Productivity app or futile bargain with the universe?

I tried out the Minimalist Phone app last week.

I just happened to see it and was seduced by the prospect of a pretentiously blank lock screen. Simplicity to the point of ostentation.

But most of all, I was seduced by the idea that maybe then I’d have some control.

I know better, of course.

But it’s seductive, the idea that this one app will change your life. This one habit. This one productivity system.

I keep trying to divest from this way of thinking, but I keep getting pulled back in.

Because, to be fair, with a toddler and a newborn and a new job, control feels in short supply lately. There’s too much to do and never enough time and yet I’m still laid flat on the couch in the evening, pointlessly scrolling when I could at least be reading a book.

Maybe the Minimalist Phone would fix that at least, I thought.

It didn’t.

I couldn’t block my browser, since obviously I need it for other things, and that’s where I do my aimless scrolling.

It didn’t have the ability to block or limit time on certain websites, and although there are plenty of ways to do that, I had really only felt motivated by the minimalist aesthetic.

And maybe I didn’t want to block those websites after all.

There are so many apps for time management, but many smart folks are saying that energy management is more important. That when we think we don’t have the time, we really don’t have the energy.

And that’s why I scroll instead of reading a book. I don’t have the energy to do something else.

What would an app designed to manage energy look like? Would it check in with you about your current energy level and ask you to consider what would be helpful to you with that particular level right now? To consider which apps or websites might further drain you, and which might give you a boost?

This evening I had lots of things I was supposed to be doing, but I felt overwhelmed. So I went down a rabbit hole about Obsidian plug-ins and note-taking and briefly felt energized and excited by the new ideas and ready to tackle my own to-do list again.

Unfortunately, I didn’t stop at that point, perhaps because I didn’t quite have the willpower. I kept on with the rabbit hole and eventually ran out of time.

Ironically, one of the things I ended up reading about was the optimal stopping problem. When should you keep looking (for an apartment, a parking space, a partner) and when should you stop in order to maximize your chances of finding the best option? (I read the Kindle sample of Algorithms to Live By, which explained the whole thing.)

I feel silly that I “fell for” yet another app that offered a solution to a problem I didn’t have. I don’t think I have a time management problem. I don’t even think I have a willpower problem.

I think maybe there’s no system or app in the world that will fully change the reality that I have a toddler and a newborn and a job and I just don’t have the energy all the time. And that’s okay.

Yet I have had a few wins this year with infrastructure. I love the Arc browser. I love Obsidian. I love my Supernote. Sunsama and Workflowy have both been helpful. It’s not that apps can’t change things for me.

But those apps have mainly expanded space for my own thinking.

Not like the Minimalist Phone and similar apps, which limited what I can see or access based on the idea that I can’t trust myself otherwise. Based on the idea that if I restrict what I can do, I’ll magically become a better me. That all I needed was willpower, and that willpower can be outsourced.

When I installed this app, I wanted a level of performative control that was an utter fiction for me in my life right now.

I was trying to solve for a problem that didn’t really exist in my life (the idea that my phone was too compelling) because I didn’t want to acknowledge how complex and sometimes sad it can be to feel I don’t have all the space I wish I had for my children and my work and my creativity and everything else all at once.

An app won’t fix that.

In Hospicing Modernity, which I’m reading right now, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira draws a distinction between a problem and a predicament. She writes:

In this sense, it may be useful to evoke a distinction between problems (things that can actually or potentially be fixed) and predicaments (things that must constantly be dealt with, won’t be solved, and won’t go away).

Which pieces are problems, and which are predicaments?

When do I want to see a predicament as a problem, because understanding that it “won’t be solved, and won’t go away” is too painful to acknowledge?

But is it actually too painful to acknowledge? Surely avoiding the truth of the predicament causes more pain in the long run?

Does it bring me joy to falsely imagine that a simple app might dig me out of the complexity of my life right now? That the conflicting desires and priorities of my life, the sense that I genuinely cannot fit it all in, can somehow be reversed with the tap of a button? By outsourcing my willpower?

I’m actually not sure. Sometimes it’s fun to entertain idle fantasies. Sometimes it’s dangerous.

But today, I’m not wanting to be in the business of being overly prescriptive with my time and attention.

Sometimes I just don’t have the energy.