🌱 The 5-foot rule

Hola. Here’s your 3 insights in under 3 minutes.

🧠 Mind the gap

A stat that made me laugh this week:

58% of Americans say they use their phone too much.

Yet 83% keep it within reach almost every waking hour.

In other words, we know what we want…We just don’t do it.

Psychologists call the feeling this creates self-discrepancy. The bigger the distance between who you are and who you want to be, the worse you feel.

My napkin-math version:

Intention − action = unhappiness

Every “I should go to the gym” that never turns into a gym trip keeps running in the back of your head. I call it cognitive congestion. Too many open tabs, and everything runs slower.

Our phone might be the biggest open tab of all.

Every time we pick it up after wanting to use it less, the gap gets a little WIDER.

📲 The 5-foot fix

The golden rule of behavior change is to make it easy.

So I tried the laziest experiment possible. I moved my phone just out of arm’s reach.

I didn’t move it to another room (too much willpower). I just put it far enough that I couldn’t reach it.

Who wears short shorts?

Almost immediately, I stopped reaching for it. Then I stopped thinking about it.

There’s real research that backs this up.

Angela Duckworth, the author of Grit, surveyed thousands of students about where they keep their phone while studying, then checked their report cards.

The farther the phone, the higher the GPA.

From Angela Duckworth’s new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best

Same concept applies at night too. I moved my charger across the bedroom at the beginning of this year and it’s been the best thing I’ve done for my sleep.

Here’s my 60-second video breakdown.

🧮 A better equation

After digging into this, I found a better equation. Psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote it in 1936:

B = f(P,E)

Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment.

This explains how to close the gap.

Most of us try to close it by changing P. More discipline or willpower. Another new year’s resolution.

E is easier. You can’t become a new person by Monday. But you can move your phone 5 feet today.

Todo bien,
Mitchell

Ps. Defensive player of the year