I’ve Worn an Oura Ring for Four Years

I’ve worn an Oura Ring for four years. It’s my answer to the claim that tracking your phone usage doesn’t change your behavior.

A single day’s data point is useless. What shifted my habits was seeing my sleep every day. I wanted to protect my sleep. The feedback loop is slow, and it does shift the habit.

Have you looked at the number once and then never looked again? One look is the version that fails. The loop needs daily repetitions.

Phone time runs on that same loop. Say it reads 4 hours on Instagram. That one glimpse is useless. See it every day for seven days. Don’t judge the number. Just observe it. Daily visibility forces a conscious decision about how to spend the time. Usage comes down from there. It can happen without a cold-turkey detox.

Turn on your screen time dashboard. Observe it for seven days.

Give each device one job

Seeing the number gets you started. The device roles are how I compartmentalize work and life.

Here’s mine.

My iPad is strictly for entertainment. YouTube, Hulu, and Disney+. No email, and no work apps. I pick it up to watch something.

My phone has no email app. Slack stays so urgent communication can reach me. I check email on my computer.

My computer is the hub for email and deep work. I only process email there, at times I chose, because that’s the only place the inbox lives.

Washing the dishes, I’m with the dishes. Email waits for the computer.

Assign a single job to each of your devices. What is your iPad’s role? What is your phone’s role?

90% of a dumb phone, for free

Dumb phones are a popular trend, and they often fail on infrastructure. Charging an EV can take an app. So can a robot vacuum. So can getting into a building. For most professionals, a flip phone is an unnecessary extreme.

The goal is peace of mind. Keep the smartphone for the utility: maps, 2FA, smart home, charging an EV, building access. Strip off the distraction layer, which is social media, email, and news apps.

Three lower-friction alternatives get about 90% of the same result.

Put your phone in a different room while you work. You add friction. Want the phone, and you have to walk to another room to get it.

Delete the non-essential apps. Make the phone a basic communication tool: calls, texts, and maps. Keep what you need for 2FA, the EV, and the door. Audit the other apps. Does this app help you charge your car or open your door? If it doesn’t, delete it.

Minimize notifications aggressively. Keep the urgent ones. Cut the rest.

Try these three free tweaks before you buy a new phone to fix your focus.

What is your team incentivized to do?

Now the work side. This next part is Brooks.

Brooks puts it in one line. Look at the incentive, and you can predict the outcome.

He applies that to performative productivity in large tech companies like Google. Managers get promoted based on headcount. They collect employees like Pokemon cards, then keep them busy with low-impact projects to justify their existence. The culture that follows is BS jobs. People are paid to show up rather than create value.

I buy his read. It explains why productivity advice often fails in big companies. If looking busy is the incentive, looking busy is the outcome.

What is your team incentivized to do? If the answer is “look busy,” you have a structural problem.

Are you paying for tools or outcomes?

Brooks has a second point about the software itself.

In the SaaS model, you buy a license and you do the work to get an outcome. He’s watching a shift he calls Software Provides a Service. The software provides the finished outcome directly.

His example is a podcast. Instead of spending hours editing in an audio tool, you dump the raw file into an AI app. It returns the fully edited, formatted, and transcribed podcast in seconds.

He calls that a shift in value, from tool access to outcome delivery.

Are you paying for tools or outcomes? Audit your software stack for this shift.

People are already using AI without realizing it. Descript is the example I come back to. It removes filler words automatically in a podcast edit.

I see 2024 as the year AI becomes invisible and ubiquitous. If you are not using these tools yet, you are still very early. The learning curve is flattening fast. Spend 60 minutes this week studying one of them, or watching videos, until you have a baseline. You might be further along than you think.

Brooks and I talked about AI telling us what to do. Workers could receive instructions from AI systems, similar to warehouse workers following prompts from an app. For knowledge workers, that could mean an AI analyzing internal data, the CRM, the wiki, and the sales records, then suggesting quarterly goals or a strategic direction.

That could eliminate the Hippo bias. Hippo is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Strategy meetings could get more data-driven and more efficient.

Imagine an AI that knows your company’s internal data. How would it change your next planning meeting?

Tonight, turn on your screen time dashboard. Don’t judge the number. Just observe it for seven days.