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I hate how much of my life is sucked up by my phone.

I've tried many times in the past to decentralise my phone in my life, but I've yet to be successful. I think the reason why is that I didn't swap it out with another dopamine-triggering activity.

So recently I had the idea to gamify the tasks I'd prefer to spend my time doing. You know, the things that would actually enrich my life.

I dabbled in using Habitica for this, over a decade ago now, but I think it didn't work for me because 1. I couldn't customise my character enough to feel attached to it, and 2. the 'reward' aspect didn't extend outside of the website so it was easy to lose interest and therefore motivation.

So this time I'm trying out a Notion template instead. It lets you earn XP points to level up and 'coins' to spend on real-world rewards. I just finished setting it up today and will see if it helps - fingers crossed!

Over the past couple of years, a lot of the shows and movies I've been watching have been from the 90s and 00s. I'm not entirely sure why - originally I thought it was just nostalgia - but now I'm wondering if it's because they're from a time before smartphones. People's lives were (or at least seemed) more interesting and varied. There was time and space to get bored, leading to motivation to do something, anything, to escape the boredom.

I remember those days. (I didn't get my first smartphone until I was 21.) I guesss I'm trying to get that feeling back. And I don't think I can do it while I still carry a tiny computer with me everywhere.