It’s there: in your pocket. On the desk. In the cup holder of the car.

You want to use it. Just grab it and alleviate the boredom or discomfort. Might as well check the headlines instead of struggling to type words on a blank screen. And why stay in this tense argument with your spouse when you can see what’s new on Instagram? “Hey, sorry buddy, I can’t play dinosaurs right now — I have to answer this email.”

That’s what our phones have become. An instant escape, and a constant burden. I remember when I got my first BlackBerry. It was an exciting and surprisingly moving moment. Not because of the technology, but because of what it meant: Someone at my job thought I was important enough to need one of these.

Over the years, though, that pride has worn off. My phone, once a source of liberation — I could check my email without having to go home, which meant I could spend more time out doing things — eventually became a weight that tied me down. Instead of making me better at my job, it started preventing what Cal Newport calls “deep work” — focused, dedicated, creative time. Instead of helping me have fun, it was making me miserable.

So recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use it less. About how to get the benefits from the technology without all the downsides.

If that’s what you’re looking for, too, these strategies might help you. Some of them are easy. Others are tougher, and you’ll probably think some of them are nuts. Maybe they are. But they work.

Turn off all alerts

My lock screen is almost always blank. It’s not because nothing is happening or nobody needs me. It’s because I went into the general settings on my phone and turned off all alerts by default, with the exception of texts and alarms for literal emergencies. (In Texas, we have flash floods and tornadoes.) Even once I unlock my phone, I don’t see any red circles showing me how many messages or notifications I have. I don’t need Strava to tell me I need to check Strava. I definitely don’t allow anything to make noise or buzz me. (I turned off vibrate for texts as well.) No alerts means fewer things to check and a lot less FOMO.

Decide how you’re going to be reachable

One of the best decisions I made a few years ago was to limit how people can get in touch with me. Some people have email, text, phone calls, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger, Twitter and Instagram DMs, LinkedIn messages, Slack, Telegram, and God knows what else. No wonder they’re overwhelmed.

I basically limit myself to three: You can text, email, or call me. Email is day-to-day work stuff, texts are for friends and family, and when my phone rings, it’s usually something important from either one of those groups. I no longer feel the need to check 20 different apps and inboxes 50 times a day, because I know everything that actually matters will come in through one of those three channels.

Sleep with your phone in the other room

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska is known for giving his young staffers old-school alarm clocks — not because he wants to make sure they’re on time for work, but so they don’t have an excuse to sleep with their phone on the nightstand. If you have an alarm that’s not your clock app, your phone can go in the other room, and if your phone is in the other room, you can’t check it at night.

This means you won’t know if you get a text message or an email. It means you won’t be tempted to scroll through social. It means you’ll have to lie there with your own thoughts, read a book, or maybe even go to sleep at a reasonable time.

Start phone-free mornings

About six months ago, I was invited to a challenge on the habit-building app Spar to not touch my phone for at least 10 minutes after I woke up. I’d been sleeping with it in the other room for years, but I still usually grabbed it first thing in the morning.

The challenge came with a powerful incentive — each time I failed, I’d have to pay $10. But the real draw was that it meant I could focus on being present with my son in my first waking moments. Soon, I started challenging myself to stretch 10 minutes into 30, then 45, then an hour. Now some mornings, if I am writing, I might not touch my phone until lunch. On those days, I’m happier and more productive.

Get a smartwatch

I’m not a big fan of the “solve a device problem with another device” logic, but in this case, it’s really worked. Having a watch that connects to my phone — but that I don’t use as a phone — has substantially reduced the amount of time I spend on my phone, and helped me curb the desire to always have it near me. The only alerts I allow on my watch are calendar reminders and phone calls, which keeps me at least somewhat tethered to my work life. I can reject calls from my wrist, too, without having to go into my pocket.

Get AirPods, too

Not having a physical cord tethering me to my phone makes a huge difference. I want to listen to music. I don’t want to be tempted by my email. I want to talk to this person on the phone. I don’t want to be scrolling at the same time.

Get rid of social apps

I am old enough to remember the days when you checked Facebook and Twitter on your computer instead of carrying the apps around on your body 24 hours a day. That world was slightly less awful than the one we’re in today. Twitter used to be fun. Facebook used to have photos of people’s lunches. Now they’re both filled with constant arguing.

The decision to remove social media from my phone radically reduced the role these apps played in my life. Twitter is fine as a social diversion from time to time. As a thing you can access every time a thought pops in your head? Not so much.

Don’t use your phone for entertainment at all

Why do cellphone companies strike deals with Netflix? Why did AT&T buy DirecTV? Because they want to turn your phone into your television. They want you to mainline data and entertainment. This is good for them, but not good for you. When I’m on a plane, I don’t pull up my phone and watch movies; I read books. When I want to watch TV, I have to sit down on the couch and use a remote.

While we’re on the subject, delete your games, too. Really smart psychologists, designers, and marketers have figured out how to make them as addictive and immersive as possible, and cutting them out is one easy way to use your phone less. My phone is for communication, not entertainment, and maintaining this distinction helps subordinate its role in my life.

Carry two devices

Chris “Drama” Pfaff, founder of the clothing brand Young & Reckless, once told me he carries two phones: one for work and one for fun. The fun one — the one with all his social media and other apps he likes — stays in the car while he’s at work. People laugh at him when he has to walk down to the garage to send a message, but it works. If you can afford it, this strategy is a good one.

Don’t sync your computer and phone

If your phone is a distraction machine, your computer should be a tool for focus — and the more you keep them separate, the better. The last thing I want is my computer to start ringing. What the hell do I need texts on my desktop for? The more you can minimize interruptions, the better.

Print your tickets at the airport

When I fly somewhere, the first thing I do is print my ticket at the self-check-in monitors. Why? First off, the bar code thing never works and I hate people who hold up the line trying to position their phone properly. Second, and more importantly, I don’t want to give myself an excuse to keep my phone at hand — the piece of paper in my pocket tells me everything I need to fly, and now I can zip my phone into my backpack and not check it. A minor reduction in phone time, sure, but I’ll take it where I can get it.

Use child protection settings

You know you can block certain sites on your phone, right? So if you deleted Facebook but still check it in your browser, you can use parental controls to protect yourself from yourself. There are a number of sites I wanted to stop checking, so I made it harder for me to do so.

Go on a purge

Delete contacts you don’t use. Delete apps you don’t need. Clear your cookies. Do you need the Macy’s app? Do you actually need both Lyft and Uber? Simplify. Your phone wants to remember everything to make your experience using it more seamless. Don’t let it.

“Do Not Disturb” is your friend

Use this feature all the time. Whenever you sit down to a meeting. Whenever you got into a movie. Whenever you’re doing something nice with your family. Put up a wall that prevents people, emails, and texts from getting through. Protect your space. Be in the moment.

Whenever possible, replace your phone with another solution

If you read news on your phone, try subscribing to a newspaper or a magazine. If you want a restaurant recommendation, ask a friend. If you use a countdown app with your kids, get a kitchen timer. Yes, the phone can be easier for all these things, but what we don’t factor in is the mindless scrolling that we slip into once the task at hand is done. The less you use your phone to deal with trivial matters or minor conveniences, the less dependent you’ll be on it.

Okay, but what do you use your phone for, then? Well, lots of helpful things. It’s a calculator. It lets me look up information I need on the go. I can take pictures. I can listen to music and podcasts. I get directions. I can call an Uber to pick me up anywhere in the world. I manage my schedule. I write notes to myself. I record my runs and my swims. I FaceTime my kids when I’m away.

My life is better because of the ability to do these things. It’s the stuff that prevents me from doing them that I want to get rid of.

Because it’s my life and it’s ticking away every second. I want to be there for it, not staring at a screen.

***

Like to Read?

I’ve created a list of 15 books you’ve never heard of that will alter your worldview and help you excel at your career.

Get the secret book list here!

There is a story about an exchange between Jerry Seinfeld and a young comedian. The comedian approaches Seinfeld in a club one night and asks him for advice about marketing and getting exposure.

Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Just work on your act.

Seinfeld, a pure stand-up, a comedian’s comedian, is appalled by the question. It’s offensive to his legendary heads-down work ethic. But to the kid, this was a surprise. Isn’t that the kind of question you’re supposed to ask? Isn’t that how you get ahead?

He’s not alone. Certainly, I myself wasted many chances to learn about how to improve my craft by instead asking people I admire for superficial hacks and career opportunities. I see the same mistake repeated in subreddits and forums and blogs and Facebook groups that (aspiring) creative professionals — writers, designers, startup founders — use as networking vehicles and support systems. If Seinfeld ever saw them, he’d cringe at every word.

Because these often closed groups are self-selected communities of ambitious, motivated go-getters, there is a tendency to skip the slow and immeasurable creative process and go right to the tactics for getting attention or catching a break. They want tricks and tips for getting ahead, hacks for advancing their careers. Even amongst the more advanced or already successful, the questions posed to the group are mostly technical: How do you guys like to negotiate contracts? How can I sell more copies or increase my fees? Who is the best agent?

Not that these things aren’t important. Certainly I’d like to know the answers myself but judging by the amount of time people spend asking them, or talking about their complicated Evernote systems or their preferred deal terms, or the readiness with which they are willing to share their elaborate rituals and routines, the less cynical person would assume that everyone must have already mastered their craft and the only thing left for them to worry about is mopping up a few minor details at the margins.

If only…

Because if that were even remotely true, we wouldn’t be drowning in so much mediocrity — if not outright garbage. The reason it’s not true is that nobody in these forums, really no one pursuing an artistic career, wants to hear what sits at the core of Seinfeld’s advice: Your work isn’t good enough. Keep your head down. You still have a long way to go.

To me, one of the root causes of this situation is the economic transformation that creative industries have gone through over the last twenty years. There used to be publishers, art dealers, investors, managers, and record labels that handled the majority of the business side of the equation. But increasingly, the relevance of those partners has fallen away, and the number of hats a creator wears has increased. The artist can’t just be an artist — they also have to know how to upload YouTube videos, use GIFs, promote gigs, and figure out how to get followers on various platforms. The artist has far more visibility into their earnings and their distribution, than ever before. With that comes more leverage, all of which is a good thing.

But the unintended consequence of, what one might call, total brand and business control, is that it diverts attention away from the most essential part of any creative profession. You know, making great stuff.

It’s hard to do that under ideal circumstances; harder still when you’re tweeting or visualizing your next Instagram story or flying to some industry conference. And podcasts…every one of them takes an hour. If you’re lucky. And more are created every single day and again, if you’re lucky, people will want to have you on theirs.

Earlier this month, NovelRank.com, a site which let authors track their sales rank on Amazon across all regions, was shut down by Amazon. The “official” reason had something to do with the terms of service of their affiliate program. I’d never cheer someone losing their business, but secretly, I’m quite grateful to whoever made that call at Amazon. I have spent way too much of my time refreshing that site, checking how my books were selling in Germany or trying to figure out why the rank of one of my older books suddenly shot up.

A line from Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote, is “people who are thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.” I’m willing to overlook the fact that Evernote is too often a shiny distraction for creatives — a black hole into which time is thrown under the auspices of “research” and “organization” — because he’s totally right.

It echoes an even more poignant sentiment from Cyril Connolly which I quoted in Perennial Seller: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”

An artist’s job is to create masterpieces. Period.

Everything else is secondary.

About a year ago, my mind began to construct this recurring moving image that would play on a loop whenever I was working on a book or a particularly difficult article. I’d close my eyes, think about the project, and there it would be. The image is of an unidentifiable baseball player at the plate. It’s zoomed in like one of those SportsCenter closeups, and the batter is already mid-swing and connecting with the ball. It’s one of those beautiful, old-timey swings like Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams used to do. The front leg extended, the back leg all the way back, the bat coming up and hitting the ball perfectly.

That’s it. That’s the whole image.

I don’t see where the ball goes, whether it was a base hit or a grand slam. I suspect earlier in my career, I would have cared about the outcome. I would have cared about who the player was and what team he played for. I would have needed to know whether the ball went foul or found a fielder’s mitt or cleared the upper deck. But as I have gotten better as a writer, paradoxically, it doesn’t even occur to me that such a thing would matter.

The image is just the connecting. The bat and the ball. The thing that is supposed to be all but physically impossible — hitting a rock coming at 90 miles per hour, that traveled from an elevated mound down to the batter in less than 400 milliseconds. Over and over again. The connecting.

Very few of us can do that impossible thing. Can connect like that. Can cut it in the big leagues, where the ball looks like a marble as it comes over the plate and pitchers put it in a spot the size of a croquet ball… at 90+ mph. Very few can time their swing just right to meet the ball and hear that satisfying crack as the ball heads back the other direction. And to do it more than once? To do it game in and game out, day in and day out? It’s a miracle. It requires complete and total dedication.

If you cease practicing for a second, if you let your mind get wound too tight or simply allowed to drift elsewhere, you will lose that ability. Your bat will stop connecting with the ball, your batting average will drop and soon enough you yourself will be dropped, first from the majors and then the sport altogether.

That’s what I think the image is supposed to be a reminder to me of. Writing of course is all about a kind of consistent connection: with the audience, with yourself, with something that goes to the essence of the human experience. Really, that’s all art and commerce are, too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are about swinging at the right pitches too.

When a business is perfectly lined up with the needs of the market. When a song taps into some wave of emotion you didn’t know was there. When a painting or a poem shoves you in your solar plexus. When an article touches on some truth about the world that needed to be said.

That’s the job.

Selecting and Connecting.

We need to forget about tertiary concerns and stop fiddling with shit that doesn’t matter.

We need to keep our eye on the ball.

We need to work on our act.

Nothing else is of any consequence.

***

Like to Read?

I’ve created a list of 15 books you’ve never heard of that will alter your worldview and help you excel at your career.

Get the secret book list here!

The best advice I’ve ever got about reading came from a secretive movie producer and talent manager who’d sold more than 100 million albums and done more than $1B in box office returns. He said to me one day, “Ryan, it’s not enough that you read a lot. To do great things, you have to read to lead.”

What he meant was that in an age where almost nobody reads, you can be forgiven for thinking that the simple act of picking up a book is revolutionary. It may be, but it’s not enough. Reading to lead means pushing yourself—reading books “above your level.”

In short, you know the books where the words blur together and you can’t understand what’s happening? Those are the books a leader needs to read. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is—lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight.

For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wrestling with them until you can—shying away from the “easy read.” It means reading Feynman over Friedman, biographies over business books, and the classics over the contemporary.

It worked wonders for me: at 19, I was a Hollywood executive. At 21, I was the director of marketing for a publicly traded company. And at 24, I’d worked on 5 bestselling books and sold my own to the biggest publisher in the world. I may have been a college dropout, but I have had the best teachers in the world: tough books.

My apartment is filled with such books that on paper, I never should have been able to understand. It wasn’t easy to crack them, but with the secrets below, I was able to. And the process starts before you even crack the spine of a new book.

Before the first page…

Break out of the School Mindset

The way you learn to read in the classroom is corrupted by the necessity of testing. Tests often have very little to do with proving that you know or care about the material but more about proving that you spent the time reading it. The easiest way to do this is picking obscure things from the text and quizzing you on them: “Name this passage,” or “What were the main characters in Chapter 4?” We carry these habits with us. Remember: now you’re reading for you.

Let’s say you’re reading the History of the Peloponnesian War. That there was once a conflict between Corinth and Corcyra is not really worth remembering, even though the proxy fight kicked off the war between Athens and Sparta.

(To write this, I had to look the names up myself, I only recalled that they started with a C)

What you should latch onto is that as the two fought for allied support from Athens, one took the haughty—“you owe us a favor”—route, and the other alluded to all the benefits that would come from aiding them. Guess who won? Place. Names. Dates. These are unimportant. The lessons matter.

From Seneca:

We haven’t time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know—when every day we’re running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

Forget everything but the message and how to apply it to your life.

Ruin the Ending

When I start a book, I almost always go straight to Wikipedia (or Amazon or a friend) and ruin the ending. Who cares? Your aim as a reader is to understand WHY something happened, the what is secondary.

You ought to ruin the ending—or find out the basic assertions of the book—because it frees you up to focus on your two most important tasks:

1. What does it mean?
2. Do you agree with it?

The first 50 pages of the book shouldn’t be a discovery process for you. You shouldn’t be wasting your time figuring out what the author is trying to say with the book.

Instead, your energy needs to be spent on figuring out if he’s right and how you can benefit from it. Plus, if you already know what happens, you can identify all the foreshadowing and the clues the first read through.

Read the Reviews

Find out what the people who have already read it felt was important. From Amazon to the New York Times, read the reviews so you can deduce the cultural significance of the work—and from what it meant to others. Also, by being warned of the major themes, you can anticipate them coming and then actually appreciate them as they unfold.

Tip: if you agree with someone’s assessment of the work, go ahead and steal it once you’ve finished. You can’t copyright an opinion—this isn’t school, this is life.

The book itself…

Read the Intro/Prologue/Notes/Forward

I know, I know. It infuriates me too when what looks like a 200-page book turns out to have 80 pages of translator’s introduction, but that stuff is important.

Every time I’ve skipped through it, I’ve had to go back and start over. Read the intro, read all the stuff that comes before the book—even read the editors notes at the bottom of the pages. This sets the stage and helps boost your knowledge going into the book.

Remember: you need every advantage you can get to read a book above your level. Don’t skip stuff intended to add context and color.

Look It Up

If you’re reading to lead, you’re going to come across concepts or words you’re not familiar with. Don’t pretend you understand. Look it up. I like to use Definr or I use my phone to look stuff up on Wikipedia. With Military History, for instance, a sense of the battlefield is often necessary. Wikipedia is a great place to grab maps and to help understand the terrain.

I was once trying to read some books on the Civil War and got stuck. 10 hours of Ken Burn’s documentaries later, the books were easy to breeze through (see, looking stuff up can be as easy as watching TV). That being said, don’t get bogged down with the names of the cities or the spelling of names, you’re looking to grasp the meta-lesson: the conclusions.

Mark Passages

I love Post-It Flags. I mark every passage that interests me, that makes me think, or that is important to the book. When I don’t have them, I just fold the bottom corner of the page. (I actually folded the corner of every page of Heraclitus’ Fragments). If there is something I need to look up, I fold the top corner of the page and return to it later.

I carry a pen with me and write down whatever thoughts, feelings, or connections I may have with a passage.

It’s much better to do it in the moment than to risk losing the contemporaneous inspiration. Don’t be afraid to tear the book up with tags and notations—books are a cheap. Plus, you’ll get more for your money this way.

After you finish…

Go Back Through

I have the same schedule with every book I read. After a mandatory 1–2 week waiting period after finishing, I go back through the book with a stack of 4×6 index cards. On these cards, I write out—by hand—all the passages I have noted as being important.

It might seem strange, but it’s an old tactic used by everyone from Tobias Wolff to Montaigne to Raymond Chandler, who once said, “When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.” Each one of these cards is then assigned a theme and filed in my index card box.

The result of 4–5 years of doing this? Thousands of cards in dozens of themes—from Love to Education to Jokes to Musings on Death. I return to these pieces of wisdom when I am writing, when I need help or when I am trying to solve a business problem. It has been an immense resource.

Read One Book from Every Bibliography

This is a little rule I try to stick with. In every book I read, I try to find my next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core.

Keep a running list through Amazon’s Wish List service (here is mine). Last month, I read a book on Evolutionary Psychology and discovered that I’d read almost 80% of its sources because I’d been pulled down the rabbit hole of a predecessor.

Apply and Use

You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren’t going to memorize and use them?

Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters, and in your daily life.

How else do you expect to absorb them?

The more fulfilling an outlet you find for the fruit of your database, the more motivated you will be to fill it. Try adding a line to a report you’re doing. Find solace in them during difficult times. Add them to Wikipedia pages. Do something.

I give you Seneca again:

My advice is really this: what we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.

Remember: we read to lead for moral and practical lessons. The point is to take what we’ve read and turn the words, as Seneca says, into works.

Conclusion: It’s on You…

Of course, none of this is easy. People always ask me if the books I carry around are for school because they’re full of notes, flags, and folded pages—why would anyone work so hard on something they were doing on their own? Because I enjoy it, and because it’s the only thing that separates me from ignorance.

These are the techniques that have allowed me to leap years ahead of my peers. It’s how you strike out on your own and build strength instead of letting some personal trainer dictate what you can and can’t be lifting.

It’s also expensive, I’ve purchased thousands of books and invested hours upon hours of time learning them. But how expensive is going back for an MBA? Or attending TED? I think there is more wisdom in the timeless books of the last 5,000 years than a conference or two—if you do it right and push yourself.

So try it: Do your research, read diligently without getting bogged down in details, and then work to connect, apply, and use. It’s your job as a leader. And I think you’ll find that you’re able to read above your supposed “level” and that people will follow your example. If you put in the work, books, as the great writer and voracious reader Petrarch once said, will pay you back:

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

Enjoy the journey.

***

Read To Lead

If you’re looking to use reading to advance your life and career, check out a course I helped create called Lead To Read: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge.

It’s a 13-day challenge that shows you exactly how to find great books to mine for wisdom and to use to build the beginnings of a great library with. You’ll learn to dissect a book like a pro, to remember more of what you read, to apply it to your life, and much more. Learn more here.