NoSurf

Most of my wasted days don't start with a plan to waste them. They start with the phone. On the nightstand.

I pick it up to kill the alarm and then I notice some notifications. Not from people, from apps trying to engage me. It works.

I'm in a feed before I've stood up. Same thing at night, except now I'm too fried to notice the hour disappear scrolling short videos looking for one last hit of pleasure before turning it off. Work still gets done. The day still looks fine from the outside. I just can't remember what I did with the hours that weren't meetings.

NoSurf, for me, is not quitting the internet. Email has to live. Maps have to live. This site has to live. The thing I'm trying to kill is the open-ended scroll — the visits I couldn't explain if someone asked me what I was doing. Watching AI generated dogs visit a vet? Pathetic.

I only track three things. That's the whole program.

Phone out of the bedroom by 9

This is the one that actually moves the number.

Phone charges in the living room. Cheap alarm clock by the bed if I needed it. I don't start the morning by "just checking." I don't take it back to the pillow to wind down. If I need it as an alarm on the road, it goes face-down on the other side of the room, not under my hand.

Mark it only if the phone slept somewhere else and I didn't open a feed before I was actually up.

Mindless scroll

A negative goal. If I'm going to kill time mindlessly on Social media then I have to take the hit. Probably self explanatory but for me it usually comes in the form of scrolling reels, short videos, etc.

Map the weekend, pay the bill, answer the email are clean. "See what's on Instagram" gets the tax.

I don't try to make this perfect. I try to not let a slip become the evening.

Analog hour

Reading, playing a game, taking a walk and leaving the phone behind (yikes!), having a coffee date with the phones in a stack. Goal is to try and work in a deliberate dopamine free connection with real life.

On a travel day the hour can be a walk around the block after the last meeting. On a home day it can be the first hour after the phone goes to the kitchen. If sixty minutes makes you stall, do twenty and stop bargaining.

That's the work.