“Now, this might seem inefficient, and first it slowed me down. But that’s exactly the point. Now when I pick up my phone, I see essentially a blank slate. This means that instead of seeing a bunch of triggers for distractions, I wind up pausing for a moment to think about what I’m doing. Often I lock my phone again and set it back down, realizing that I was just in an avoidant state or trying to distract myself from what I really want to be doing. I try to keep a limited set of useful apps on my devices, and use the built-in apps to the extent that they do what I need them to do. And in the end, I think the slight delay in typing the app name I’m looking for is balanced out by the time I save not mindlessly scrolling through my apps.” Cody De Haan
![](http://daily.stillweb.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/10/iphone.jpeg)
Today, can you set up your devices as Cody suggests in his blog post? Can you plan in inefficiency to enable intentional pausing in your workflow? HT @johnjohnston for suggesting that ‘clunky-ness’ in the use of a device can offer unexpected insights – like a moment to pause and take a breath in a busy day.
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This Daily Stillness has been recycled from previously published ones:
• #tds832 Inefficiency was exactly the point (Oct 9, 2017)
• #tds971 Inefficiency was exactly the point (Feb 25, 2018)
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