On a recent Sunday I drove my son to a strength and conditioning session. The gym is 5 minutes from our house and as we got into the car, he got on his phone to watch YouTube as is his habit.
My instinct was to snap, “Get off your phone!” But I know how ineffective that is. Instead, I said “I know it’s not going to work if I tell you to get off your phone. Just pay attention to people you see on their phones all the time, and see what you notice.”
But this story isn’t about my son or parenting in 2025. It’s about me and what happened next.
His training session is about an hour long and I usually stay and watch. There’s a bunch of kids at the gym on different programs, and sometimes I get ideas for exercises to try. I had my phone and AirPods on me, a podcast to finish, and FPL scores to monitor.
But having just had this conversation in the car, I decided to sit there for an hour and not look at my phone at all.
Was it boring? Yeah, a bit. Did I want to look at my phone? A ton. There were many times I felt the itch to pull out my phone.
What I also noticed is that I came up with 3-5 different ideas. Faced with boredom and space, my mind wandered and went to work.
I came up with an idea for a LinkedIn post, how to re-use content for my newsletter, what to do with my (very inactive) newsletter, how to follow up with a previous client for a testimonial, and questions for my wife about our real estate business. And I came up with the idea for this blog post.
These are just the ones I remember. Will I act on all these ideas? Probably not. Were they all great? Nope. Would I have had these same ideas if I had listened to my podcast and followed my FPL team? Maybe.
It’s hard to know, but it feels like I was more creative. We’re always under pressure (often from ourselves) to be productive. I encourage you to play with creating space and doing nothing. See what happens and what you notice. The results may surprise you.
Additional reading
If you’re interested in topics such as creating space, mindfulness, attention, and impact of digital devices, here are a few books to check out:
- Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
- Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, explores what he calls slow productivity. Measuring cognitive work is difficult, and we often use activity as a proxy, but activity does not equal productivity. He argues for the benefits of slow productivity:
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
- Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, explores what he calls slow productivity. Measuring cognitive work is difficult, and we often use activity as a proxy, but activity does not equal productivity. He argues for the benefits of slow productivity:
- Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity
- This book explores the research on attention and the implications. One big take-away is that attention is a limited resource and sustained focus for the entire day shouldn’t be the goal.
- The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
- Jonathan Haidt is very pessimistic on the impact of technology on children. While the target audience for this book is parents and policy makers, it’s easy to connect the dots on the influence of technology on adults.
- How to Get Away: Finding Balance in Our Overworked, Overcrowded, Always-On World
- I found this book while staying at a Getaway cabin (now Postcard Cabins). The idea of a digital detox and other strategies for living in our always-on world resonated.
- Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing
- It can be useful to think of wellbeing as a practice, and another word for the practice in the story above is presence. This is one of the 9 wellbeing practices explored in this book.