Roadman, today I want to talk to you about why you should declutter…
Roadman, today I want to talk to you about why you should declutter your mobile phone. Let's cure that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our long changes? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back to another Roadman, Cycling Podcast. That intro takes all the air on my lungs. It's that big deep. Welcome back. It sounds and just kills me. I heard Miley Cyrus was on the Joe Rogan podcast a couple of months ago. It's an interesting listen. It definitely gave me a different perspective about Miley. She is definitely not just a stuffed dress. She has a lot to say for herself. Super interesting girl. But one of the things she was talking about is that your voice has a health to it and like a muscle it can get overused and you need to treat it well. So maybe with that in mind that crazy oxygen deprived intro might be setting my podcast and career back. And on podcasting career I won't have a podcasting career if you don't head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch that's the place you can buy me a price of a beer once a month to keep my podcast and career on track, to give me time to destroy my voice. Dig deep or else I'm not going to get this voice fucked up. Well, man, today I want to talk to you about why you need to declutter your mobile phone. And I've often mentioned this on the podcast that I have these borderline schizophrenic moments where my mobile phone is on the mantelpiece and I'm on the couch and it beeps and I jump up to it and then I stop and I pause and I reflect and I think I wonder what the dog thinks of that action. Does the dog think the mobile phone controls me? So the mobile phone is the master and I'm subservient to the mobile phone. So for that reason and a lot of other reasons I've decided to make some amendments to my mobile phone. I've actually been on a process of doing this for probably over a year but you could just take all my recommendations and blanket do it in one single day and you would have saved yourself a year of my kind of experiment and toiling back and forth. Suppose why would you want a declutter? Your phone at all is an interesting place to get started. For me it's just a distraction piece. The mobile phone is the number one distraction. I even have a little top-aware safe with a lock timer on it so I don't pick my mobile phone up. And it's becoming intentional with my phone use. I was out of meat in a couple of years ago and an elderly guy, not super elderly, 70s, 70s, the new 50s, about 70, but he's a really successful businessman and my buddy's phone rang and he immediately went to grab the phone and the meat and had finished so it wasn't But he said to him, you know, it's your phone. You get to choose when you answer.
Somebody gets to ring you and then you get to choose if it's a…
Somebody gets to ring you and then you get to choose if it's a convenient time to speak. You don't have to answer it every single time it rings. And that sent me on a journey of going, Oh, this is my phone. I get to choose my relationship with it. I don't have to use email just because they've decided to put an email app on my phone. So that's my force recommendation. Delete email from your phone, like delete the Gmail app. You can always re-add this if you're going away. I know people hide behind this and go, it's really handy if you're on the road. It takes like four seconds to go into the play store and re-add this. People don't expect an immediate response to an email. It's not quite like a letter and it's not quite like a text message. It sits somewhere in the middle. If someone sends you a text message and you're on a There's a little bit of an expectation that you're right back fast enough. If you poke somebody a letter, there's not an expectation that you get a response for weeks. Email sits somewhere in the middle. If you send me an email, you don't expect to get an instant reply. You're happy enough to get a reply in a couple of days, so we don't need immediate access to this. We can jump on the computer later on that day or batch them once a week and get to all our emails. Plus, nobody likes getting a response from somebody who's typing on their phone. The responses are brief, they're literal grammar mistakes, and often the intonation and the subtleties of writing and the style that goes with that are just lost when we're typing with toms. I've even seen people like putting a little addendum on the end, excuse grammar mistakes, typed with toms. Like fuck off, just don't type it with your toms, you lazy bastard. Right, so the next recommendation is to turn off notifications, turn off notifications across Everything I have no notifications on my phone. I'm talking the phone doesn't ring the phone doesn't beep The for nothing it's a box unless I choose to engage with it. It does not beep Now you can go one step From this and you can put on priority notifications that your parents can get through to you Your wife or husband their girlfriend a boyfriend can get through to your children get through to you But I don't have anything on if someone calls me They know I'll call them back at a time that suits me if someone calls me two three times I see two treatments calls. I know I need to get back to that straight away But in general my phone just doesn't beep because I never have it on also Nestle your apps on the second page keep the useful apps that you engage with on page one of the phone and Then not so useful apps on the second page of the phone because just just that extra layer of friction And when you have to scroll across the second page and then during a folder and the folder is labeled, time wasting and you have your apps inside a folder, it's called time wasting, you're less likely to scroll to page two, click into a folder with a negative disclaimer that says time wasting and actually go in and waste time on that app.
It's just setting up that little layer of friction works super well
It's just setting up that little layer of friction works super well. Also I've deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all from my mobile phone. If I want to access them on my mobile phone, like I spoke about in the previous podcast because I'm sitting on the shitter and I want something to do, great book, Twitter on the shitter. Interesting read. That's a tangent. But if I want to log in to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I'll log in through my browser. I'll open Chrome, go to www.tweater.com, I'll put in my username, I'll put in my password and I'll log in. 99% of the time, that layer of friction of having the gold area put in my username, put in my password, which I forget nine times out of 10. That's enough to stop me engaging and interacting on those time wasting apps. And finally, don't use your phone as you're an alarm clock in the morning. Get an old school alarm clock. The worst thing you can do, and I've talked about this time and time again on morning routines, you pick up your phone straight away and what do you do? Oh, I've got a notification. Oh, look, someone tagged me in this bullshit on Instagram, on Facebook, and then you're deep into it and you're in this. Like, we talked about it around another podcast this week, this spoil and negativity again, caught commenting on people, shit, on social media that you can't control and get your waste and your time and your energy. And don't forget, time and energy, it's not just all the same. We have deeper levels of focus and first thing in the morning, we're super focused, we're using that freshness. And we're giving that to social media, first thing in the morning, it's toxic and it's bullshit. And if you implement these things, delete your email, turn it off your phone notifications, nest your apps, delete social media platforms from your phone, and don't use your phone as an alarm clock, it's a great, great start to decloach your phone and living with a little less distraction in your life. Roadman, thanks for listening to my rants on this, another Roadman Bites short-form podcast. Hey everybody, it's Anthony again. Really quick, I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14-day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you the leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans regardless of what your level is. There's the master's beginner, advanced. There's meal plans shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmancycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmancycling.com slash 14 day.