If you picked up your phone to get one specific thing done, and you’ve done it, put it down.
And just stare.
It’s hard at first. The pull to open it back up is strong, to keep scrolling for one more hit. We love searching for that small comforting hit of having checked everything there is to check.
But it’s worth training ourselves to put it down.
And stare some more.
It’s amazing how many things feel better with a bit more calm, tact, and humor.
The problem is rarely the what. It’s almost always the how.
An idea that we discussed recently that stuck with me: ten extra minutes spent making sure what you send is concise and clear can save the organization two hundred minutes.
The math is simple. Send something vague or sloppy to twenty people, and each of them spends ten minutes decoding what you actually meant.
Brevity and synthesis aren’t just good writing. They’re a form of respect for everyone else’s time.
A good friend put it simply: accountability goes up, credit goes down.
When things go wrong, leaders take accountability. When things go well, credit flows down to the team.
One of the clearest signs of bad leadership is when that relationship reverses.
A friend and I were talking about organizational behavior recently, and one of her observations stuck with me. Public markets are unforgiving. When performance slips, the market notices, and that pressure, assuming reasonably mature leadership, tends to force a culture of accountability.
Take that pressure away, and the opposite tends to happen. Without real consequences for weak performance, culture drifts toward the performative. The result is inevitably more politics and more energy spent covering your ass vs. doing the work.
It reminded me of Richard Parker, the tiger in Life of Pi. Pi Patel’s fear of the tiger sharing his lifeboat is constant and real. But that same fear is also what keeps him alert, focused, and alive through an impossible ordeal.
Some fear, typically driven by dreading bad consequences, helps keeps organizations honest.
I’ve been thinking about an approach to the internet I’ve been calling hermit mode.
Social media was never a big habit for me, so cutting that wasn’t much of a difference. But I used to spend real time catching up on news, soccer especially, which has always been a weak spot for me. Over time, I pared general news down to a single AI-generated morning brief. That still left the soccer habit untouched.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve stopped that too. Now my only engagement with the internet is that morning brief and work. Nothing else. I’m learning to spend away content that is built to hold my attention.
The net result has more time for thinking, building, writing, and staring into space.
While this is still early days, I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
There’s a principle in UX design I find helpful: the fidelity of a design should match the fidelity of thought.
When you’re still exploring ideas, a low-resolution wireframe is the right tool. A polished mockup, with illustrations and finished copy comes only once the thinking is that far along. The point is to give feedback at the right level, and to set expectations for what people are actually looking at.
One problem I keep seeing with AI in writing workflows is that it breaks this principle by default. It produces polished artifacts that look far more finished than the thinking behind them actually is.
It is worth remembering this principle when we use these tools. Reach for the flashy output when your thinking has genuinely earned that fidelity.
If it hasn’t, start with a few bullets in a doc or a spreadsheet instead. That way everyone in the room knows exactly what level of discussion they’re actually having.
“Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?” | Marcellus the Octopus, Remarkably Bright Creatures
Marcellus has a collection of beautiful observations about humans in this well-told story. This was one of my favorites.
If you picked up your phone to get one specific thing done, and you’ve done it, put it down. And just let your mind wander.
It’s hard at first. The pull to open it back up is strong, to keep scrolling for one more hit, that small comforting feeling of having checked everything there is to check.
Let your mind wander instead.
There’s nothing more you will learn from picking up that phone or that next scroll.
There’s no need to give a long answer if a short one will do.
