Ding!
Your email notification sound calls your attention away from whatever it is you are doing and brings you back to the phone screen. You unlock it and check the email. It is nothing of consequence. Compulsively, you open other apps to check for the most recent updates.
A few friends have sent messages. You respond to every one of them. As you do, they respond and you respond too. While you are at it, you check statuses and stories. Some make you smile, but for the most part, you are scrolling through. Then, you move on to your social media apps to check some more updates — some news has broken about whatever. You read comments and share your opinions. Others reply to your comment, and you reply to theirs. A call comes in. You pick it. Speak for a couple of minutes and hang up. The friends you responded to have responded again. The commenters who commented earlier have commented again. New statuses, and stories have been posted after the ones you saw earlier.
Rinse and repeat. You scroll on.
Whatever it was you were doing before the notification called you away, remains unattended, waiting for you to return. When you finally do, a half-severed thought gropes in the dark as it seeks out its other half. Eventually, you bring yourself back into the flow. But as your heart and soul start to re-engage, the sound of urgency calls your name again.
Ding!
Addiction by Design
We are familiar with this scenario (or variants of it) where the compelling need to check feed and respond in real-time, keeps us glued to the screen forever while other things wait or are unattended to. In most instances, our virtual immersion and disconnect from the real world yields nothing of consequence. At other times, that moment of distraction is the difference between life and death.
Why is the mobile phone so addictive? And how do we get more out of our lives while making the most of what smartphones have to offer?
Why so addictive?
I first heard of addiction design while reading an online article in Bloomberg referencing Nir Eyal’s book Hooked. After reading Hooked, I paid more attention to my online habits to better understand what keeps me hooked. I chose TikTok for this self-study and reflection.
For context, I am a hermetic, 38-year-old man who lives alone. I have a day job as an architect in real estate and moonlight as a writer. I’d just discovered TikTok and the panoply of content on the app. My feed mostly featured busty women in their 20s performing actions that weren’t directly related or connected to the revealing outfits they usually wore. There are the Tik Tok babies and their mommies; Tik Tok kittens and dogs; and Tik Tok humans performing to voiceovers or soundtracks … all eliciting tens and hundreds of millions of likes and comments.
Every night, after the day’s job, you’ll catch me spending 30 minutes to 1 hour of my life scrolling. In TikTok, I got the opportunity to see myself within this concept of addiction design. And I discovered a few interesting things.
The algorithm knows what I like
Nothing is static
The UI hides the time while using it
The UX is insanely easy to navigate, and you can experience it without signing up.
1. The App’s algorithm understands my preferences — eye candy, choreographed dancing, babies, and dogs, delivered in an endless stream for my insatiable appetite
2. TikTok UI/UX is designed such that nothing is static. Still pictures move. Everything moves, and this constant dynamism has a way of connecting to me and calling. They are like neon light nodes that chase each other around sign lights in the commercial strip on a busy night. Each picture, each frame, each video … calling, calling, calling.
3. There is no time on the user interface. I suspect that this is deliberate. Once you log in and start scrolling, there is no way to tell how long you’ve spent on the app scrolling from video to video.
4. There is no need to sign up or log in before consuming content. This is a one-up over other social media platforms that need some form of validation. While you still need to register on TikTok to like, comment, or publish content, you can consume content without signing up.
A Hall of Sorts
In TikTok’s design, I can see deliberate design. I understand it even better because of my architectural background. However, what I consider to be the biggest addiction factor in our interaction with smartphones is what I call Clustering. Clustering is how every subset of our lives has been Appified and grouped on one device. Productivity, Time, Calendars, Fitness, Health, Library, Shopping, Learning a new skill, Learning a new language, Games, Chats, Finances, Banking, Social interactions, Work, Religion … every aspect of our life can be channeled through an assistive app that promises us support in achieving whatever we want to. Now, hold the thought on TikTok for a minute, and imagine you are in a hall. In that hall, you have your workplace, your social circle, and the rest of the world. In that same hall you have the clock, the weather, your music, your source for finding information, things you love, and things you don’t love; and every time you go inside this hall to find something, there are always hundreds of other things to see. That is what the smartphone has become.
While it promises productivity with each assistive application, it doesn’t remind us that the responsibility of managing the time spent on these different applications lies solely in with us. In a world where we have limited time, time management could be the difference in how much of our lives we waste scrolling away, or how well we leverage the power of these applications to our advantage.
This is not a drop-your-phone-it-is-evil post. Neither is it, a don’t-have-fun-online post. Rather, it is a be-mindful-of-what-you-spend-your-time-doing post so that your smartphone better serves your life objectives, and not the other way round.
2 Phones, Silent Mode
Most profound thoughts and enduring work require silence. Even if the thought was conceived in chaos, crafting it requires some silence — at least for me. To protect this silence in a world of static, where notifications sound is music, I’ve had to buy two phones, set perpetually to silent mode. One is dedicated solely to work, the other to play. On the work phone, I have my productivity apps — work emails, Slack, Medium, and bank apps. On the play phone, I have my fun/social apps — TikTok, Twitter, and Clubhouse. As a rule, I don’t download apps on the play phone. When they come preinstalled, I uninstall them. Except for TikTok, I restricted my interaction with social apps to the mobile versions. Say I want to check my Twitter account, I first have to type TWITTER in the URL bar and enter my password before gaining access.
This caveman approach has saved me from impulsiveness, and a human tendency to underestimate the power of the pause before taking action. Most times, by the time I finally log in to post that instant thought I haven’t fully thought through, I’ve had some time to re-evaluate. I can’t recall how many times I’ve put the phone down, after hurrying to post what initially sounded like a reasonable thing to say, only to reconsider and tell myself, “I really don’t have to say that.”
At a second level, I stopped replying instantly to anything — even work emails. When I pick up my phone and see the numbers at the top corner of the Gmail envelope icon. I put the phone down for a bit before opening it up to read and respond. The truth is that, IT. CAN. WAIT!
Final Thoughts
I figure that if the phone has somewhat become this crowded place where everything happens, and everything calls for our immediate attention all the time, we must work doubly hard to extricate ourselves from its possessiveness and be fiercely protective of our periods of silence. Otherwise, we wouldn’t make much of our lives, except if what makes meaning to us centers upon creating content for the world’s consumption and getting worthwhile compensation in return for the time invested.
Getting 2 phones has helped me a great deal in digitally separating work and play. It is the equivalent of introducing partitions and closed doors in my hall of sorts to bring about just a little more order. Conditioning myself to go the longer route in getting access to these play applications has also helped in fighting impulsiveness — the bane of modern-day interactions. In addition, staying conscious of the time spent on these devices, and constantly assessing the real value I am getting from them (compared to what else I could be doing with that time) has proven to be a good strategy for coping with distractions. There are days I switch off for most parts of the day (usually weekends) just to read a good old paperback.
Why take life so hard, my late father would always ask. And my answer to him all the time before his passing was, “I don’t have a long time here. I’ve got to make the most of it.”
Osundolire Ifelanwa
Nice article🙌