Jake & JZ

This episode is about our SINGLE BEST technique for avoiding distraction every day. In part two of our mini series on Make Time, Jake describes the Distraction-Free iPhone — which he started doing 10 years ago!! If you’re looking for a simple, powerful way to block distraction (ESPECIALLY after episode 8’s discussion of the Highlight Method), be sure to tune in.

On episode 9 of Jake & JZ, we also talked about:
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jake Knapp
Host
John Zeratsky

What is Jake & JZ?

Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓

Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of‍ Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.

Jake (00:00)
All right, so I've got some British naval history facts for you, John.

JZ (00:04)
Wow,

this is one of my favorite genres of fact. Excited. Anything naval related is like very exciting to me. there are, it's impossible to have any naval facts without them being British in some way. It's cause like the British, like, you know, they essentially like created the concept of a Navy.

Jake (00:08)
Is it? Okay, okay, so.

You

Well, yeah, it's, mean, I'm, I'm a novice here. I'm a novice. So this, these facts may not stun you as much as I was hoping, but so you're familiar then with who Horatio Nelson is. When I say Lord Nelson, you know exactly who I'm talking about, but I didn't know who he was until I was in London. And this is a number of years ago, but I was, I was in London with Luke, my son, and we were at

JZ (00:32)
you

Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (00:53)
the, actually it might have been the whole family. You know, it doesn't matter, but we went to the, the Naval Museum there in Greenwich and they have his, all this stuff on him, including uniforms that he wore, like the uniform that where he, you know, gets shot and killed in. have it there. he's a very interesting character. And for any listeners who don't know who Lord Nelson is, he's kind of this.

JZ (01:00)
cool.

Jake (01:20)
giant of a historical figure who led the British to all of these tremendous naval victories in sort of the era of Napoleon. if you go to London and you see Trafalgar Square or Nelson's Column, those are related to big victories of his or just celebrating him in general. some of the things that he accomplished are just really stunning. victory after victory after victory where

You know, the odds are against them. And anyway, I'm listening to this series on him and it's, it's really interesting, but these, couple of things that I found very fascinating. One was that a big part they say of his success as a, as a, as a leader and as a, you know, in his, in his battles was that at that time, the captain of the ship in the British Navy was responsible for provisioning the ship.

JZ (02:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jake (02:18)
So it was their job to get the food, you know, the, kind of food are we going to have all that stuff? It wasn't just everybody gets the same thing. The captain actually had to track down the supplies and decide how much they were going to have. so early on in his career.

JZ (02:32)
Yeah. yeah.

you're saying there was no

larger infrastructure of every ship gets this amount of stuff per sailor. It was very much done at the ship by ship level, run by the captain. Yeah. Okay.

Jake (02:49)
Yeah, apparently so apparently

that's the, that's the way it worked, which is counterintuitive to today. I would think of there's a Navy they're doing, they've got this sort of mass scale thing and they're just shipping out the same stuff to everybody. But no, so, and early on in his career, he had a situation where his sailors got scurvy and he was like, never again. And so he became really adamant about getting great provisions. And they say that actually set him apart from.

JZ (03:10)
Yeah.

Jake (03:17)
You know, not only the other ships in the British Navy, but especially the, the folks that they were up against was that their sailors were like really well fed, well provisioned. And I thought that was interesting and not something that, you know, it's a detail that he's there. There all these heroic scenes with him jumping onto an enemy ship with a sword ahead of all of his, you know, all of his crew saying like death or glory and, know, taking on ships three times the size of his and everything. But the.

JZ (03:22)
Yeah.

Right.

Jake (03:45)
The provisions were such a big deal. thought that's kind of cool. And then the other little tidbit I enjoyed was there's a moment when his, he's leading a, don't know the proper word, but you know, a bunch of ships. So he's kind of in charge and there's a, there's a bunch of other ships with them. What do you call that? Fleet. Fleet. think it's just a fleet because it wasn't a huge one. And they're trying to track down Napoleon and Napoleon's in the Mediterranean somewhere. So they don't know where.

JZ (04:01)
like a fleet or an armada, perhaps? Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (04:12)
And they're trying to find him. mean, this is so great. How great is

JZ (04:13)
They narrowed it to one, one C.

Jake (04:16)
this? Yeah. So they're going from port to port, trying to figure out where he is. And then they can't find him. And so he brings all the captains of the fleet together and he's like, okay, where do we think he is? And to, to guess where the, you know, to decide where they were going to go, they did a note and vote. He had every person write down on every captain wrote down on paper where they thought he was.

JZ (04:35)
No way.

Jake (04:40)
And they all wrote down their answer and then they looked and it was all the same answer. Yeah. And it was Alexandria in Egypt. so they go to Alexandria when he's not there. So they leave and then he arrives a day later. And, and anyway, so they were right. They were just ahead of him. this leads to the battle of the Nile and they ended up destroying the French fleet there. But anyway,

JZ (04:45)
That is amazing.

Yeah. Yeah.

Jake (05:06)
good stuff and two fun naval facts.

JZ (05:10)
Those are great. will resist the very powerful urge to interpret those as lessons for building companies or teamwork. So otherwise we'll end up like those, that meme on LinkedIn that's like, when I was six years old, I lost my first tooth. Here's what it taught me about B2B sales. You know, like have you seen this? Very funny.

Jake (05:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

JZ (05:35)
genre of what started as like classic sort of like engagement hacking, but has now turned into like a parody of itself.

Jake (05:47)
I'm definitely guilty of that kind of thing, the anecdote that leads to something else.

JZ (05:52)
Well,

it's kind of the structure of Sprint is like, here's this story and here's what we learned from it. So it's good. I'm a fan.

Jake (06:05)
Well, should we record a podcast here?

JZ (06:08)
Yeah, let's do it.

Welcome to episode nine of Jake and Jay Z, our weekly podcast about design, startups, technology, marketing, product, naval history, other topics that we hope you find interesting. I'm Jay Z. That's Jake over there. We are the founders of Character Capital. We are the authors of Sprint and Make Time. This is our podcast. And before we get any further,

I would like to ask you a favor. If you're watching this on YouTube, I want you to subscribe so that you find out when we release new episodes. If you're listening in Spotify or an Apple podcast, I want you to open your phone and look and hit the follow or subscribe button. This really helps us a lot. And we don't want you to miss an episode because we're doing this every week. We're having fun with it. We're putting a lot of time into it and we hope that it's worthwhile for you.

That's the request. If you want to get an email when we release new episodes, you can go to jakeandjay-z.com and sign up there. Today, we're going to experiment with a new format, a shorter, more compact format. As you may have picked up by now, we sometimes like to go on and on and follow tangents and subtangents and sub-sub-tangents. But we thought it might be...

might be worthwhile to of focus on one topic per episode, to hold ourselves to that standard of having one big message, one key message for each episode. And so we're going to give it a, give it a shot. What do think Jake?

Jake (08:06)
Yeah, I think we'll hold ourselves to that standard at least for one episode. And we'll see how it goes. mean, we're already several minutes in with Lord Nelson and we haven't even started the topic. So we'll see if we can resist our inclinations. I don't know.

JZ (08:09)
At least for one episode.

Yeah.

All right. So today's topic is a continuation of last week's topic. If you listened or watched last week, you heard us talking about make time, which is this book that we wrote that came out after sprint came out in 2018. It's based on sort of a framework and a bunch of tactics that we developed to help ourselves be better with our energy and our attention, our time, basically to

to try to shift like Lord Nelson, to shift the environment, to change the environment. There we go. I said I wasn't going to do it, but I did it. To create the conditions for better days, better life, spending time on the things that really matter to us. We talked in depth about the highlight method, which is this idea of starting each day by choosing the one thing you want to make sure to make time for.

be something urgent. It can be something satisfying. It can be something joyful. It's 60 to 90 minutes of this is the one thing I want to really prioritize in my day. Today, we're going to continue the discussion and talk about, I think, an equally important tactic, which is sort of the other side of the coin from the highlight method. So if the highlight is all about saying proactively, here's what I want to do, this next tactic is about

defensively, setting things up so that you don't get distracted and randomized and pulled into a million different things. And Jake, this is one that you came up with a long time ago now, and you introduced it to me and I was skeptical of it at first. Will you introduce the distraction free phone? For everyone? Yeah.

Jake (10:09)
Yeah, I will. So

the distraction free phone came to me as an accident, or I should say I came up with it just out of frustration, not, not sort of calculatedly thinking about what I ought to do. But, the, sort of backstory here is that I, I got an iPhone. I think not, not immediately when it came out, I was in Switzerland at the time working for Google and.

complicated telecom reasons. It wasn't easy to get one at first, but when I finally got one, I was so excited. And in fact, I remember for a while before I could get an iPhone and use it, I had an iPod touch, which also launched at the same time and was like the iPhone, but you know, not a phone. so anyway, yeah, so I was ready when it finally became an iPhone. I was really ready. knew, I knew how it worked. So I

JZ (10:50)
wow.

Yeah, yeah. It was like training wheels for the iPhone.

Jake (11:04)
I loved the iPhone and as every successive app would come out for it, I'd install it. know, great. You know, Facebook's on the iPhone now. Awesome. there's Google maps now. Awesome. You know, everything that

JZ (11:16)
And this was sort of novel

in those days because when the iPhone first came out, it was only Apple's own apps. then within maybe a couple of years, Apple launched the app store, the ability for other people to create apps. But it wasn't like there were a million apps, right? Like at first there were a few and like any new medium or platform, the first ones are like kind of weird. They're like...

Jake (11:22)
Yeah.

JZ (11:43)
an app that like makes a fart noise or something like kind of funny like that. But then, yeah, when these well-known brands and companies, you know, whose products we use, Facebook, Google Maps, when they would launch an app, it was like pretty exciting. It was kind of a big deal, this moment. And so I remember feeling that same enthusiasm to get that app, that new app, as soon as it came out and install it.

Jake (12:05)
Yeah. Yeah. You'd be like used to using this thing on the desktop. And then you'd think, what's it going to look like on this new shape, this tiny little form? What's that? How'd they do it? And it was, it was so exciting. And yeah, I remember Instagram came out and again, like they just, I'm sure that by the numbers, there were like a lot of apps, but nothing compared to today. And it would feel more like in the same way that if you

JZ (12:10)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (12:31)
A movie came out in the 1980s. Like everybody saw it because there just weren't that many things to do. When an app came out, know, everybody would, would check it out. So over time, the first, those first few years, the apps started to accumulate on the phone and. I had my, you know, ESPN app and I had, you know, like a couple, maybe a couple of games on there and, know, all the Chrome browser coming off, got the Chrome browser now on there. You know, a couple like.

JZ (13:00)
An email, of

course, that was like one of the coolest things about the iPhone was like this really nice email app. If you had used a BlackBerry before, was like, you know, people loved their BlackBerrys, but the email experience was really not that nice. And so to then have it on iPhone, you're like, my God, this is beautiful. Yeah.

Jake (13:01)
Email.

Right. Right. this is great. Yeah. And then the Gmail app came out and I was like, man,

even cooler. So anyway, you get the picture. You get the picture. I've got apps on my phone. Probably don't have to. I'm excited. Yeah. And this also corresponds with the period of my life, which just from really the time I had started, I had started working. I was never well-trained for the jobs that I've had in technology. I never came into them with the right background. So.

JZ (13:26)
They're excited about it. Yeah.

Jake (13:44)
I always felt like chip on my shoulder. I don't know what I'm doing. I've got to figure out how to make things work. And a part of my formula for that always was how do I get really productive? So I'm using my time as efficiently as possible at work. And then when I became a dad, that just cranked up. It's like, I really wanted to spend time that was meaningful with my kids. So being as efficient and productive as possible with my work time was the way to do that.

And so the phone, great, this is tool I can take with me everywhere and get stuff done, be productive. So anyway, this moment hits where I'm, I'm at home in the evening. I'm on the floor playing with my kids with wooden trains and I hear this voice kind of coming from a distance and I'm like, what is that? And I kind of tune it in and it's my son who's right there and he's saying, Hey dad, dad, dad, you know,

JZ (14:39)
Thank

Jake (14:43)
What's on your, what is it that's on your phone? And I'm like, I'm just doing some work stuff, email stuff, port and stuff. And then I realized like, he's not, he's actually not trying to show me up. I don't need to be defensive. He's just curious. He's just interested like, you know, we're playing wooden trains right now, which is super fun. This is the coolest thing in the world. If there's something on your phone that you're looking at and it's even cooler than wooden trains like

JZ (14:57)
Yeah.

Yeah,

must be awesome. Yeah.

Jake (15:12)
I would love to be a part of that too. You know, what's

going on over there. and I don't know why that, just that moment really struck me. I was like, I mean, cause I didn't even know why I was holding my phone to be frank. Like I, it had just, I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the phone without thinking. And I didn't even really know what I was doing. And I was just unaware, had just kind of checked out. Right. It's not a terrible thing. It's not, you know, people do this, not a terrible thing, but it just struck me that like, my God.

For years now, this is because like my son was probably, I don't know, like eight, nine, something, my older son, my younger son's like two or whatever, like maybe a baby, maybe we're talking eight and zero. But I, I'm like, for all of that, those years, I've been trying to do things to get myself in a situation where I'm more present with my kids, where I have more control over my, my head and my, attention and.

JZ (16:01)
Hmm, yeah.

Jake (16:09)
The phone, which I saw as this tool to do that, this futuristic like gift that would allow me to do all of these special things had just become like, had gotten right in the way of it. And all of my efforts to like react as fast as possible to everything at work, they were making it so that I could never let go of work. And I just got really frustrated in that moment. I took the phone and I just like mashed the screen and I started deleting apps and.

I deleted anything that.

JZ (16:38)
Can we, I'm

just curious if we can pause there. What do you remember? Like how did you, how did you get that idea to delete the apps? Like, do you remember what the insight was where you were like, Hey, I can, I can fix this. I can do something about this. Cause my instinct would have been like, let me go put my phone in the other room. Let me put it away. Let me, you know, whatever. Let me turn it off. Maybe even.

Jake (16:58)
yeah. Yeah.

I think the insight was just rage. I was just, I was just, I was just angry at myself, but then like, rather than directing it at myself, I was like, I'm going to just direct it at this device in my hand. And I just thought like, this is, this thing is stupid. I'm stupid for putting this on my phone. I'm stupid for paying attention to it. I'm going to delete it.

JZ (17:05)
OK, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, gotcha.

Jake (17:25)
You

know, like, I'm not, by the way, I'm not saying that like anyone who has any of the apps I'm going to talk about on their phone is stupid. You're not, this was just like in the moment, my rage at myself, right? if you kind of go out of control, snap angry and you like, you know, if you've ever like kicked something and then like really regretted it, like, cause it hurts, you know, it was that kind of thing. It was like,

JZ (17:41)
Right.

Jake (17:45)
You know, I tripped on that step. I'm going to kick the step. You know, if you've ever done that, maybe I'm revealing too much about myself, but then you're just like, that was even worse. that was kind of the thing. So I, yeah, I deleted, like, was just like, anything that pulls at my attention, I'm just going to delete it. And I deleted like, it was like, first I'm just deleting like games, deleting like, you know, sports news and deleting like the, you know, the proud, the Chrome,

JZ (17:48)
You

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (18:14)
any news apps at all. Cause all of those could always potentially have something on them that might pull at me. You know, like LinkedIn that could always have something new, social media of any kind, Instagram that can always have something new. Facebook could always have something new. Anything that was like a thing that might pull the phone out of my pocket without me thinking about it. And, and then, you know, I figured out you could turn off the browser. You could actually like shut off Safari on the iPhone and

JZ (18:25)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Jake (18:41)
And then even email, I like, remember looking at email and being like, my God, like the Gmail app. worked on the Gmail team at the time. I was like, no, screw it. I'm going to delete this. I don't, I don't need this. And so, yeah. So I just, I just deleted all that stuff just still in the rage and, and, and then there I was with like, you know, nothing left on the phone. Only there really is still a lot on the phone. Even if you get rid of everything that has.

JZ (19:09)
Yeah.

Jake (19:11)
an infinite amount of information that could constantly be refreshed and pull at my attention.

JZ (19:17)
Yeah, we sometimes call those infinity pools. The app, like any app where you can pull to refresh any app that is streaming any app that's like, like, like you just said, has it effectively infinite pool of new stuff, new content, new information behind it. Those are the hardest to resist.

Jake (19:20)
Yeah, yeah.

Because those things,

because those apps create attention residue. this, I think maybe we've mentioned on the podcast before, this is a, this concept that comes from a researcher at the University of Washington. And I heard about it in Cal Newport, something book or, or, you know, some interview with him. And it's a really lovely concept that really makes sense to me of attention residue is you're doing something, you have your head on something.

And then you go to do something else, but that other thing kind of stays with you. And these infinity pools, the attention residue is there, even if I'm like not really interacting with it, it's like, could be there. There's a question that I could answer. There's like a dopamine hit there potentially. So yeah. So I.

JZ (20:14)
Mmm.

And if you know

there's a dopamine hit there for you and you don't like, you try to resist getting it, that makes it like even worse. It makes it like even harder to like know that it's there, but you're not doing it.

Jake (20:33)
Right, right. Yeah. So it's, it's taking up real estate in my, in my head. the phone without those apps, here's what I had left. had music, which, you know, I suppose it technically there's infinite ish content on there, but it doesn't pull in the same way. It's not like I'm going to be refreshing to see if my favorite band released a new album, you know, it probably didn't just happen. And there's, you know,

JZ (20:50)
Right, yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (20:58)
podcasts, which again, infinite content, but it comes out slow enough and there's not that many that I'm into at any given time. Didn't feel the same. Didn't feel like it was pulling at There's utilities like the calendar, you know, there's the, camera, which is an amazing part. mean, remember when the iPhone came out, was like, my God, a camera that's decent. And it even wasn't then, but just like, you know, a camera that you could have in your pocket. How cool is that?

JZ (21:03)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (21:23)
the basics on the iPhone are really powerful. And then there's a category of app that doesn't just come with the iPhone, but it's not distracting in the same way. It's not something I'm going to go and just be like pulled into. Right. Right.

JZ (21:37)
Google Maps, you're not going to spend hours just browsing maps of random cities. mean, you might. If that's what

you're into, then great. But it's not addicting or distracting in the same way that the Twitter app is.

Jake (21:45)
Viver.

Exactly. Exactly. It's not designed to pull me back and back and back. Yeah. So that's, that was the big insight, the distraction free iPhone. It's taking that stuff off. And like I said, it was not really premeditated or well thought through at first, but what I realized right away was first, there's this discomfort of, my gosh, I'm not reachable. you know, I mean, I had, I still can text, could still take phone calls on it, but, but what I realized was that it was not crucial.

JZ (21:54)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Jake (22:21)
for me to be reachable 100 % of the time. And that I felt this, I just felt this relief to not have that pull of the phone. So that's in a nutshell, that's the idea with the distraction-free iPhone and in make time, and we recommend this.

JZ (22:29)
Yeah.

Jake (22:41)
So one of the inspirations for writing make time had been writing this medium post about my weird experience with the phone and seeing that people were interested in it. And so, so here's that original post

The distraction free iPhone in a nutshell is the notion of taking off any app that has infinite content that pulls at your attention. Anything that feels like it's taking away from your ability to focus on what's most important. So in the last episode, we talked about the highlight, what's most important to you each day. This is a way to make sure that the phone doesn't become an obstacle to my ability or your ability to focus on that thing. And it's a practice that you can do on a permanent basis. You can take the things off of your phone and just leave it that way.

Some people prefer to just delete the app or apps that bother them temporarily and then bring them back when they're, when they're ready to go out of that focus mode. So either way, it's just seeing that, Hey, a lot of our distractions have consolidated onto this little device and we have the ability to just pull those off when we, when we want to. So.

JZ (23:44)
And so

you, you mentioned like, can do this forever. You can do it sort of in waves. What, how did you do it? Like that from that initial day when you removed all the apps in a, in a fit of rage, did you, did you freak out the next day and reinstall them all? Did you, did you immediately love it? Like what happened next?

Jake (23:57)
Hahaha.

I immediately felt like, no, I'm going to miss out. And I decided that I was going to try it for like an hour. Like I did it. I guess maybe because I didn't want to feel even more foolish. I didn't want to just like install them again right away. So I'm like, well, I'll just, let's just put the, you know, put it aside, put it back in my pocket and just see if what this is like for an hour. And then it like was okay. And then I was like, well.

JZ (24:22)
Right.

Jake (24:34)
Maybe I'll just leave it off for tonight. You know, see what it's like in the morning. And it was still okay. And then I was like, well, maybe I'll try. I remember I had to go back to work the next day. was like, well, maybe I'll try like not having them on for the work day. mean, when I'm at work, I'll have access to a computer so I can do stuff then. And, and then I don't know, like it hit 24 hours and I was just like feeling better. Like it just felt like stress, real, you know, relief. And so I just, I just left them off and essentially.

I've left them off since then. Now, not a hundred percent of the time. There are times when I need to have email for a trip. If I'm traveling sometimes, I'm not going to have access to a computer when I need it. And I'll install an email app on my phone and, I'll really need to look something up and I'll, go into the browser, you know, install it. But what I've found is that when I finished that, like I can already feel the static when the,

JZ (25:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jake (25:32)
emails on my phone, I feel the static and I just can't wait almost to delete it again. It feels so good. I can just always feel the quiet coming back.

JZ (25:38)
You

Yeah, it's like when you've been, you like have been sitting all day, maybe on a flight or in a car and then like, you can't wait to stretch. It's like you, there's this cloud cover that has settled in and you just can't wait to like bust through it again.

Jake (25:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, and you you are talking about this like you know what it feels like because you ended up trying this. What was your experience like with it?

JZ (26:08)
I think that I, at first, when you told me about it, I thought it sounded kind of crazy. And I also, I remember having the feeling that like, I didn't need it. I was like, I was like, I don't need, I don't need that. Like I'm fine. I mean, I don't have kids. So I didn't, I didn't relate sort of, you know, one to one to like your experience. Like I didn't have this overwhelming sensation in my day-to-day life that I was being like.

Jake (26:19)
Yeah. Yeah.

JZ (26:35)
I was too distracted or I was unable to spend time on important things. And so I didn't feel like the same level of fury that you felt, but I did try it because by this point you and I had been talking a lot, trading notes a lot about different tactics and hacks for making better use of our time. So I tried it. And for me, it was less of like fixing a problem and more about

gaining some additional upside. And pretty much right away, I felt an incredible sense of space in my ability to think deeply about things and to work on things without that little tug of, there might be something interesting over here. And you mentioned a few minutes ago that you went to work the next day and you were like, well, let's see what this is like without.

Jake (27:23)
Yeah.

JZ (27:30)
phone that has a bunch of apps on it. And I remember having that sensation a couple of times too, where it's like, I would go a period without looking at email or without checking in. And then when I would, would like, you know, get my computer out, open it, like go to my email. I was like, everything's totally fine. Like I didn't actually need to be checking email every five minutes. So that, that was how it felt for me. And

Jake (27:49)
You

JZ (27:57)
today, the state of my phone is that I have no social media apps on my phone. I have, I have no news apps, no games. I've never really been much of a gamer, so I don't have any, any games. the only infinity pools that I have are I have YouTube installed and it's starting to be a problem. Like I, this is so weird because like,

Jake (28:17)
Ha

JZ (28:19)
YouTube has been around forever. I helped design YouTube channels. I've been close to YouTube for a long time, but only recently have I felt like really has my number. So I'm monitoring that one. I don't have email on my phone most of the time. I probably reinstall it more often than you do, certainly when I'm traveling. But even if I have a busy day where I'm going to be

Jake (28:30)
Yeah.

JZ (28:45)
doing like a bunch of back-to-back meetings. I like to be able to just like look at my phone in between meetings rather than sort of like dive into full like laptop, you know, open screen mode. And then I do have Safari on my phone. I recently blocked LinkedIn from my phone browser because the LinkedIn feed is becoming very distracting. But there's just too many little things like, how do you do this? What's going on with that? There's just like,

So many of those little questions that I felt that Safari itself was not, I didn't feel that it was distracting to me, but not having access to it was like creating a bunch of friction in my day that just didn't really feel like it was worth it. But apart from those things, like for all intents and purposes, I still think of distraction-free iPhone as a tactic that I use, not to the maximum extent, but it's still, it is one of my core like five.

six, seven, make time tactics that I use every day.

Jake (29:42)
how did you block LinkedIn from Safari?

JZ (29:46)
It's, so we go to settings and then you go to, this is circa, you know, circa December, 2024 and Apple has been making it harder and harder to find these settings over the years. But so, so, you know, for what it's worth, settings screen time. And then there's, an option that's labeled like apps, media and web settings or something like that. And then inside of there, you have to turn on.

Jake (29:55)
Yeah. Yes, they have.

JZ (30:14)
block adult websites. And then you can add a URL, you can add a custom URL under that section. it's like block adult websites turned on and then below it, it's like never allow access to and I just put linkedin.com in there. so yeah, if I try to go to LinkedIn on my phone, which I still do just out of muscle memory, sometimes it says like, it's just a white screen. It says you can't visit this website.

Jake (30:17)
Okay.

10.

mean, LinkedIn is definitely an adult website. So kids, kids do not want to be on LinkedIn. It's a different definition than they probably had in mind.

JZ (30:45)
Such a good point. Yeah, not what they meant, but

very, very appropriate. Yeah.

Jake (30:58)
just let it train.

JZ (30:57)
have a question for you.

So we work with founders all the time. That's sort of, I think, where we spend most of our time is like talking to founders, working with founders, trying to help them design better products and figure out how to market those.

I wonder, because I struggle with this, how do you deal with the sense, whether it's real or imagined, the sense that like, you know, since we're in a job where we're sort of, you know, in service of founders, like, how do you deal with this feeling that somebody might need something, a founder in our portfolio or a really time-sensitive, you know, new investment opportunity that somebody might need something and you're going to be too slow to respond to it in a way that is, you know,

Jake (31:28)
Yeah.

yeah.

JZ (31:43)
Maybe it's maybe it's negative specifically negative in that moment or maybe it's just sort of this this adding up of cumulative negative impressions where it's like, man, like I can never get Jake, you know, when I need him or I can never get Jay Z when I need him to like give me some feedback on something like how do you how do you deal with that?

Jake (31:58)
Totally.

Totally. Well, the short answer is text messaging. But the longer answer here is that there's a great myth that nobody says, and maybe nobody would say, we've all, I certainly accepted as the phone became a part of my life as this thing that was like shiny and cool and then started to have more and more cool stuff on it. I started to think I have to have this and I have to master.

JZ (32:06)
Hahaha

Jake (32:31)
All of these ways of communication and be on top of them. have to be on top of how I present myself on LinkedIn, how I present myself on Instagram, how I present myself on Facebook, how I present myself as a fast email responder, how I present myself in all of these different places is necessary for me to be a, to be worthy of, of, know, like, like my, my self-worth is dependent on those things and all of these new places, new arenas for me to.

present myself kept appearing and, there were new. Yeah. They never stopped. Yeah. Yeah. And of course this is like from the past. So now, of course, if you're listening to this now, you're thinking, well, there's other places too, where you should, you know, you should be presenting yourself on tick tock and, know, threads and whatever Twitter. I'm not even on blue sky yet. Right. So, and the, think this.

JZ (33:02)
None of our shut down, you never get to cross one off the list, you just have to keep adding.

I bet you're not on blue sky yet, are you?

Jake (33:28)
There's this fundamental thing with all of that is it's not really true. It's we're not, for one thing we can't, I think there's, there's a, expectation that I'm going to be on top of everything and it's just not realistic. And it's crazy making like to try to be on top of everything will certainly make me crazy. Had did make me crazy and does, and I mean, still creeps in and pulls at me and I have to resist. I, I have to resist the idea that I'm a person.

who is always on top of his inbox. And that's one, I've had an email inbox since the 1990s, and I used to be a person who was on top of it all the time. And early in my career, that was like, one of my defining features was like, this guy's really on it. And I had to let go of that. And that's hard. I did, I did. I an email course at Google. I worked on Gmail.

JZ (34:01)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Did you teach an email course at Google? Yeah.

Yeah.

Jake (34:25)
You

know, design the priority inbox, which like organizes your mail to make it easier. And I'm now a person who you send me an email and God have mercy on your soul. If I, I just, it's a mess. so I treat the founders like they're friends and I love the work, the line of work that we're in, because I can blur the lines between this idea of like work and life a little bit and just say like they're friends and they're not, they're not.

you know, family who I see every day, but like if my friend needs something, they should text me and I'm going to get back to them. Like I get back to a friend and I, I try to tell them that like, like just text me. I'm not always responsive on email, but I'll see it as, as fast as I can. And don't ever hesitate to ping me more than once about something because I'm not totally on it, but I want to be there for you. want to help you out.

JZ (34:58)
Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Jake (35:19)
And I think that works, you know, for me and in our work that works. I, and I kind of think that in many categories of information work or whatever, like at least an element of that will work.

JZ (35:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like there's a, there was a couple of interesting insights in, in your answer. One is that we should be very clear about the people that matter, the relationships that matter and how that's different from these, these spheres of influence and responsiveness that we, we feel an obligation to that. Those are actually different things. many

Social apps in particular are designed to conflate those two things to make it feel as though the people we are presenting ourselves to are interacting with and social media are the real people that we care about. But usually those are not like the same thing. And then the other insight I picked up on was like, for the people who do matter, treat them more like you would treat your friends, treat them like real people where the best way to communicate is in these, through these methods that are

that are very personal and intimate in some ways, instead of routing them through the sort of mass channels that are more engineered for addictedness and distraction.

Jake (36:43)
There's a memory I have from being a kid. My dad was a prosecuting attorney in our County and my mom was a teacher. taught high school English and I could remember, you know, this is before email, before the internet, just imagine such a world. And I can remember them getting, when work was, when they were busy. Yeah. What was going on when work was busy for them? You know, if, if it was, there was something.

JZ (36:58)
Yeah.

What did people do all day?

Jake (37:10)
funny going on at school that my mom had to deal with, you know, dad would have these criminal cases, some really great murder case that we'll have to talk about in another episode, but, you know, they, they might get a phone call at night or on the weekend and they'd be talking on the phone. You know, you can picture this phone with a cord going into the wall. They'd be talking to a person from work and some of these people from work were like, they were like friends. So they existed in this very much simpler universe of communication modes where you're either.

You're either talking to a person in person or you're talking to them on the phone or maybe you write them a letter, but you know, it's like, it's not, there's not multiple millions of modes to talk to people. And those people, like my dad's colleagues, my mom's colleagues, they were people who were known to my family. Like, you know, you would, you, they'd hang out sometime. You just would see those people. They were real people. Like they weren't just work people. were people. And I think there's.

JZ (38:06)
Yeah.

Jake (38:08)
There's something to that. It's hard to craft that if you work at a company with tens of thousands of people, your team is this giant team. Like maybe it's harder to craft that, but that's really a delight. If the people in your life are just people and you're not constantly thinking is this work, is this not work.

here is, this is the original post that I wrote back in 2014. 10 years ago. Yeah. 10 years ago. And you can see. Yeah. Yeah. Look at that.

JZ (38:32)
10 years ago.

Look at the shape of that iPhone screen.

Jake (38:39)
It's, really, don't, RDO, like I looked at that just now and I was like, what? That was an old music service app. this is quite a, quite a time capsule, but that's what my phone looked like at the time. if you're listening, the apps on my home screen or Google maps, RDO, which was like, Spotify and reminders and the weather. then,

JZ (38:42)
Wow.

That was an amazing music app.

Then in the dock

you had phone and messages.

Jake (39:04)
phone and messages. Yeah. So very, very simple. anyway, I kind of talk about how to do this, you know, in this post and the people really liked it. This is a lot of people tried it and, and then I, I wrote one later. in 2018, so now this is six years ago, but this is after I think even this is, this is very popular. Yeah.

JZ (39:21)
Even more people liked it. Like this was, this was like twice as popular as the original one. Yeah.

Jake (39:28)
In this one, I kind of got a little bit more into here's the story. I've got to pick some drawings of, you know, the moment when, that I described earlier, when I realized that, was kind of checked out from the most important part of my life because of the phone.

JZ (39:33)
Yeah.

Jake (39:41)
So here there's this at the bottom of this post and what we can link to this in the show notes at the bottom of this post, have this, this kind of visualization for me of like what the difference is in terms of my attention. And it's like, if I'm doing a big project and whether that means doing a sprint with a startup or I'm doing a writing project or, even

recording this podcast or whatever it might be. If I want to be really focused on something, I could kind of visualize that as like this big, like golden block of attention, right? It's like a, like attention takes a block. And in the previous episode, when we talked about the highlight, that's kind of a way of thinking about the highlight is like this three-dimensional like brick of attention. And then I had this idea of like, suppose that I have a pyramid building contest. Like I need to build a pyramid out of these.

JZ (40:25)
Yeah.

Jake (40:34)
blocks because if you're going to write a book or do a whole design sprint or whatever the thing might be, you're building a pyramid of some size. Like you have to collect a lot of those blocks together to do something.

JZ (40:42)
Yeah.

It's made up

of a whole bunch of smaller but still significant blocks of attention. 60 to 90 minutes at a time, they add up to a lot of time, to something really significant.

Jake (40:58)
Yes, yes, exactly. And so I felt like this was kind of, essence, the diversion of Jake, who has everything on his phone, he's going to not make as many bricks as the version of Jake who doesn't, because like when I sit down to do something, just as you described, John, it's like, if it's not pulling at me, there's a better chance I'm going to make the brick and stack it on the pyramid. that's just kind of one sort of simple, simple way of thinking about it is the

JZ (41:21)
Yeah.

Jake (41:26)
the version of me who's app free, who's distraction free on the phone is going to be slightly ahead of the other version in terms of paying attention to what matters to me. And so that's kind of how I think about it. And that's what hopefully keeps me focused when I might not otherwise be.

JZ (41:45)
Yeah. Cool. Thank you for sharing the story. It's fun to revisit the history of the distraction-free phone. And every time we talk about this stuff, it's a good, it's a little boost for me. It's a little help in revisiting some tactics that I moved away from. So, is great.

Jake (42:03)
Well, I haven't been able

to get Safari off of my phone anymore. stopped working. We've talked about that, but I'm now I know about your screen time trick. I might, I might use that. The total websites.

JZ (42:08)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The adult websites. LinkedIn and other adult websites.

So any recommendations to share with our audience today?

Jake (42:21)
Yeah, I do have some recommendations. if you're on YouTube, you can see my, this is my phone now and I'm using. Yeah, I do have more things in the doc. now have music and the camera in the doc in addition to messages and the phone. And you can see that I'm not on top of things. have a lot of unread text messages, but still essentially the same kind of deal on the home screen. It's, Apple maps now and.

JZ (42:28)
Circa 2024 distraction-free iPhone.

That's great.

Jake (42:47)
reminders and notes. And then my recommendation is this other app here, which is called how we feel. And the how we feel app is just a little emotion tracker and it's very beautifully designed. And so if I, if I open up this app, it's going to ask me like, how are you feeling this morning? And I can check in and at the top level, it's going to ask, you feeling high energy, unpleasant, low energy, unpleasant.

high energy pleasant or low energy pleasant. kind of high, low energy and then pleasant or unpleasant. These kind of two, you know, axes. And if I go into one of these, like, let's say I'm, gosh, I'm feeling kind of high energy pleasant right now, which by the way is usually not the case, but like, usually I'm more of a low energy pleasant kind of guy, we're doing the podcast. it does this really nice job of describing like what, okay, what's joyful. Joyful is feeling pleasured and high spirits or what's enthusiastic. has all these fine grained.

JZ (43:24)
Yeah.

I'm

Jake (43:44)
emotions within there and

JZ (43:46)
just imagining the writing effort that went into this app and creating all these descriptions.

Jake (43:53)
Yeah. Yeah. It's, terrific. Energized feeling like you're wide awake and ready to get up and go. This is based on a bunch of research, I guess. it's a collaboration between, I think it's Yale. one of those fancy pants schools and then some designers from like Pinterest. And, it's just this really well-crafted free app that they, you know, they made, they said we've got this research about tools that make it.

JZ (44:11)
Yeah.

Jake (44:20)
think easier for you to understand your own emotions and understand the way they change over time and that they're not permanent and how they correlate to different things. It can correlate to weather and activity and things just off of your phone. And then, you know, it's free. They wanted to make it free. So how we feel is the app and I think it's a fun one. So that's my recommendation.

JZ (44:44)
I have one television recommendation to share. Netflix has been making a series of sports documentaries. They're mini series, I guess. They're limited series. The first one I ever saw was about golf. And I'm not really a fan of golf. mean, nothing against it, but it's just not one of my favorite sports. But they have a really captivating sports documentary called Full Swing.

They ended up making a few seasons of it. I So I guess it's not a limited series, but it follows. It's just it's straight documentary. It just follows a few professional golfers through the season, through the ups and downs with I think a slight tilt toward their personal lives. Not not 100 percent. You know, there's still plenty of coverage storytelling about the, you know, the game itself, but but a tilt toward the professional lives.

And, so that was, think the first one they made, and it was certainly the first one I saw, but I've since watched a few others. have one that's all about, quarterbacks in the NFL, one that's all about receivers. both wide receivers and tight ends in the NFL. And the one that we've been watching recently that I love is, about the NBA. called starting five and it follows it was last season. It follows five NBA players, LeBron James.

Jimmy Butler, Sabonis from the Kings, Jason Tatum from the Celtics, and Anthony Edwards from the Minnesota Timberwolves. Follows them all season, and it's the same thing. used to play jazz music, I played saxophone, and one thing I love about jazz is the idea of standards, that there are these classic...

formats, these classic things that you just return to again and again, and you kind of put your own spin on them. This is like the standards of documentary making. there's nothing fancy, there's nothing flashy, there's no like clever angle. It's just, we're going to follow five NBA players for a whole season and we're just going to see what happens. And you know, the Celtics ended up winning last year. So like, you know, it's pretty cool that they happen to choose, Jason Tatum as one of the players, but I've really been

Been enjoying that.

Jake (46:58)
Cool. Right. What's it called again? What's the series called? Starting five with each series has a different name, appropriate, good sport. Gotcha. Okay. Cool. All right. Well, how we feel starting five and the other sports documentaries on Netflix and everyone. And the distraction free phone. Yeah. Give it a shot links to all these.

JZ (47:00)
Starting five, it's on Netflix. Yeah, yep. Yeah.

And the distraction free phone, of course, you should give it a shot. Yeah. Give it a shot and let us know

how it goes. You can email us at hey at jakenjz.com and thank you for listening. This has been episode nine. getting into a pretty good rhythm with this podcast and let us know what you thought of the shorter format too. We'd love to hear from you.