#036 Combating Technological Dependencies

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I discuss several techniques and tactics you can immediately adopt to begin to combat the addictive elements of technology and smartphone dependencies. I think you are going to take A LOT of useful tips and techniques away from this episode and it can help you spend more quality time with your friends and loved ones.

As always, thank you for supporting The Decoding Excellence Show!

In addition to those social mediums, you can head over to AdamRingler.com/Newsletter and sign-up for my weekly newsletter. This is a newsletter for the curious. It's chalked full of interesting articles I've read through the week, things I'm exploring and finding fascinating through my week, and a collections of thought experiences and resources I've cultivated. It's essentially a Birchbox for performance-related articles and musings.

If you are looking to help grow and support the Decoding Excellence Show, navigate over to Buy Me a Coffee. Buy Me A Coffee is a an easy & fun way to support the show. For the price of a Grande Latte ☕ you can support the show and help us maintain the quality of the content. One hundred percent of the contributions go directly to supporting the hosting fees associated with operating this podcast.

If any of the material resonates with you, I'd love for you engage with me at @AdamRingler

Thanks again for listening to the Decoding Excellence Show! I appreciate all the support growing this Sport Science, Strength & Conditioning, and High-Performance Coaching resource. If you have taken anything away from the show, please login to iTunes and navigate to Decoding Excellence page and leave us a review.

Key Takeaways

• You can adopt concrete tactics immediately to push back on the addictive pull of smartphones and technology.
• Reducing tech dependency is about reclaiming quality time with friends and loved ones, not just lowering screen time.

Listen and Subscribe

Find this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or use the player above.

Go Further in This Episode

Enjoyed this conversation? Here is how to get more from it:

• Read the transcript below to revisit key ideas at your own pace.
• Share this episode with a coach or colleague who would benefit.
• Subscribe to the Decoding Excellence Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app.
• Join the newsletter at adamringler.com/newsletter for weekly insights on human performance.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show.

[00:01:24] I get emails and messages every single publication talking about how can we support the Decoding Excellence Show and the mission that you're bringing to us. And the easiest way is buy me a coffee. No, don't actually physically buy me a coffee. Head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler. And there you can find in an easy donation way. You can pop in your information and you could essentially buy the show a coffee, a $5 latte, if you will. And what we'll do with that is those proceeds from that donation will go immediately into the

[00:02:02] Hosting fees for both the website and the Decoding Excellence Show. So we can continue to bring this show to you via iTunes, Spotify, whatever podcast player of your choice. So check it out, buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler. Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. I'm your host, Adam Ringler. And on this episode, we are going to be discussing some of the things that I am doing to try to bring out more productivity in my day. And it starts with my smartphone. I am decreasing the applications and my reliance on this addictive

[00:02:42] Technology. And there are some helpful tips and tricks that I have learned through a number of different books that I've read recently that will help you to. So stick around, listen to this episode. And I think you'll take a lot away from the productivity tips of removing yourself from the addiction. That is your smartphone.

[00:03:02] Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. We have a fantastic show for you and it's check full of really good tips that you can apply immediately. I'm excited to bring this show to you because I think it is really important, especially in the modern hyper-connective digital world that we live in today. It may seem counterintuitive because so much of what I do is on the digital mediums of the internet, right? Whether it's the website or the Decoding Excellence Show or if you follow me on Twitter or anywhere else the socials that I may

[00:03:39] Have or whatever doesn't really matter. Then you would assume that I'm going to be very pro social media. It would be very pro sharing information online and the production and the consumption of that information. And I think these tools can be very valuable tools. Number one, right? But they do have an unintended downside, a consequence of using them. So what I have wanted to sort of jot some notes down on this Decoding Excellence Show, this random show, is I want to discuss a little bit about those unintended consequences. And I know the show Intro talked a lot about

[00:04:23] The addiction of not only social media but these devices that we so commonly hold in our hands, right? Your iPhone or your Android device or whatever it may be. But these are devices that have a lot of addictive qualities to them, right? Whether it's social media or the phone itself. And we need to recognize and realize that we live in a society where these devices are ambiguous with our day to day workflows, right? They are a part of our lives. And in some respects, you know, there's people that will literally fall asleep with their phone in their hand. And that's

[00:05:04] The first thing that they see when they wake up in the mornings. And we all have a job to do it, completely understand. And we recognize that these devices bring a lot of value, they bring a lot of good hyper connectivity world, right? The literally amounts of information that is available at our fingertips has never been as accessible as it is now in the world that we live in. So there are a lot of benefits that these things bring to us. But there also are some of those unintended consequences, right? Those downsides of living in a hyper connective world, living with these

[00:05:42] Devices. And I've read a number of books recently that sort of led me down this rabbit hole, really wanting to change some of the behaviors that I have with these devices. And two of which happened to be Cow Newport's new book, Digital Minimalism. And a second book, called Man, Why Am I Forgetting It? It's irresistible. The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked by Adam Alter, a really great book came out in 2017 and is true today. One of the things that they talk about in sort of both of these books is that these

[00:06:18] Products are engineered to be addictive, right? Because your attention is the medium of which that they're trying to capture, right? Because a more captured attention on their devices, the more people spend on it, literally you are the product, whether it's harvesting information or metadata or anything like this, depending on what device you use and their level of privacy or concern for privacy. But nonetheless, we are the product, right? And our attention is the product in which they're vying for, right? Attention to bring your consumer dollars to their ad store or to their

[00:06:55] ITunes or into their app store, whatever it might be, right? So we need to first recognize that we are, are you literally our attention? We won. One person is going up against an army of engineers and product designers that is literally painstakingly looking to optimize and produce the most slick and perfect app for the user experience so that our attention is literally focused on this one thing. So with that, there comes those unintended consequences, right? And that is that we are so hyper focused with these applications and with our phones that as a consequence, we miss

[00:07:34] On all of those moments that we could be focused on our relationships, our communication with our families, our communication with our coworkers, communication with our loved ones, whoever it might be. And some of the strategies in which I've adopted through this book is a few here, right? Now I'll walk through them. Is that number one? And I think I might have said this on a different Decoding Excellence Show or online via Twitter, is that I almost exclusively gray screen or gray scale out my phone, right? And I do this so that I don't see the bold, rich colors that pop out

[00:08:15] And there's been some really good research that has come out of a couple of universities that talk about sort of our attention and what color stimulates our attention. And there's a reason that notifications pop out in red because that's from an evolutionary standpoint, it seems like there's some decent research that suggests that that red, whether it's blood or a signal, captures our attention. So notifications typically pop out red and what by gray scaling out our phone, I remove that sort of trigger. I remove that signal so that I can passively respond to those notifications when I choose.

[00:08:56] It's one way of sort of breaking the addiction, if you will. So the way that I do this is I go through general and then I go into my accessibility. And then towards the bottom, there should be, there should be a setting, essentially, that allows for you to go in. I think it's display accommodations. And I go in here and I can set up color filters. And I have set the gray scale color filter up so that anytime, and I also have set up a shortcut and accessibility shortcut on my home screen so that anytime I triple click my little home button, I can toggle from full

[00:09:37] Scale, right color notifications, everything. I can see slack notifications right now staring at me with two notifications to triple clicking it and then having everything go dull. And I do that so that I can obviously break the visual component of what those notifications bring. So that is one thing that I've played around with and have adopted probably the last two years or so. The second thing that I've done is that I heard about Ariana Huffington talk about shifting and rotating and randomizing the application so that we don't get into this low sort of habit of

[00:10:17] Just sort of browse, browse, browse, swipe, swipe, go to this application, swipe to the next application. At least by randomizing those applications, you sort of have to search for them. You have to you know have a level of intent to go out and actually seek out the application that you're looking for. But I've sort of taken a step further. I have literally my home screen is completely blank. I have four icons at the very bottom of my home bar and going from right to left, I have my two notification. My two first and foremost apps are my phone app and my message app. Those are

[00:10:53] Things I actively will use on a databases. And I look at that as sort of pushing. I can push communication to people. I can be actively involved in that. And there's some level where you know there's some pull notification. If I get a message, I will check it. So those two are sort of at least in my mind, sort of neutral, if you will. I also have my third icon from the right is Slack. And I use that for most of my work correspondence with our team and interns and support staff, things like that. So I will have you know, messenger, phone, Slack. And then my fourth

[00:11:32] Application in my home screen or home bar, dock, whatever we might want to call it, is a folder that contains every single application I have. And this allows for me to be very sort of mindful that what app I'm searching for. So now there's a level of I'm not when I look at my home screen, I look at my phone, I have four icons and I sort of actively have to pursue the applications that I want to seek out. So I'm not just sort of when I'm starting to become bored, pick up my phone and you know, randomly peruse the applications. So by having that,

[00:12:13] It has allowed another barrier for me to mindlessly grab a phone and start scanning and being distracted by our smart phones rather than using them for their sophisticated nature of which they were designed for. So now in those applications, in addition, I have made a really a habit to really try to prune random applications down, right? So every application I have thought about sort of like Marie Kondo's sort of Spark Joy, if you will. And I look at it and I sort of ask like, does this application provide me a benefit? And if it doesn't, then I'm going to delete it out.

[00:12:57] There's no reason to have an application just sit there and the clutter of applications tempting you to to peruse it, right? So we talk about certainly from a nutritional standpoint, like you buy your accountability at the grocery store, you buy your compliance at a grocery store. And why I think about this and this analogy is that if you need compliance or accountability for, let's say not eating donuts for whatever, you don't want to challenge that accountability when you already have donuts in the home. No, you can actually buy that accountability by simply

[00:13:36] At the grocery store not buying the item that you want. So I look at the applications by saying like, look, you can download accountability and you can do, you can build accountability in the app store by not downloading those apps, by not tempting yourself in the first place, or not trying to be distracted in the short and in the in the first place. So that is one way that, you know, whether it's the grouping of applications or, you know, obviously by grouping them in one folder that there's just more barriers to that mindless need, mindless perusing, if you will,

[00:14:17] Right? A second thing I've done is through iOS 12 and maybe it was wrote out even in earlier iOS versions is that I have set up, you know, quite a stringent, if you will, screen time on my phone. So again, I have, I've set this up where now my iPhone essentially will, I set those limits so that I'm trying to peruse to it right here right now, live on the show, is that I've set those downtime periods to happen from 8 p.m. To 4 p.m. And I do that so that, you know, again, later in the day, I want to spend time with our family. I want to be able to not only be accessible in the case of

[00:15:07] Emergencies, telephone calls, I message things like that, but there's no reason to, to jump and just randomly peruse later in the evening. Now don't get me wrong. I mean, our kids will fall asleep on the couch or we'll read them a book, we'll tuck them into bed and, you know, we'll have some time to unwind as parents. Certainly, I get that, but I would rather have that unwinding time be beneficial to be enriching relationships, rather than being distracted by browsing CNN or, you know, whatever news app of your choice, your pick, right? So that is just another way of setting those hard limits,

[00:15:46] Configuring that downtime so that if you are an addict, right, for whatever reason, right, that you set those constraints so that you, you're not even tempted in the first place. And I do that through the downtime and through the screen time app. So if I want to bypass that, right, for some case, let's just say an emergency or some reason, you know, work cause or something, and I need to access a part of that downtime, right? I can punch in the passcode. I know the passcode, but if I'm just mindlessly, you know, thumbing through my phone and trying to access an application that is

[00:16:22] Permissioned away because, you know, the downtime that I established on my iPhone, then what ends up happening is that that, you know, that prompt to say, hey, enter your passcode, that's a good reminder for yourself to say, oh, you know, actually, I'm just, I'm just, you know, I don't know where my mind state was. I was just happening to be bored. But so again, it sort of looks you in the eye and says, hey, do you really need to access this random website? Do you really need to use Safari? Do you really need to use this application? And what I have found over the case of setting up

[00:16:59] These hard constraints is that almost, I don't even want to say nine times out of 10. I'd I'd almost say like 95%, right? Like 98% of the time, I look at this thing and I say, no, no, actually, I don't need to use this application. I'm just being bored and rather than just being bored, right? How can I use that boredom? How can I use that period of time for either productive reasonings or leisure and actually relaxing or engaging in conversation with people, things like that. So that is one thing that has been hugely beneficial through the configuration of that

[00:17:36] Screen time via the iOS. And I'm sure there's some Android possibilities or similarities on the Android device. I'm not as well versed in the sort of Android community or applications or operating system as I am probably iOS, right? But the other thing that has been really beneficial and I did this a long time ago. I think it was maybe in 2014 or 2015, is that I just, I literally quit Facebook for almost a hundred days. Didn't log in, didn't check it. There was an application ironically, right? In a whole show that's, you know, divulged around or centered around

[00:18:27] Deleting applications. There was an application or a web app, if you will. That was like Facebook 99 day challenge or something. And it was asking you to try to break the social media addiction and quit Facebook or don't log in for 99 days. I did a hundred. And you know, that was that was long time ago. And so what I have done just recently is I've I've literally deleted every social media application off my phone, Instagram, Facebook. I've have long not had Facebook on my phone, but Twitter, I'm not active on Snapchat. So I didn't have that on my phone. But anything

[00:19:09] That is sort of has an addictive quality to it. Boom, gone, deleted off my phone. Don't need it on there. There's no reason for it. So my trying to think the best way of paraphrasing this or articulating this is that my rationale is that I can access those applications if I want to from a desktop computer. But I'm not going to have it accessible 24, 7, 365 days at any particular moment of the day on my phone. And that is a hard stop that I've made. And being pretty recent into it, it has has provided me a lot of additional time through my day, right, where I would

[00:19:54] Rat, you know, I'm on a commute, you know, I'm traveling in or out or you know, on a bus or moving whatever it might be. And they let me just log in and check what's going on in the feed. So rather than doing that, now I can actually commit myself to, hey, let me listen to this audiobook or let me read this research paper or let me reach out to this particular person and and soak up a conversation with them. And it has been very enriching in something that I have, I've got a lot of benefit out of simply in the short time of using it. But I've also recognized

[00:20:26] As how much of those applications sort of creep into our date, right? So now I'm looking, I'm like, man, I got a lot of additional time or whatever. And I think one of those books, reference in the beginning of this show talked about that, you know, a majority of people will spend anywhere to four hours of screen time are an average a day, right? And that is between your, your laptop, your computer, but most prevalently your smartphone. And when you look at that and you add up all of those hours throughout a day, they had up to, I think, over a course of a lifespan,

[00:21:05] 11 years of time in front of a screen. And that's ridiculous. I know our longevity is continuing to increase in our lifespan, but 11 years to be in front of a computer 11 years to being in front of a phone is just seems so ludicrous to me when, you know, I would love those 11 years to be in front of friends and family and laughing and sharing great conversations and being around people that I love. So that is something that I am really diligent in trying to change. Certainly in 2019 and hopefully I can use these resources, I can use these tools for the betterment of it rather than

[00:21:53] Really trying to use them as, you know, me being the product of these companies and my attention being the product of in which that they try to actively go out and seek. So, you know, I think that is a another sort of tactic strategy that I've utilized over the last couple months, if you will. I've also, because my home screen is so simple, I've really tried to minimize, I'm trying to think the best way, right, minimum, almost like a digital minimalism. I tried to minimize my home screen. So I've simplified my home screen. It's literally almost black and white

[00:22:39] Even without the grayscale, it's black and white. And again, avoiding the clutter of my home screen, I don't need it to be crazy or, you know, over the top with stimulating visuals or anything like that. I want to make my phone as boring as possible. And I'm trying to articulate it or architect my phone to be so. I've moved almost all of the applications, and there's not many of them, right, that I have, but I've moved the ones I access most frequently to the widgets, right, as you scroll over to the left of your home screens. So now, you know, I think of the conversations I have, like, okay, who is in

[00:23:22] My favorites? I'm going to be able to contact them immediately. What does my calendar look like? So I have my calendar popped up because I'm always constantly thinking, what's next? Do I have a meeting? Do I have a session? Where do I have to be next? I have the weather, because, you know, obviously the weather here in Boulder, Colorado, beautiful sunny Boulder, Colorado can change very rapidly. So I want to know, you know, what the weather looks like. So I have a weather app in there. And then RTD, which is our sort of metro bus. So what are the bus lines? What are they running so

[00:23:54] That I can, you know, in a very eco-friendly way get in and out of Boulder, trying to, you know, do my part to reduce emissions and keep it as beautiful as it is. So those are the widgets that I have on my phone and it's because those are the things that I want to actively be conscientious of using. So rather than digging through apps and going through and being tempted by, you know, the Apple TV app or, you know, email if that's popping up or Spotify, no, like, let me, let me access the applications or the information that I need most rapidly and more

[00:24:31] Most frequently through the widgets. And that has delivered a lot of value and have saved a lot of time. It's, you know, I'm, I'm architecting my phone to be boring, but informational. And because of that, I can utilize it as the resource, the incredible resource that it is. And not the addictive qualities that the phone can certainly be. I also as a, you know, another random tip, I have partitioned out all of my emails to, and this is redundant. And I'm still searching for a better strategy. So if you are listening to the show and you have a better strategy, please

[00:25:10] Ping me at Adam Ringler. And whenever I get to a desktop, I'll see that notifications and I'll respond to it. But I partition all of my emails to three different email apps. Gmail, the native iOS mail application and a work email that I use Edison for as an application. So that, depending on where I'm at, I can access the right email. So I have a sort of a global email that I've utilized since, you know, the early 2000s that I, you know, through Gmail. So I like to stay current with that. And I check that periodically, but that is so spammed with subscriptions and

[00:25:53] Newsletters and things like that. So please continue to sign up for my newsletter. No, but that I have not taken the time to actually unsubscribe or, you know, advertisements from companies, things like that. But occasionally I get an email there. My iOS native app is through the Adam Ringler emails, which, you know, that there's a number of them that I have like my newsletter or my personal email. And then obviously my work email, right? And so, you know, if I'm on vacation, right? What do I do? Well, I'm going to avoid the work email. That's fine, right? I don't have

[00:26:29] Push notifications. They're not popping up. They're not plaguing me by looking at me and saying, hey, respond to this, respond to this, respond to this. One of the research says that most aren't average. Most people respond to an email alert or notification or a ping within six seconds. So that notification gets pushed to you. And immediately you respond, you load it up, you read it in six seconds. And it's distracting, especially if you're trying to do deep work to pull yourself out of that deep work environment. Look at the email. You're distracted by the

[00:27:04] Email. Now you're impossibly having to respond to it potentially. Maybe it's just, hey, I just wanted to relay this info, but most of the time emails, you know, it's pulling you to do something. And and because of that, you are no longer focused on what that deep work that you were doing. So now you can be more conscientious of how we use email. Do we batch it so that you're maybe checking it at, you know, 9 a.m. Noon and 3 p.m. Right? Periods of time where you batch read and batch respond to those emails, rather than, you know, free feeding on emails through the day where

[00:27:40] You're never allowing yourself the space or the attention to do the deep work that you're actually trying to do. So those partitioning emails out has been certainly helpful in sort of making sure that I reclaim my attention and focusing my attention on the deep work that I do. Another strategy that you can use is obviously configuring your notifications. And I think we've all been conscious of that. We might know it, but, you know, I am very, very selective of what gets pushed notified, notified to me immediately. So, you know, there's a number of different things that will

[00:28:16] Have push notifications on my phone, and depending on the hours working hours, I'll have push notifications on things like Slack or, you know, I very rarely do I ever have it configured for emails or anything, but obviously telephone calls and I message, I'll have push notifications because those are the things I want to respond to immediately. But, you know, I don't know if, you know, if you shoot me a response to the newsletter email, then I need to read it immediately, right? That could probably go six seconds or six minutes or six hours and potentially it could go six days,

[00:28:51] Right, for me to respond back to that. And I do that so that I can focus on the work that I am doing and the people around me or the athletes around me, the teams around me, and not being bogged down by those emails. Another great strategy, and I haven't mentioned this, I don't think publicly on the show, but I do this quite frequently, is that native to iOS, there is drive mode, right? And what this is is that if you were to swipe up from your bottom of your screen and you see the the dock that comes like a configuration dock or whatever, where you can adjust your brightness and your

[00:29:29] Sound and, you know, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity and airplane mode, all those things, right? There is a setting, I think it comes enabled called car mode. And what this is is if you're driving, right, you can click the little drive thing, and you can either manually sort of activate toggle this feature, or you could have it so that when you jump in the car, it immediately when it connects to Bluetooth, it immediately enables this, it toggles that aren't. But why I like this is that I use this feature quite often because I have it so that I've changed the default notification. So when

[00:30:11] It says do not disturb, what happens is that essentially it will auto-reply on the default version, it will say, hey, I'm driving right now, if it's urgent, you know, reply urgent, and it will push notify this iOS message to the person with this message. And the idea of it is that you can, essentially, you know, and rightfully so to avoid vehicular accidents through text messages and distracted driving, things like that, you can enable this when you're driving from point A to point B, you're not going to receive that text message while you're driving because your eyes should be

[00:30:51] Focused on the road and not on reading text, although as I, you know, write our eco-friendly buses occasionally that I see so many distracted drivers when I stare out the window, you know, pleasantly being distracted myself on the bus, you know, enjoying coffee and perusing or listening to a podcast or an audiobook or reading a research paper. And when I recognize that, almost nobody is focused on driving anymore, but that's an aside that I could go down for many, many minutes or hours here, but what I've done with my auto-reply is that it essentially says, hey, I'm currently unplugged

[00:31:31] From technology, I'll receive your message once resuming normal technological usage hours. If it's necessary to contact me, IE scheduling reply with urgent and I'll push through immediately, things. And what this allows for me to do is that now I can use this feature when I want to do deep work. So when I'm focused on, you know, writing or, you know, publishing something or reading research or working on programming for the X's and O's of strengthening conditioning, I can click this button, and now iOS messages won't go through my phone. It will essentially say, hey,

[00:32:05] I know you're trying to text a message for me. I'm not using my technology right now. I'm being active, actively selective with what I'm focused on so I can probably do deep work. And now, when you text message me, unless it's urgent, unless you need to, and you have the option to reply as urgent, and it'll push notify that message to me, right? And they will interrupt that deep work. But this is a way of letting the other participant know that like, hey, I'm not accessible in real time right now. I'm working on something. And I'm being selective

[00:32:39] With the technology and the push notifications that come through. And this has been a really helpful strategy of communicating to other people that your attention is focused on some of the deep work. So whether it is just maybe to put the show or put a bow tie on the show, whether it is utilizing gray scales to make your foreign or your phone more boring, whether it is using, you know, app selection or folders to compile all of your apps into one centralized spot to decrease the clutter. If it's randomizing your application so that you don't mindlessly roam to the apps that

[00:33:18] You know through pattern recognition, whether it is setting those hard stops, those down periods of AMPM limits so that you can really be selective and focused on your attention, whether it's turning off slack notifications or setting out of office hours so those don't ping you or decreasing push notifications or configuring those widgets to be the most helpful widgets so that you're not on your phone. So frequently all of these tips I think can be utilized. And the great thing is you don't need to do them all day one. You can configure them, you can play with them, you can experiment with

[00:34:03] Selectively saying, Hey, I used Twitter a lot. I'm going to delete Twitter for a week and see how that goes. Ooh, I got through a week. I'm going to delete it for, you know, keep it deleted for another week, right? Or you could adopt all of these strategies. I think they're great strategies for you to curb the addiction, curb the thousand programmers and design engineers that go into creatineg these phones for a very productive reason, for a very holistic reason. But from a societal standpoint that we've just become so addicted to that you can shortcut, you can buy that accountability

[00:34:41] Through the discipline and the constraints that you make with these devices. And so that ultimately you can enjoy life and you can enjoy the conversations, you can enjoy the people around and pour into them rather than mindlessly flicking through Instagram, looking, looking, looking, double tapping and swiping through our lives because our lives are so important and the people around us are so important. They deserve your full attention and they deserve for us to put our phones away. Hey guys, that's going to be it for this week's episode of The Decoding Excellence Show.

[00:35:26] And my hope is that you took some tangible, some tactic technique away from this show and you can immediately adopt it into your smartphone usage so that you can also, hopefully, curb the addiction of these smart devices and to minimize some of the unintended consequences of having the hyper connectivity and literally the world at your fingertips and really refocus that attention, refocus those efforts into the people around you, the relationships that you have, the connections that you have and live a better, more meaningful and less distracted life. So hopefully you learned

[00:36:11] A couple things from what I do. You don't have to take it as extreme as I typically do. It's a little polarizing sometimes, but feel free to play around with this and if you've got some benefit from it, please reach out to me on social media and when I get around to it, I will certainly check in on that notification. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at atomringler.com forward slash newsletter. And like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great

[00:36:49] Articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits. But ultimately, to really try to improve my life and get something a little bit more meaningful out of it. So head over to atomringler.com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email and I promise you you'll get the welcome email and you'll start receiving those monthly updates and you won't regret it. I'm not going to send you a bunch of spam messages or anything like that. I really think that you'll get

[00:37:24] A lot out of it and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence show and the question I often receive is how do I support this show? Well, we have a new way that the audience and the crowd and everybody else here can support the Decoding Excellence show. Head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash atom ringler. It's actually not buying me a coffee. I know the name sounds sort of confusing or misleading if you will. But what it is is it's a platform, sort of a crowdsourcing way of donating to the show.

[00:38:06] And the idea is that you would donate a coffee, right? $5, $4 or whatever to the Decoding Excellence show. And what we do with this is we turn the proceeds directly over to supporting the hosting of the Decoding Excellence show on whether it's on Spotify or on Simple Cast or iTunes and elsewhere. And it supports the hosting fees for our website and the Decoding Excellence show. So if you want to support the show, you can buy me a coffee. You can buy seven coffees. You buy yourself a coffee. Otherwise, please head over, check it out. It is buymeacoffee.com

[00:38:46] Forward slash atom ringler. I'll include it in the show notes. And as always, thank you for supporting the Decoding Excellence show.