedly want to stop this, so I've installed an extension to aggregate my overall time spent on different websites via Chrome.

• GitHub/Sentry/DataDog -> GOOD
• Netflix/Prime/AstralCodexTen -> BAD

I'll then be able to quickly actualise my 12P.M. HackerNews slump, and switch it efficiently to the more wholesome HotUkDeals wallet sap.

Olauncher

Finally, I've turned my phone into a joyless husk by removing any styling from the homepage and instead converting each app into its most minimalist form.

Measurement

I'm also going to introduce some relatively meaningless self-osbserved metrics that I'll start recording from today. These will be graphed moving forward to try and get a vague idea if these new practices are helping in any way. The first entries are below:

1. Strategicness: 6
2. Focus: 5.5
3. Sharpness: 6
4. Motivation: 6
5. Calculation: 7