The Art & Science of Digital Lockdowns 🔐

📍 Coordinates: Somewhere in the cloud forests, Costa Rica.

📖 Reading Time: ~7 minutes.

🏴 Vibecheck: I haven’t done a proper guide in a while – felt good to lock in for this one, and I truly hope it helps. We are starting Radical Redesign, our 10-day lifestyle architecture quest, this Friday! A wicked group has gathered already. I’ve infused everything written below into Day 9 of the experience. I hope to see you there. 🐉 EB.

The collective attention armaggedon rages on…

A virtual contagion decimates the population. Collective consciousness is under attack from the greatest barrage of exponential bullsh*t we’ve ever experienced.

Staying in control of your digital world is like slaying the hydra of hypernormal stimuli. Once you’ve got Facebook under control, 3 new platforms pop up.

When confronted with a challenge of this magnitude, an equal and opposing force is necessary:

Declare digital lockdown.

Prioritize your attention at all costs. Treat your conscious awareness like the sacred Ground of Being it is.

If you want to get anything truly meaningful done in today’s age, getting control of your tech, before it completely puppeteers you, is paramount. 

Up until the 1900’s, the word priority was singular. 

Like a canary in the coal mine, signalling the devastation to come, the word priority evolved and multiplied:

Priorities.

How a culture performs the mental gymnastics required to understand what it means to have a diversity of a singularity is beyond me. 

As the noble march of the Huberman Husbands continues, I hope we have finally put to rest the ideas of multitasking and multiple priorities.

At the neurobiological level, multitasking doesn’t exist. There is only rapid task-switching. 

Advanced meditators know this too. With refined concentration, you can validate this experientially. You are only ever attending to one sensation at a time. The magician’s secret is that you underestimate how fast the stream of experience moves. Dozens, even hundreds of discrete sensations pass through your conscious awareness every second. 

What follows are my nuclear protocols for getting your digital sh*t together.

While it’s not a trophy I like to parade around much anymore, I won’t deny that my level of productive output is immense. I can get a lot done. Part of it is being merciless at wrestling technology so that it works for me, not against me.

I’ve had periods where I use all of these suggestions at once (nuclear mode), some of them at a time (get sh*t done mode), or none at all (need more fast dopamine).

I am never as productive, nor as fulfilled when I’m using none of these.

Run this setup for two weeks. After enduring the difficult adjustment period, I guarantee you will feel substantially better. 

🚮 Delete & Deactivate All Social Media Profiles and Applications.

One of the hardest, but also the most powerful.

I’ve deleted my Reddit & Pinterest accounts entirely. I deactivated Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, & LinkedIn. I allow YouTube.

If you’re not willing/able to do this (you can always reactivate accounts later), they must be off your phone.

I don’t miss them, other than lacking a convenient escape outlet to waste my time. Not a good sign for the social giants. 

🦋 Shut Down All Distractions with Freedom.

Freedom blocks all distracting apps and websites for certain time limits. 

You select what it blocks. It can be social/news sites, certain applications, or your entire connection to the internet.

Selecting ‘Locked Mode’ means you can’t remove the limitations once you’ve started a session. Select any amount of time you want, and Freedom will block your list. Try to go somewhere blocked, and get hit with:

🛑 Use the Pause, Limit, & Insight Browser Extensions.

These are Chrome browser extensions made by Freedom.

• Pause gives you a moment before continuing to any website that you add. Adding a 5-10 second ‘pause’ before opening Facebook gives you enough time to consider whether you want to be there, or you fell victim to an unconscious behavioural tick.
• Limit blocks any website after you hit a certain amount of time on it. Set up 30 minutes for Facebook, and it will block it once you hit that limit. Add any site you wish.
• Insight gives you weekly time reports of how long you’re spending on websites. The results are nauseating. This is good. Don’t look away. Creating a negative association is essential to fuel the desire to change behaviour.

📵 News Feed Eradicator.

I’ve been using News Feed Eradicator for over 2 years straight. A random change that started and then never stopped. The difference is incredible.

It does what it says: obliterates the news feed of every social network you choose. It gives you a quote instead.

Home feeds are hyper-curated algorithmic labyrinths designed to silently assassinate your attention. Avoid them at all costs.

You can interact with the rest of the platforms normally.

✅ Single-Task With Slash.

Slash is a fantastic ‘done’ app made by a friend and mentor Jordan Lejuwaan.

The behavioural design is second to none. Its killer feature is keeping your current task constantly visible while you work on it. 

You can see it at the bottom, “Write Tech Hyperfocus Lockdown Article.”

I’ve used it for years, and there’s an incredible depth of features packed into elegant simplicity. It truly turns on hyperfocus and enables an insane level of output. I swear by it.

🖥️ Full-Screen Only

Self-explanatory. Work on one thing at a time. Full screen all your apps. I love the iA Writer app. It greys out every sentence except for the exact one you’re writing.

Don’t mix and match screens when you can avoid it (I understand taking notes for a YouTube video). Push yourself to make everything full screen, one thing at a time.

It gets easier the more you do it.

Bonus Tip: Extremely potent when combined with Slash, because the second you head back to your home screen (searching for a distraction!), Slash is there, ticking away, ominously reminding you what you’re supposed to be working on right now.

⏱️ Automate Behavior Design.

Set aside 20 minutes and go through every setting on your phone: Screen Time, Notifications, Do Not Disturb, and the Shortcuts app. 

My recommendations:

1. No Notifications, Ever. Only phone calls can make noise. No badges, no notification centers, no lock screen. Turn them off.
2. Do Not Disturb Profiles. Deep Work, Sleep, and Weekend are 3 great ones to set up, with their own allowed apps, backgrounds, and automated on/off timers.
3. Shortcut Automation. Blue light from screens (& phone use at night) zonks your sleep cycle. Go to Automations and set it to automatically turn on Color Filters at Sunset and turn off Color Filters at Sunrise. Set the Color Filter as red as possible.
4. Screen Time. Mercilessly cap anything that you have trouble with (social, reading, games) and then respect yourself enough to honour those limits. If you can’t resist hitting “Ignore for Today” every time, delete the app.
5. Clean Your Home Screen. This is more of a personal aesthetic preference on my end, but it works well. Remove all apps from your home screen, put an inspirational background, and put the apps you want to make normal behaviour on your bottom row. Here’s my current one below (07/24), with Music, Books, and your favourite Duolingo Language across the bottom. It’s so easy to default to something on your phone: make sure your defaults are what you want.
6. (HARD MODE) Turn your phone greyscale. I’ve never done this, but I will admit it’s extremely effective at making your phone less inspiring to f*ck around on.
7. (BONUS) Leave it in another room. Seriously. Don’t carry it with you.

👁️ The Art of Focus

There are countless components to cultivating focus and digital lockdowns not included here.

If you have any tips/tricks/questions about anything, please share. I’m always on the hunt for a good tool or technique.

I intend to help you keep your technology on your side, instead of becoming its b*tch. 

I will write another piece in the future on the more human side of focus: learning to say no, identifying importance, and loving yourself enough to be disciplined.

Momentum builds on itself. The first moment you feel the expansion, the spaciousness made available in your consciousness from these actions is intoxicating. What is uncomfortable for a few weeks becomes second nature in a few more.

Developing concentration (and removing distractions) is Day 9 of our 10-Day Radical Redesign program. If you liked what’s here, and want to go deeper (especially if you want to actually implement this list) – I encourage you to join us.

We begin on Friday.

Love and power, EB. 💛