So I tried a Flip Phone, and it Wasn't Great.
Why the flip, can’t I just do the work? In this post, I dive into the focus challenges entrepreneurs face and how I attempted to solve them with an old-school flip phone. Focus is the currency of entrepreneurs, and learning to avoid distractions is key to success.
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“You have problems, dude.”
Those were my wife’s words as we left the house last Saturday.
“Why do you always do this?”
A bit embarrassed, I went into defense mode – “I wanted to try it out, look how small it is. This, could change everything.”
Not seeing the humor in the situation, she just stared at me from the passenger seat.
“Dusty… I give you six days. Six days and you will be over it and move onto the next one.”
The thing is, she was right. I have an extensive track record of exactly that.
For years, I have had a thing for nice phones.
Every new flagship phone…
Every new operating system...
I buy them all so I can test them.
This one was different though, because this one was an old school flip phone and, in my mind, there was a chance it could actually make a difference - so, let me explain.
Spoiler… I did give up on the flip after 6 days, just as she predicted.
Why the flip, can’t I just do the work?
It has never been easy for me to do the work that needs to be done, unless it’s really hard.
Somehow, whenever I need to focus on something important, I’ll find myself getting distracted by the tools to get the job done, instead of just getting the job done.
Here’s an example:
About 4 years ago we needed to find a cloud storage option so managing, sharing, and editing files would be less scattered.
We could have just used one of the known options, like google or Dropbox, but those were too simple.
Instead, I set up a data-center hosted cloud server with a self-hosted cloud management system and proceeded to spend 100+ hours learning how to maintain that…
Tools, can be useful.
But, they, for some people, can have some major downsides.
So, why the flip, did I buy an old phone with buttons?
I thought, that maybe instead of always chasing the right tool
- The notes app
- The texting app
- The autocorrect
- The email clients
- etc…
If I just removed the tool completely, and took away every option, I would be forced to just do the work instead of spending time migrating things from one app or one device to another.
The point is switching was to take away things that caused me to lose focus. Because like I said in this post, and firmly believe:
“Focus is the currency of entrepreneurs”
But it's not just focusing on work, it’s focusing on my kids when they are showing me the picture they just drew.
It’s focusing on my wife when she is talking about plans for an upcoming birthday.
It’s focusing on the thing that is present, in this moment right now, on the thing that matters.
I don’t know who said it, or where I heard it but something I agree with, and I am aligning my life to now is the concept of choosing a few things decisively, and sticking to those things to become the best I can be at them, because it isn’t possible to be great at a lot of things, it's only possible to be great at a few things.
Nothing about business is easy, and sabotaging myself with endless, repetitive, pointless things will keep me from doing the best work I can do, in and out of my career.
A flip phone is just a symbol to me of what I believe I want to be - an always present husband, father, and entrepreneur.
PS... Believe it or not, these $50 flip phones come with YouTube, and if you have never felt stupid enough to realized that what you were doing was ridiculous - you should try sitting on a bucket, with a flip phone, trying to get YouTube to load.
That, for me, put things into context enough to realize what the problem was - Focus.
