61–70 of 236 posts
Get rid of all the apps where you consume content, except for maybe an eBook reading app. Reading books is still good. Fill your devices only with apps that allow you to create content. Don't even worry about sharing the content. Just get apps that let you create. Photography, video, code, drawing, writing, music, whatever.
Even dumping my thoughts into a note-taking app(I use Roam) helps me a lot.
Podcasts: People like Sean Carroll, Dan Carlin, and Sam Harris are regularly having amazing public conversations and interviewing amazing people. There's also some funny podcasts like Conan O'Briens or David Spade/Dana Carvey's.
I find listening to good content more exciting, fulfilling, and relaxing than any other form of brain stimulation.
I have found Headspace very useful for learning how to practice mindfulness and meditation. It’s very easy to get started with. https://www.headspace.com/
1: https://www.oakmeditation.com/ 2: https://www.oakmeditation.com/privacy-policy
Sorry if this sounds blunt but the question is a bit like "what's the least harmful kind of crack I can get to improve my health?" From the way it's phrased it sounds like you're struggling with mental health and excessive phone/devise usage. The two issues might be related, my advice would be no app.
I’ve been stuck in bed due to medical stuff quite a bit over the last year. My iPhone has essentially preserved my sanity. Like any powerful tool, the user can can choose to make it good or bad. I learned quite a bit about music theory and writing music over the last year. The iOS music ecosystem is fantastic and affordable. I’ve been drawing in procreate on my iPad for several years but this also helped pass the hou…
Disable notifications. ALL notifications (barring - maybe - email and IM), including the little red counters on the icons. Move all non-essential apps off of the front page (perhaps even off of a "page" entirely).
This does wonders for making using a phone a pleasant experience. The "engagement" apps no longer have automated hooks into your attention - it lets you dive into them as you want to, not as they want you to.
I can go entire days forgetting that Facebook and Twitter are even a thing, since the lack of icons fools my dopamine circuits into believing that there's nothing new that requires my attention (which, mild entertainment from doomscrolling aside, is generally the truth). It makes it easy to pick a book or puzzle game instead.
Extremely unpopular opinion from a software engineer on a tech forum but: mental health is as far away from the Internet as possible. The more you can integrate the slower pace of nature and natural life, the better your mental health. Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by. Still struggling with this, but my long term life goal is livi…
> waiting for a deer to pass by We don't know everything about the era that shaped our bodies, there are a few contradicting narratives: One being that we were mainly scavengers during the time that our brains grew to this size, especially savoring the marrow of the large bones of the large animals that used to roam the earth before we finished them off and had to look for other sources of highly nutritious foodstuff…
They didn't have to pay taxes!
(this is a joke)
* remove All notifications from non-message & Calendar apps.
* condition everyone around you that you might not reply messages in time. (crucial to make above work) and ofc you have to follow that too.
* (if you have the financial means) get another device without ANY distraction what so ever, ideally disconnected from the internet (except maybe syncing files) For me it is a e-ink (android) tablet.
>I’m looking for some apps that people use and get genuine value out of. Can I learn something while I’m bored on the couch?
For me it's not about finding some app that helps me with this; I already have a backlog (bookmarks, pdf, tutorials) of stuff I genuinely want to consume yet I end up always scouring for new content, even with the gigantic backlog.
There's rarely any lack of quantity in content these days, quality maybe, but that's the fallacy that lead us to look for more/newer content rather than consuming the ones we've already identified.
So having a dedicated device for "consuming backlog" and minimizing adding more stuff to it have been a good change.
In the last few months I have aggressively reduced my time online and replaced it with reading books of all sorts.
Part of this was a deliberate attempt to ween myself off an increasingly toxic online world. But the other part was that for learning technical topics the web has become a heaping pile of garbage. It used to be you could find some great insights on even advanced subjects, but now searching a topic make it more likely for me to find incorrect insights.
So my advice is: If there's a topic you like chatting about online, order some books on that subject. If you want to relax, start reading more fiction. And aggressively start building out a library of technical/text books (used is pretty cheap), so that you can start browsing your own "web" of useful content instead of content marketing created trash.
You can read on the toilet, that's what people used to do back in the 90s and before!
Google Maps, Waze, LinkedIn, Reddit, a monitoring app for my car and Edge browser. Reddit isn't used frequently.