Make Time #2

By Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Lessons #2

“Infinity Pools”

In addition to the “Busy Bandwagon” there are what are called “Infinity Pools”. As described in the book, these are apps and other sources of endless interesting content. In conjuction with the “Busy Bandwagon” the “Infinity Pools” also take up a large amount of your time.

If you can pull or slide or tap to refresh its an “Infinity Pool”. Examples of “Infinity Pools” include facebook, youtube, snapchat, tiktok…e.t.c “Infinity Pools” are way more dangerous in the sense that they take up a large amount of your time and you mostly gain nothing of value.

You keep scrolling and scrolling , tapping, refreshing as the content gets more and more interesting until the day ends and you realise you didn’t do the things you actually wanted to do that particular day.

For most of us this happens by default, you unlock your phone, open facebook, you start scrolling and refreshing as more interesting content pops up in which to a larger extent you are not gaining anything of value.

So to combat these time wasters you need to change these defaults. Don’t get me wrong these apps are not all bad as they are also tools for communication and gaining knowledge, but more often than not due to our default settings we tend to spend way too much time on these apps, dwelling on content that has no value.

There are many ways to change these defaults, but let me share with you one way which is effective which l learned from the book.

In everything we do there is what can be called as activation energy. This is the minimum amount of energy that we need to be able to do anything. Every activity that you do requires a certain amount of activation energy. Some activities require more activation energy than others.

Think of it this way, lets say you want to do something important like studying, but due to your default settings you also want to watch TV. Since watching TV is more fun and interesting than studying its easier for you to watch TV rather than study and you are more likely to watch TV.

So in this context watching TV has a lower amount of activation energy than studying therefore you are more likely to watch TV than study. This means that everyone is more likely to do something that has a lower amount of activation energy than that which has a higher amount.

So in this context if you want to make sure that you are more likely to study than watch TV ,you need to increase the activation energy of watching TV and decrease the activation energy of studying, that is you should make watching TV more difficult to do than studying.

For example to make watching TV more difficult to do you may; hide the remote somewhere that is not easily reachable, remove the remote batteries and put them somewhere which is difficult to reach…e.t.c and to make studying less difficult to do , you remove obsticles by; putting your study material somewhere in the open which is easily reachable, putting your study material very near to you in the open when you sleep such that when you wake up that is the first thing you see…e.t.c

Now you know what activation energy is, you need to apply this same concept to “Infinity Pools”. All you need to do is just make the apps harder to reach such that you can only open these apps when you really need to. One way of doing this is by uninstalling or disabling these apps such that you can only access them through your internet browser.

After you have done this the next time you want to access these apps you have to firstly open your browser, secondly type in the web address and then finally login. As you can see accessing these apps is no longer just unlocking your phone and accessing them, but there are now three more steps which increases the activation energy needed for you to open these apps.

You should also note that this concept of infinity pools can also be applied in many other fields, tasks, goals and activities.

Thank you guys for tuning in, hope you learnt something from this article.

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Goodbye have a nice day and a peaceful night.🙂