Ding! Buzz! Tap! Your phone wants your attention. You feel busy and important. You reach into your pocket and pull out your phone. And just like that, they have you.

I started designing and developing mobile applications the year Apple’s App Store first came out in 2008. I love apps ❤️ — they’ve been very good to me. I also hate notifications. I’ve turned almost all of them off, and you should too.

I offer this definition of notifications for 2018:

notification [noh-tuh-fi-key-shuh n] noun 1. an interruptive waste of time that supports the needs of others and fucks up your life.

Let’s use it in a sentence: Andrew got a notification and it interrupted his conversation with Aaron.

Notifications are always an interruption to your present activity. Unsurprisingly, Google and Apple see this differently.

According to Google’s Material Design guidelines, “Notifications provide short, timely, and relevant information about your app when it’s not in use.”

If you ask Apple, notifications are, “great for keeping users informed with timely and relevant content, whether your app is running in the background or inactive.”

Nonsense. The “user” they’re talking about is you. Notifications are not timely or relevant to what you’re doing. When an app is inactive, or not in use, it should stay that way.

The only times I allow my phone to interrupt me are:

1. Messages from people I love
2. Reminders of my schedule
3. Alarms to wake me up in the morning

That’s it. No email. No work related chat channels. No Facebook. No Twitter. No Instagram. I don’t have any social apps on my phone.

“Andrew! That’s crazy! That’s not realistic! At my company you’re expected to respond to urgent messages within minutes.” Are you an ER physician saving lives? Does the company lose millions if you don’t answer in 60 seconds or less? If these things are true — keep your pagers on.

Otherwise, you’re living in a shitty culture my friend, and you need to set some boundaries. Here’s a boundary: tell people you check all messages once a day and set a calendar reminder. This allows you to be in control of your time while still managing communications. You can batch all those messages together and dedicate focused time to answering them. You’ll even be better at your job because you’ll have more focused time to work.

If you don’t take control of your time this way, you’re selling a priceless resource for a bargain basement price.

That will take care of the work problem, but what about news apps, games, and social apps? You should just delete this stuff from your phone. The people who create mobile apps have to monetize your attention. It’s not that they want to mess up your life, they’re just too strongly incentivized to do it.

Mobile apps make money off of your attention in 2 basic ways:

1. Increase the time you spend in their app so they can sell advertising
2. Drive conversions of the product they’re selling

The people that make apps are under immense pressure to make money by using notifications to drive conversions and engagement. Their bonuses, and the success of their company depends directly on how much of your time they take up with their app. They feel none of the pain of interrupting you and taking up your time. In this equation you can guess whose needs come first. My co-founder Aaron talks extensively about this in his article, “Harvesting Human Attention”. Delete these applications. That’s what I did.

Don’t put the needs of your office, news organizations, and app developers above your own needs. When someone asks if they can “notify” you, the answer is no. You can always opt-in on your own schedule. If you never open an app again — you didn’t need it in the first place.

I used to be terrible about this kind of thing. Any of my long-term friends can attest to that. I would to go out to eat and stare at my phone throughout the meal. I used to live a distracted day. I checked Facebook when I got bored and opened Instagram when someone liked a post.

Nothing has made me happier than getting my time back. Join me. Open your settings, navigate to your notifications and tell those apps, “Fuck off with your notifications.”

Some people are more creative than others. They can draw, paint, play guitar, and maybe even sing. These people are creative types and they clearly have something the rest of us don’t. They can draw from a well of magical fairy dust where infinite beauty springs to life. How do they do it? Nobody knows, and there’s no way to understand it.

That’s nonsense. There’s a reason that some people have an easier time creating things than others and it has nothing to do with fairy dust. It has to do with becoming the right kind of person, in the right order.

The Child and The Critic

There are two types of people you need become to create something. They exist inside all of us and anyone can access them. I call them The Child and The Critic.

The Child is completely free. She’s carefree and messy. She ignores rules and loves to play. She never hesitates with a paint brush and hums new melodies with a snap and a side step. She hops onto the dance floor at a wedding all by herself and dances the night away. Sometimes the things she makes are great, sometimes they’re not. She doesn’t care.

The Critic is totally different. He can tell you everything wrong with the article you just wrote. He gets a sense of the room before making any moves. He’s a buttoned-down adult that studies for years before taking any action. He has a strict sense of the rules and carefully avoids doing the wrong thing. He’s probably on a diet.

Here’s the trick:

You can’t be both at the same time

In order to create something great, we have to first become The Child and then become The Critic. We have to do it in that order and we can only be one of these characters at a time. The Child will freely create whatever she wants. It’s her job to make ideas and many of them. The Critic will look through this great quantity and pick out things of great quality. This is how creativity works: generate lots of ideas, pick out the good ones. Repeat this process enough and eventually you’ll get something great.

Anyone who is having difficulty creating something is trying to be The Critic and The Child at the same time. All creative hurdles like writer’s block are the result of this. You simply can’t generate a large quantity of ideas and pick out the good ones at the same time. It’s impossible.

People rarely struggle to be The Critic. As we get older, this becomes our default state. The process of socialization and schooling that we go through is designed to train and empower The Critic.

Adults forget how to be The Child

In their book Creative Confidence, brothers Tom and David Kelly describe how young children create freely while adults agonize over each brushstroke. If you were to go into any kindergarten class and lay out a bunch of paint, paper, and brushes, you’d quickly see something like this:

Kids of this age will happily play and paint without hesitation. They’ll do their own thing, they won’t need any guidance, and each painting will be different.

If you do the same thing with a group of 40-year-olds, they’ll sit patiently waiting for instructions. The Critic has a great need for conformity and perfection. You can see him at work in a recently popular adult activity: drinking and painting in groups.

Would you look at that, they all magically painted the exact same thing! All it took was a few glasses of wine and some clear instructions and everyone got creative! These adults were given clear instructions so The Critic could ensure they were creating the artwork “correctly.”

Holding Back The Critic

The great challenge of being creative is shutting up The Critic long enough for The Child to produce a significant quantity of ideas. For many artists, this is where the drugs come in. Alcohol, Marijuana, LSD, Heroin, Purple Drank — artists are famous for having substance abuse problems. The truth is, drugs are very effective for shutting up The Critic so The Child can get to work. If you don’t mind ruining your life and going through a stint in rehab, this is a great way to get more creative.

If you’d like to remain a healthy, happy person, there is another way: commitment and deadlines. It works like this — make a commitment to create a certain quantity of ideas within a tight time frame. The exact details of this don’t matter. What matters is that it’s difficult to create such a large quantity of work by the specified deadline.

Your goal might be to create 20 songs in a day, 10 blog posts a week, 5 paintings in an hour, or 3 websites by lunch. It doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to do. The key is that it’s hard to hit the quantity goal and you’re committed to doing it. This is the most reliable, drug-free way to shut up The Critic. If you do this correctly you’ll be in such a hurry to hit your goal that you won’t have time to let The Critic to slow you down.

When The Child and The Critic work together

When you make a commitment like this you end up with something that’s actually useful for The Critic—a large quantity of work to choose from. If you write 10 blog posts every week for a year you’ll have 520. The Critic will probably think most of them are terrible, but some of them will be undeniably good.

Set yourself some crazy deadlines, and let yourself play. This is how to be more creative. Don’t worry if you’re making anything good. When the time comes, The Critic will be more than happy to tell you what the best work is. Put on your favorite music, take your shoes off, get some markers and start making things. This isn’t a time to follow the rules or to try to be good. It’s time to play.

When you’re done, you’ll have a pile of work to choose from and you won’t need drugs, rehab, or fairy dust to get it.

Thanks to Shannon McFarland for reviewing and editing drafts of this article.

There’s a conversation that’s so common in startup culture that it’s become cliché. It goes something like this:

Person: “How are things going at [insert startup name here]?”

Founder: “Oh man, so great! We’re crushing it! Feels great. It’s all about that #hustle!”

This statement is a lie, and you shouldn’t believe anyone who says it. You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask Sam Altman

“Whenever you ask a founder how their company is going, the answer is always, ‘Great, we’re crushing it, it’s awesome.’ It’s almost never true, but that’s always what founders say.”

-Sam Altman

If this is so common, why does everyone still say their company is crushing it?

If you run a startup, you are in a perpetual state of crisis. Your startup has a certain amount of remaining “runway”. This is the amount of time your startup can survive without running out of money at your current cash burn rate.

Imagine you’re in a half-built, moving plane, starting down a cold, lonely runway. At the end of this runway lies the death of your company. It’s a death that means apologizing to the investors that gave you money, firing the people who believed in you, and explaining to your friends and family what happened.

It’s pretty normal to find that scary! Founders are under immense pressure never to show weakness by admitting they are living in this perpetual state of crisis.

Founders need people around them to believe. They need investors to believe they should put in money to extend the runway. They need employees to believe so they are inspired to finish building the plane to lift the company off the ground. They need acquirers believe enough to think “where they’re going, they don’t need roads.”

This is how we ended up in a world where people in crisis will tell you they’re “crushing it.”

Maybe this culture helps bring great new companies and products into the world. Maybe “In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times,” to quote Buddy Kane, the King of Real Estate from American Beauty.

On the surface it appears true that you need to project success. In practice there are a host of problems created by that. The biggest one is that a founder’s mental health takes a beating. This is known as founder depression and it’s been discussed online extensively. If you’re not feeling yourself as a founder, it’s important to get out and get some help. It’s harder to do that when it feels normal to “project success.”

This is compounded by the the “instagram effect.” People naturally compare themselves to others. When you look around and everyone’s saying how great their company is doing, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking everyone is doing better than you.

The more we normalize the culture of projecting success, the harder it is for founders to reach out for support. The truth is, founders need support. They need support from friends and family. They need support from their employees. They need support from their investors. They need support from mentors.

If you’re a founder, this is a great reason to get into an accelerator. The best of them are able to help you feel comfortable being open and honest about the challenges you’re facing. It’s much easier to let your guard down in this kind of environment. Remember this: no matter what stage you’re in, it’s ok to ask for help. No successful founder did it by themselves.

If you know a founder, be nice to them. Let them vent. Keep what they tell you private. They’re on a lonely runway and they need your support. Listen to the things they say and allow them a little leeway. Even if they tell you they’re “crushing it.”

Startups are fucking stressful. You don’t need me to tell you that. It’s quite possible you’ve arrived at this article with that insistent ball of anxiety coiled up in your chest. You need some relief and not in that later kind of way. You need relief right now. Let me save you some time. The internet is filled with horrible advice on this subject.

Articles are written all the time about how to handle stress. There’s one problem, though. All the advice sucks. Seriously, it doesn’t work at all. Don’t believe me? Let’s see if we can find some useful advice. Here’s two quick tips from HuffPo:

Gratitude & Acceptance

Anybody tried those before? Say thanks, and accept your shitty situation. How’s your stress level? Better? Nope, didn’t work for me either. Let’s see what else we can find. Maybe there’s some other good stuff on Medium! Stress, Startups and Survival — this looks promising. What’s inside?

Sleep, Breathe, Eat Food, Talk to Someone

Now we’re cookin’! Had a nap and a grilled cheese yet? Feel better? I don’t think so.

Stress is tricky. You can have a million conversations, read a ton of articles and it won’t go away. The same problems are there, and now you’re stressed about how bad you are at stress management. That’s how I always felt, until my friend gave me the single best stress management tip on earth.

I was a high level employee at an early stage company and things were going badly. Our product wasn’t a fit for the market. In fact, we weren’t even in the right market at all. We were half way through the seed round, money was burning fast, and we had to start from square zero. On top of that we were having a hard time finding direction. Meetings, meetings, disagreements, meetings, nothing getting done.

Every day was a struggle. That’s when I turned to my friend Ryan and articulated all my hardships.

“I just don’t know what to do.” I said.

He carefully listened through the tiny Gchat window I was using to reach for help. “Paul did this,” I explained. “So confusing,” I confessed. He listened carefully as I waited for the same advice I usually get on this sort of thing — don’t worry, relax, this too shall pass, have you tried X,Y,Z or a nap? The usual advice never came. Instead, like a crack of lightning, Ryan gave me the secret:

“Put on your headphones…turn them up…and watch this.”

Ryan never seems to have the same advice as everyone else. I guess that’s why I was talking to him. “Ok, I’ll give it a shot,” I thought.

I watched closely as a lawnmower glided across the grass, a semi-transparent gorilla in the foreground gazed longingly into the distance. Then, like an angel ascending to heaven, the lawnmower slowly lifted into the air as the sweet sounds of The Tallis Scholars filled my ears.

I laughed. I felt better. Relief.

I keep the video to my browser shortcuts now. When I can’t handle the stress, I put it on. Works every time. Give it a shot.

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