I turned off notifications and it changed my life

you may have read last week’s post (the first of the year) in which I explained that I wanted my time back and wanted to liberate myself from addicative social networks.

My plan to liberate myself from addictive social apps

Here’s what I did and I arealdy see the changes in my daily routine :

• remove Facebook from my smartphone (on my tablet, which I use only in the evening, I moved to the last screen)
• turn off notifications for all remaining social apps (twitter, hootsuite, linkedin) as well as for Youtube
• move youtube to the last screen of my smartphone
• move useful apps like Medium, Arte to the first screen of my smartphone

And it worked ! It’s incredible how I was able to reduce my use of Facebook and other useless apps. I wish there were some stats available to show you this.

Daily routine back to life again

I’m not saying that you can liberate yourself without a minimum of self-discipline. But the above-mentioned steps have greatly helped me refocus on what’s important to me : reading and writing (and not only for SEO reasons).
I was also fortunate to stumble upon some great posts by Dr. Patrick George, a neurosurgeon who writes about our brain and gives some useful tips on Linkedin on how to make the best our of brain depending on the time of the day. I wish his posts were available in English (another idea for a future blog ?)

I’ve thus found the energy to resume my old routine, i.e. start my day earlier than usual by reading some difficult stuffs, reflect and write about them. So far I’ve been able to write 1 post every day which is great. I’ve also been able to write a 10000-word market research guide that I’ll be posting in the coming weeks in 10 episodes.
The problem I’m now faced with is that I have written so much that it all needs to be translated which adds up to the pile of work.