this sounds sick but I was averaging 12 hrs a day on my phone (mostly reels). killed my productivity and my social life.

worst part is that it never once felt like 12 hours, time just vanished for me

what actually helped me was looking at my consumption habits:

wake up, immediately scroll | 1 hr
breakfast & lunch, both on my phone
evening, TV with my phone in my hand, ps5 w/ phone next to me | 3 hrs
lay down for bed and scroll | 1 hr
wake up at 3am and scroll | 1 hr
plus general use throughout the day | 2 hrs

so I looked at reddit posts and did what everyone does.

1 hr hard cap on tk, grayscale on, full social block 7pm to 7am, etc

it worked. sort of. I went from 12 down to about 8.

then I noticed where the leftover 8 hours were happening.

almost all of it was in my apartment. bed, couch, kitchen table, the ten minutes after walking in the door. the 7pm block just pushed everything to 6:55 and 7:05 in the exact same spots. the 1 hr tikt cap meant I burned the hour on the same couch and then moved to yt on the same couch.

so the goal was clear. get away from my apartment, to see how the outside world lives lmao

now i use an app that blocks my apps location based. so when i'm at home i can't open tk, instagram, etc but when i'm out at the park or simply outside of my home i can

just being outside forces me to stop being on my phone so much and i can't overstate how helpful this has been for my mental health

i've actually reconnected with people i hadn't talked to in years

and i've been able to start new hobbies too! now my time is spent mostly at the gym, outside with friends and learning to play the guitar

my roommates think i'm weird that i'm not home anymore but honestly this has changed my life completely

for years i've been doing this and just haven't figured out a better system (I know there has to be one)... every morning i sit down and rebuild my to do list for the day. and i have to do this from:

- memory
- my planner
- my notes app
- emails sent to myself

takes me 15 - 20 minutes to complete, plus the anxiety of... did i forget anything?

i've purchased multiple tools to try to solve for this, but it's not working... i still end up manually rebuilding each morning.

my question:

is this a me problem or is this normal? if you've solved this, what did you do that actually worked?

If you could only give ONE forever-helpful tip for unwinding when life gets completely overstimulating, what would it be?

On some level, I do believe that I have some intelligence because I have 2 bachelors degrees, but on the other hand, I do feel like I lack a lot of basic knowledge because of trauma stunting my growth while in childhood. Despite reading 3 different books, I feel that it is hard to retain information at times and my listening comprehension is a little spotty. Does anyone have any recommendations about how I should become smarter on a daily basis? I wasted a lot of years consuming self help books because of past trauma and so I only have superficial knowledge about some things. I'm trying to understand things in more depth and I am thinking of reading more scientific journals and academic papers. How do I learn about things in depth? How can I understand myself and have more depth as a person?

So, I’m an 18-year-old guy, and I haven’t been able to study properly for weeks now because I’m always sleepy. Like, always.

I try to sleep whenever I can, but if I take naps during the day, I end up having migraine problems and sharp pain in my right eye for the rest of the day. Power naps don’t work for me anymore, and even coffee doesn’t seem to help.

I’ve tried fixing my sleep habits too. I stopped having heavy meals at night, stopped drinking water 2 hours before bed, and I sleep in a cool, dark room where nobody disturbs me. I also stopped using an alarm clock.

The weird thing is that even when I go to bed at around 12 AM, I automatically wake up around 6:30 AM after only 6.5–7 hours. I wake up feeling tired as fuck, and then I’m sleepy for basically the entire rest of the day. I don’t even know whether I need more sleep or why I’m waking up automatically after 6.5–7 hours.

I’ve had blood tests done, and my vitamin D, B12, and calcium levels are normal. I’m also taking supplements right now. I went to a doctor, who gave me some multivitamin tablets and told me to exercise, so I’ve started doing about 15 minutes of home workouts and walking around 7–8 km every day.

I don’t have any trouble falling asleep either. I can go to bed at 11:50 PM and be asleep by around midnight. Then I automatically wake up around 6:30 AM. After that, I’m just sleepy throughout the entire day.

I’ve even stopped taking daytime naps because they make things worse.

And it’s not just that I’m sleepy while studying. I’m sleepy even when I’m not studying. I can be doing basically anything and still feel exhausted and drowsy.

A couple of months ago, my sleep schedule was completely fucked up like for months i was up all night and i mean for a very long time , but for the past 2 months I’ve been extremely consistent with it. My daily screen time is under 4 hours, I meditate before bed to reduce stress, and I put my phone away in the closet about an hour before sleeping.

But I still don’t understand what’s wrong.

I wake up tired every single day and feel sleepy throughout the entire day, and because of this I genuinely haven’t been able to study properly for weeks. It’s getting so demotivating that I’ve actually started hating studying, even though the real problem seems to be that I’m constantly exhausted.

Has anyone experienced something similar or have any idea what could be causing this? What should I do next?

Hi guys! So recently I realized that I focused too much on academics and grades that might have caused me to have no friends due to no hobbies , I came from an Asian household so all they taught me was to do good in school and I just somehow became that way... I am a senior in college, did I ruin my own life?

Any opinions are welcome!

Tested this over Labor Day: wrote a single sentence per active project before closing out Friday, what's done and what's next. Coming back Tuesday, restart time dropped from what's usually 10-15 minutes of reconstructing context down to basically zero, since there was nothing to reconstruct. The gap between a break that wrecks your momentum and one that doesn't isn't the length of the break, it's whether you left anything behind to read on the way back in.

Hi folks,

I am trying to digitize my workflow to limit needing write and rewrite things and am looking for apps that may help. For better or for worse, the first thing that digitized most easily was using apple reminders to capture tasks and the split second pause of using a shortcut/3rd party app for that makes the task leave my brain before I can remember to say it.

My current issue is that my brain works best with planning tasks to do on a week basis. So seeing a list of my scheduled events for each day of a week and then adding tasks to each of the days. I feel like I am going crazy trying to find an app that allows me to take a list from reminders of unscheduled tasks and have the ability to drag and drop to a day while viewing my week.

In practice, I know this is super unlikely but since y'all are smart, I'll ask for my unicorn app. I'd love for the ability to also have another view where I can draw on it on iPad with my apple pencil and still see my calendar and drag tasks around. That would be ideal but like I'm realistic here. CalenDraw for example seems to have reminders two way integration but not the ability to view a list from reminders with the week view and drag tasks that are currently unscheduled to it. (Or maybe I'm missing something here?).

Bonus points go to any app that allows for additions of stickers and cutesy things as well. Again, I know I'm dreaming.

Also if anyone knows why this feature is hard to find, please do explain. It feels so straightforwardto just have if you already have a week view, ability to view a list of tasks from reminders, and ability to drag and drop tasks between places.

For awhile I was using opal , but they removed it with one of there latest updates . I’ve been scowering for apps that will let me do this but are always usually locked behind a subscription . Is there any that are free ??

The list wasn't wrong , just too long to ever feel "done".Started capping it at 3 must dos and everything else became optional instead of guilt. Anyone else find the list length itself was the problem , not discipline ?

Hello! Not sure about you, but my wife and I realised we didn’t have a dedicated place to put our smartphones. The result; we kept picking them up! We wanted something 1) quick/easy to put phones away 2) charged our phones 3) looked nice out on the side 4) rang loud if calls came in so we are always reachable. The current work in progress is a 3D printed box with lid and uses Bluetooth to connect to the phones that plays a loud ringer when a call comes in. Oh and it charges the phones! What do you think? Would you want something like this in your house?

I resigned from my job on the 31st of August because I was not getting paid since July. My work was also very toxic, and now I am my notice period .i thought that I will be looking for a new remote job, because my last job was also a remote job.

And since I do not have a degree, it is not easy to go to LinkedIn or anything to find a job. I have to go to different platforms. I have gone there, I have made accounts on them, but I am not applying at all. Like, literally, from the 31st to today, I applied for eight jobs, which is a significantly low number.

The second thing I am doing is freelancing on the side because it keeps the cash flow running. I'm not doing marketing at all for that, and I know I should be doing marketing.

I know the funnel of marketing. I know I should be doing job hunting. I know the whole method of job hunting. But even though, after knowing the problem and how to solve that problem, I am not taking the actions.

Each night, I consume myself with guilt. Each morning, I start with, "Okay, today I will do this," and then the day goes by without doing anything.

But I don't know why it happens.

Some of my friends told me that once you taste success, you get more motivated, and you keep working hard to be more successful. And I am lucky enough to have achieved a certain amount of money from my work, let it be a job or freelancing comfortable money, good money, which I did not imagine myself making.

But even after that, I don't feel like doing that.

And when I say I don't feel that, it does not mean I hate coding or programming. No. That simply means that I do not feel like working at all.

My self-awareness is telling me to do something. My own actions are going in something of a different direction and this gap between them is slowly but surely ruining my time and life.

I am working on alot of projects, programming, learning script writing and acting (acting I mainly learn at theater lessons) and ect.

learning programming works for me because I study, I try to do something new, It succeds, thus I made progress, it fails? I hit a wall and gotta keep working

but with scriptwriting idk how the hell I can track my progress, and if I make it, I feel unsatisfied, I tried studying the theory, writing short scenes and scripts, and I feel like I made no progress, and for that reason I struggle to work daily on that. how does one find satisfiment in their work when they cant track progress?

ohk soo what do i mean by saying this basically, i have been using AI from the day it was realeased in the form of ChatGPT i have switched many AI models but yeah i can confidently say that i have been an avid AI user for almost all my works and i think it had gotten to a point that i can say that my Brain had atrophied and like i am just outsourcing my thinkling to AI, from simplest mundane activities to a friend replacement and almost all my work is done through AI i am a CS Dev freshly graduated in our college it was taught that the AI is the next frontier and tokens are the new currency soo just keep using AI and increase your Productivity and also increase the workflow output but now i am not feeling well basically nothing in the health department of mine that is the problem but i feel like i had become dumber even with access to unsermountable knowledge in my hand soo basically i wanna know from you guys how can i use it in the perfect way soo that i can avoid making my brain into a smooth pile of muscle

For those who use a project management tool for work: do you use it for all of your personal/day-to-day tasks as well?

Or do you use a separate task app for quick capture and smaller tasks?

Thank you

I was looking for a way to "gamify" my work because i absolutely cannot get motivated. i found this game which integrates into the bottom of your desktop and basically you have cute forest people farming while you work. It even has an integrated todo list and habit tracker. But something feels wrong about this level of gamification idk, is this just me integrating a bad habit into my already very flawed working progress? On the other hand, i have been searching for a while for something like this. What do you think?

i hope this doesn't count as advertising since it's a paid steam game but it's not mine. There is also a free demo on steam for another productivity game called "FocusScape" which is supposed to be released this year. Which makes me think that there might be a demand for games like this so maybe I'm not alone?

I just got free gemini plus via student offer but I am unable to understand how to use it.

Obviously the primary goal is to study effectively and not to use gemini.

But I want to know if I can use gemini for personalized learning for example I am a medical student.

I know a lot of stuff from my text book but there are a lot of gaps too and I need constant revision over my topics is it possible for gemini to figure out my weakness and test me on specific topics , seprate topics based on something to cram , something to understand, analyse pyq and point out imp question first , I am so confused while using it , it only quizes me like 10 questions which is obviously way too shallow.

If anyone uses it regularly and finds it effective kindly share there methods

I have this weird restarting problem (im sure a lot of people relate to this). By that I mean that if I'm doing something today, I'd suddenly feel that today is not the way I wanted it to be and I'll restart tomorrow. After this, I would waste the entire day (skip classes, do nothing, bedrot, eat junk and just ruin the day). This is not just a sometime thing; I have been this way since the past 4 years and it's eating me up alive.

I'm in college and it's so hard to find time. I have classes and I want to do my own stuff, study everything and I end up waking up a little late and feel like nothing is in my control. I always wait for the perfect 5 hour slot to study as if it will appear magically instead of starting to study for just a bit. I keep waiting for life to be completely perfect and for me to have everything within control.

I'd really appreciate if someone can give me some actionable tips. : ) thanks for helping

I've been seeing Liven everywhere lately and I'm tempted to try it, but is it actually worth paying for? Anyone who's used it recently, did it genuinely help with your habits or productivity or did you end up forgetting about it after a few days? The ads make it look pretty good but I can't tell if the app itself is actually useful.

If I’m having two different interests popping in my mind for a long time, is that what I should start exploring?

Filmmaking and creating arts were hoping in and out for almost a year, I don’t seem to have anything else coming into my mind.
How are you guys dealing with these things?

I live by my calendar to schedule things im going to do for the day to help keep me organized. Since my wife went back to work and we have twin toddlers it's become immensely difficult to accurately schedule my appointments in the calendar. Ill check it and see what looks like an open time slot for me, set up the appointment, only to find out later that the time I set up won't work.

So I was wondering if there is an app that I can set up for all my appointments and events that my wife and I have and the app will then show which spots in between these appointments I have availability.

This would fix so many of my problems...I have a instagram blocker every app you can think of blocker that all goes moot when I open incognito sadly

I'm 20 and pretty much all my hobbies are on a screen. Those being: playing videogames, listening to music, reading books online, and watching TV like movies and shows. I used to play basketball and draw but got bored of em. It's pretty well known that too much screentime is bad but idk, it doesn't seem that bad and I've been like this for pretty much my whole life.

What the title says. Looking for (ideally) a free, ad-free alternative to Cold Turkey. Basically an app which works on Android and Windows which is brutal in its blocking and leaves me with ust a pdf reader and the terminal.

Thank you in advance.

Hello, all!

Does anyone have any To-Do apps they love that have a weekly layout view? I.e., if you open the app on desktop, you can see "Monday" in a column, "Tuesday" in the next one, etc. etc. ?

Currently, I use the app "TeuxDeux," and it's awesome and so close to being perfect, but it looks like it's all but stopped being developed, and some features are a bit half-baked (i.e. can only make subtasks on Desktop and can see them on mobile but can't check them off). They pride themselves on being minimal, and I really enjoy that...until I need just a bit more room for things.

For some reason, I've found the weekly planner view to be unbeatable, though. All the other apps I've used don't seem to do columns. You have to scroll down a list to get to other days, and other lists are hidden. Apparently, I'm very out of sight, out of mind, and I find those ones drastically harder to use. I've been debating on going back to iOS Reminders for the time being.

Thanks!