Last week on Friday, at the end of our work week, I challenged my husband to try a weekend without our phones. No mindlessly checking social media, no couch-scrolling — just giving ourselves the opportunity to experience whatever came about as a result of putting our damn phones down.
What we did instead:
We built a greenhouse. We planned our garden. I meal prepped. We worked out. We watched movies. We cleaned the whole house, top to bottom — the kind of clean you do when you’re about to move out and want to make sure you get your rental deposit back.
The kind of cleaning job that we just never seem to have the time or energy to do.
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It felt so good to not be glued to my phone.
It wasn’t easy; we’d both instinctively reach for our phones out of habit — checking for email, looking something up based on our conversation, referencing a thread we’d read on a social platform. But each time we’d catch ourselves, we’d simply notice the urge, and then put the phone back down.
Given how much we got done around the house that weekend, it became painfully obvious how much time and energy our devices have been stealing from us. Of course I knew this instinctively, but to actually run the experiment was illuminating.
I had amazing sleep all weekend. I had energy, motivation, and a better overall mood. The domino effect of that one choice was a cascade of goodness.
As a new work week emerged and I was catching up on my email newsletters, I noticed an email from Meghan Telpner asking, “Are smartphones the new smoking?” A soundbite from her email:
It has gotten out of hand. People — especially the youngest and oldest among us — are becoming deeply unwell. Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Anxious. Unable to cope. And is it any wonder? Every five to ten minutes, the phone gets picked up. Every five to ten minutes, the nervous system is asked to process, assess, react, regulate and try and protect you. Over and over, all day long. Human beings were never designed to handle this volume of input. We didn’t evolve for this. And we are showing it.
I resonated with Meghan’s email, and appreciated the timeliness.
Ah, a breath of fresh air, I thought.
And then I read the next email in my newsletter queue from an entirely different entrepreneur, with the subject line, “Speed is the only moat.”
It argued that you must compete with speed to market, speed of decision making, speed of execution. That “without urgency every cycle takes longer than your competition. You should always optimize for the long term, and the long term rewards speed.” That with AI we now have infinite labour hours and access to 10x engineers, so what’s your excuse for not moving faster?
And then I noticed something.
My body reacted before my brain did. There was a tightening — a low hum of panic, a familiar FOMO-adjacent feeling that I’ve been trying to wean myself off of. Are you moving fast enough? Are you falling behind? Is your competition lapping you right now while you’re building a greenhouse?
I sat with that feeling for a moment. And then I recognized it for what it was: not a signal to move faster. A signal to pay attention.
I see this pattern constantly in my own community. People come to Notion Mastery to get organized, to feel more in control of their time and their work. And somewhere along the way, the productivity culture they’ve absorbed turns the whole thing into a new arena for self-punishment. They’re not productive enough. They’re not moving fast enough. They not visiting their dashboards enough.
The tool that is supposed to help instead becomes another mirror to hold up their perceived inadequacy.
Speed as a value system doesn’t just affect how we work — it rewrites the story we tell about our own worth.
It turns rest into guilt, slowness into shame, and a quiet weekend into something that needs to be justified. A slow week isn’t human, it’s a character flaw. The metric of productivity becomes the metric of you.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: our bodies are always signalling. The phone-free weekend felt like exhaling after holding my breath for months. Reading the email about speed felt like someone cranking the tension back up. Both of those reactions were data.
We talk a lot about curating our feeds, but I think we undersell what that actually means. It’s not just about avoiding negativity, it’s about being intentional with what frameworks and value systems you’re letting shape your inner landscape. Because they do shape it, whether you’re consciously absorbing them or not.
You’re allowed to read something from someone you respect, feel it land wrong in your body, and decide: not for me, not right now, maybe not ever.
That’s not falling behind. That’s paying attention.
If you enjoyed this newsletter you might like these podcast episodes:
The Practice of Attention — Healing Social Media Addiction with Cody Cook-Parrott
The Freedom Myth: What No One Tells You About Entrepreneurship with Meghan Telpner