Abey Koshy Itty

Fifteen years ago, if you were early to meet a friend, you'd just sit there. Watch people, daydream, or maybe stare at a wall.

Now you'd never even consider it. Your phone is out before you've sat down.

The disappearing in-between

It happens everywhere now. On the metro, in queues, at restaurants, at family dinners. A room full of people, all somewhere else. And this isn't generational anymore. It cuts across age groups. Everyone's in the same loop.

I catch myself less now, but I'm not immune. The instinct to fill every quiet moment with a screen is deep. It's muscle memory at this point.

Those in-between moments used to look different. People daydreamed. They looked out of bus windows. They struck up awkward conversations with strangers. They noticed things, a kid doing something funny, a weird shop name, a dog sleeping in the middle of the road, and it would put a small, private smile on their face.

These moments are small, but they connect you to the world around you in a way that no reel ever can.

We've traded all of that for a feed we won't remember by tomorrow.

It's not your fault (mostly)

Here's the thing most people don't realize: this isn't just a willpower problem. Your phone is engineered to be hard to put down.

Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who went on to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, has compared smartphones to slot machines. Every time you pull down to refresh a feed, you're pulling a lever.

Maybe something interesting shows up. Maybe it doesn't.

That uncertainty is what keeps you going. It's the same psychological mechanism, called variable-ratio reinforcement, that makes gambling addictive.

Then there's infinite scroll, which was invented in 2006 by a designer named Aza Raskin.

His intent was simple: make browsing more seamless. But the feature removed every natural stopping point.

There's no bottom of the page. No moment where your brain gets a chance to ask, “do I actually want to keep going?”

Raskin has since expressed deep regret about his creation, estimating that infinite scrolling wastes roughly 200,000 human lifetimes per day.

Read that number again. 200,000 human lifetimes. Per day.

And it goes deeper than design tricks. Research from Stanford's addiction medicine clinic has found that smartphone use activates the same dopamine reward pathways as addictive substances.

Every notification, every new post, every like triggers a small hit of dopamine, enough to keep you coming back but never enough to feel satisfied.

As psychiatrist Anna Lembke puts it, with repeated use, the brain adapts by dialing down its own dopamine production.

Eventually, you're not reaching for your phone because it feels good. You're reaching for it to stop feeling bad.

The apps aren't designed to serve you. They're designed to keep you.

Three hours I didn't know I was losing

I quit Instagram a few years ago, around the time COVID hit. It wasn't a sudden decision. The thought had been sitting at the back of my head for a while. I started small, a digital detox over a weekend, then another one. Eventually, I just stopped going back.

When I looked at my screen time, the number that stared back at me was close to three hours a day. Three hours. That's almost an entire afternoon, every single day, gone to a feed.

When I finally stopped, my days felt longer. Not in a drag, but in a “wait, it's only 7pm?” kind of way. I suddenly had time I didn't know I'd been missing.

Here's a simple experiment: go check your screen time right now. Not the total, just Instagram or YouTube or whatever your default scroll app is. Look at the daily average. Multiply it by 365. That number will probably unsettle you.

Being okay with not knowing

The most common pushback I get when I tell people I'm not on Instagram is some version of “but how do you keep up with what's happening?”

The honest answer: I don't, and I'm fine with it.

I miss a lot of stuff. I don't know what's trending. I find out about news late. None of it has mattered. Not once has missing a reel or a post had any real consequence on my life.

If something actually matters, if it involves someone I care about, the news finds its way to me. Either through them directly or through someone else. It always does. Everything else is noise. I have no interest in knowing what everyone had for dinner or where they went on vacation. And I have no interest in broadcasting my own life either.

FOMO is the fuel that keeps the machine running. You're so afraid of missing something online that you miss everything that's right in front of you.

Letting go of that turns out to be a surprisingly peaceful way to live.

The smallest shift

I'm not going to tell you to delete your apps. You've heard that sermon before and it doesn't work, partly because these apps are specifically designed to make quitting feel unbearable.

But the next time you're waiting for something, a bus, your food, a friend who's running late, try not reaching for your phone. Just for a few minutes.

See what you notice. See how it feels to just sit there with nothing to consume.

You might be bored. That's the point.

Boredom is where the good stuff lives.

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Thanks for reading. Just notice something on your way home today!

In a world that often rewards quick decisions and immediate results, it's easy to overlook the deeper implications of our choices.

Enter second-order thinking, a powerful mental model that encourages us to look beyond the immediate consequences of our decisions to their subsequent effects.

This approach doesn't just ask, “What will happen?” but rather, “What will happen after that happens?”

By employing second-order thinking, we can make more informed, strategic decisions that account for a broader range of outcomes.

How to put second-order thinking into practice?

Using second-order thinking might feel hard at first, but with practice, it becomes an invaluable skill for making better decisions.

Think through questions & across time

Start by asking questions to think deeply about what happens after you make a decision.

First, find out the immediate result (first-order effect), then keep asking, “And then what?” to discover what comes next (second-order effects and beyond).

This method not only helps you grasp the full scope of your decision's impact but also encourages you to think across time.

Consider the potential consequences in the short term (10 minutes), medium term (10 months), and long term (10 years).

This broader perspective ensures you're fully aware of how your choices might unfold over time, leading to more thoughtful and strategic decisions.

Write it down

Writing down your thoughts helps you understand how decisions lead to different outcomes.

By using a mind map or a a template like the one below, you can better see the immediate and later effects of your choices. This method organizes your thinking and shows the impact of your decisions clearly.

Adopting second-order thinking is tough, which means few people put in the effort.

And that's what makes it so effective, setting you apart from the masses.

The ability to be right a lot is mostly the ability to predict the second-order effects of any decision.

You’ll rarely see someone with good judgment with terrible anticipation.

— Kunal Shah (@kunalb11) January 27, 2022

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Thanks for reading!

Here's some bonus for making it till the end ;)

The year is 1994. Jeff Bezos has a lucrative job at an investment firm called D.E Shaw.

But then he has this crazy idea to build an online bookstore and participate in this new thing called “the internet”.

A 30 year old Jeff has an important life decision to make. Either choose to have a stable career path or pursue his crazy startup idea.

We all know what he finally decided but do you know how he arrived at that decision?

He developed a decision making framework called the Regret Minimization Framework to make the decision that would change his life.

Regret minimization framework

The goal of this framework is to minimize the number of regrets you have in life.

Whenever you have to make a difficult decision, imagine yourself at 80 years old and ask yourself, will you regret not doing this?

And work backwards to guide your present decisions.

Most of our regrets are from the things we didn’t try, the risks we didn’t take, or the paths we didn’t travel.

Here’s the regret minimization framework in Jeff’s own words:

How to use this framework as a compass for making important life decisions:

1. Project yourself forward into the future at age 80
2. Look back on the decision you’re currently faced with
3. Ask yourself, “Will I regret not doing this?”
4. Take your decision accordingly

While this framework helps you optimize for long-term fulfilment, its larger horizon can be a roadblock for basing medium-term decisions, especially for people in their 20s and people who have a family to look after or have other responsibilities.

In such cases, there’s another mental model I like to use in conjunction with it. It’s called the Worst Case Scenario, developed by Ankur Warikoo.

Worst case scenario

Every important decision we make in life can have two outcomes – either it will work out or not.

Taking a decision in an ambiguous situation is hard. We do not know the possible outcome of our choices. Analyzing the worst case scenario helps us to decide better.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. What’s the worst thing that can happen if I move forward?
2. What will be my financial situation?
3. How will I feel physically, emotionally & mentally?

Write them down and reflect on it.

This framework helps you to prepare for the worst. If you’re okay despite the worst case scenario playing out in reality, go for it.

Here is a real-life example of this mental model, from Ankur himself.

From "5 months of cash" to $2Mn, in 18 months

A thread...

— Ankur Warikoo (@warikoo) December 31, 2021

Closing thoughts

The next time you’re faced with an important life decision, try to think using these frameworks to decide what’s best for you.

Our brains are not hard-wired to use these kind of frameworks but forcing yourself to think this way will give you better clarity of thought and eventually help you make better decisions.

Life is messy and these things are never perfect: you can win or fail. But if you can come to terms with the outcome, you can look back on your life from your deathbed with a beautiful smile on your face.

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Thank you for taking the time to read. If you liked this article, sharing it with a friend is really appreciated! :)

Thanks to Madhav for reviewing the draft of this article.

Asynchronous (also referred to as “async”) communication should be the norm in the modern workplace, especially in tech.

For context, let’s not get confused between ‘remote’ and ‘async’. While remote work allows you to work from anywhere without having to be at the office, async communication lets one communicate in their own time without the expectation of responding immediately to others.

In an async culture, employees are not expected to be online, and responsive during set hours. They can work on their priority tasks and answer colleagues when it’s convenient for them and within a reasonable timeframe, like 24 hours, for instance.

There are no set work hours in an async environment. With trust and independence being the core value of an async culture, employees have more control over how they structure their workdays depending on when they are most productive.

After all, people are hired to get productive work done that moves the needle. Not answering Slack messages and emails all day long.

The need for async communication

The way most teams communicate is messed up.

According to research from RescueTime, knowledge workers spend 40% of their day context switching between communication and productive work. On average, this leaves employees with 1 hour and 12 minutes of productive time that’s not interrupted by communication tools.

An average knowledge worker’s schedule is designed around multiple meetings with the remaining time spent doing work in a half-distracted state with an eye on Slack and email notifications.

The underlying problem is that most workplaces have no concrete guidelines on how communication should happen. Hardly any effort is being made to protect an individual’s schedule, making it hard to produce meaningful progress on core tasks.

Guide to async communication

Communicating asynchronously starts with intentionality.

If you feel like you lack control of your time due to the constant back and forth on Slack and never-ending meetings, here’s what you can do to evangelize the philosophy of async communication internally.

Plan ahead

Planning ahead is a great way to avoid surprises and keep your team informed. With async, people learn to plan their collaborations way ahead of time since ASAP requests are not an option.

If you prefer writing, you can keep a notebook to chart out your tasks for the week in advance and see how much focused time you need to complete them. If you prefer digital, you can use a tool like Sunsama, Amie, Routine or Kosmotime for planning.

Preparing for a vacation or planned day off? Use your status or calendar to let your teammates know a week or two in advance about your absence. This helps them to act accordingly and ensure that they don’t disturb you during your time away. Range, Pause and Nook are some tools that can serve this purpose.

Block your calendar, update your status

Time blocking your calendar for deep work is a great exercise to control your schedule. Coding, writing, designing and strategizing are all cognitively demanding activities that require long periods of deep focus. Your most productive hours should be used to accomplish such tasks.

And more importantly, make sure that your teammates can see your calendar so that they know what your day looks like.

Added to that, updating your Slack status to DND with a customized status mentioning that you’re working on an important task is a great way to let your teammates know that they should not be expecting quick replies.

Make thoughtful communication

Learn to differentiate between urgent and non-urgent communication. Your urgent question may be interrupting your teammate from an important task. 90% of things are not urgent and don’t need a quick response.

Dig deeper to see if you can find the answer to the question yourself.

If you do need to ask, formulate your message in a way that gives context and links to relevant documents with a clear CTA of what exactly you need from them. If it’s a time-sensitive task, let them know when your deadline is.

Say yes to fewer meetings

Having more meetings or jumping on an impromptu meeting should not be the default.

Meetings tend to eat into the best hours of a maker’s day. The majority of the workforce in a company are individual contributors who operate on the maker’s schedule.

As Paul Graham mentions in his essay, “When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. But in addition, there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't.”

Studies show that it takes a person 23 minutes to get back on track once they are interrupted. So, think twice before you send your teammate that message next time.

Proper written communication is the way to go for async. Default to writing whenever possible and schedule meetings if and only if it is absolutely necessary.

Document everything

Having a central knowledge base for internal documentation that everyone on the team has access to is a must for successful async communication. It also makes it easier to reference past discussions and decisions since it’s all available in writing. Notion is a great tool to document everything and get knowledge out of silos.

A central knowledge hub would include details about the product, processes, guides, culture and anything and everything the team should be well informed about. GitLab’s Handbook is probably the best resource out there that encompasses everything that should be documented.

Closing thoughts

Embracing async communication at work requires transparency and proper communication and it doesn’t happen overnight. It is a philosophy that needs to be adopted gradually and constantly improved upon.

If your organization currently has a synchronous style of working, you don’t have to look further to discover why your employee productivity is a mess.

Transitioning to async does come with its challenges but the most successful companies are making the shift to allow teams to produce their best possible work.

It’s time we embrace productivity over constant communication.

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Thank you for taking the time to read. Until next time! ✌️

It's been a year since I switched from Chrome to Sidekick. The aesthetics and user experience is the best I've seen and it's everything you could ask for in a browser. Heck, it even solves problems that I knew I had but didn't think could be resolved!

And switching from Chrome was a breeze. Since Sidekick is built on top of the open-source Chromium framework, migrating my Google account, bookmarks and extensions was a super easy and quick process.

There are a couple of things that make Sidekick a major upgrade from Chrome or any other browser out there.

But first, let me give you an idea of what's wrong with Chrome.

Chrome: The flawed market leader

There's no doubt that Chrome is certainly a crowd favourite. The way it displaced Internet Explorer and Firefox in the span of a few years to become the market leader is nothing short of phenomenal.

Back in 2008, Chrome sure was a fresh take on the browser. More people were spending their time working inside a browser and Google had the vision to develop it with rich, interactive web applications in mind.

However, Chrome does have its flaws.

Chrome has been in the news for all the wrong reasons when it comes to privacy. Last year, when the Apple Store app privacy labels came out, all eyes turned to the advertising giant to see what data is being collected and they didn't disappoint.

It was found that Chrome's data harvesting practices were quite out of the ordinary. Chrome collects data fields like location, identifiers, search & browsing history, and a lot more and links all of them to a user's identity. This is a genuine threat to a user's privacy and a serious reason why you should consider quitting Chrome. You can read more about the privacy concerns here.

Secondly, it eats up a lot of memory and makes it really difficult to work on your PC if you're running multiple apps at the same time. Tab suspender extensions can solve this problem up to an extent but it's still scrappy.

And finally, tab clutter! Ever find yourself getting lost in all the open tabs in your browser?

I've seen folks running north of 50+ tabs and multiple Chrome windows to keep hold of all the tabs they need for pending tasks.

Well, if you're someone who takes privacy seriously and resonate with the issues I mentioned above, you'll fall in love with Sidekick.

Let me explain what makes Sidekick a Chrome killer.

Built-in ad blocker & fingerprinting defense

The one thing I absolutely love about Sidekick is its commitment to user privacy. They are not in the advertising business and have all the necessary features built into the browser to safeguard a user's privacy.

This includes a built-in ad blocker to block trackers from following you around the web and for removing ads from websites. The browser also comes with a fingerprinting defense to block third parties from identifying details about you like the browser you use, computer hardware & software information, etc.

A user's private data such as browsing history, cookies and passwords are all stored locally and with a subscription-based model (includes a free plan), Sidekick has a clear business model that's not reliant on harvesting user data for monetary benefits like Chrome.

Work in apps instead of tabs

The average number of apps used by a modern worker is 9 and most of these run inside the browser. But Chrome is not designed to make your life easier to work with apps. When everything has to be a tab, staying organised gets a bit difficult. Especially if you use a lot of web apps, 5 tabs can quickly become 10 or 15 in no time.

With Sidekick, you have a workspace to add all the apps you use and pin the most frequently used apps in your sidebar. This means that you can switch between them easily without needing any open tabs. Time to say goodbye to tab clutter!

Sidekick also features an AI tab suspender to free memory by automatically suspending unused tabs.

Another interesting feature is that you can be logged into different accounts for an app even if it is not natively supported.

For example, if you're on multiple Slack workspaces, you can be logged into all accounts at the same time and switch between them easily. On a Chrome browser, you'll need to log out from an account and log in to the next one or have multiple incognito tabs to manage multiple accounts for an app.

Save your sessions for later

The most practical feature that was missing in a browser. Period.

Sessions in Sidekick allow you to save all your open tabs for later use. This feature is super helpful when you have pending tasks that you want to come back to or if you need to use certain tabs throughout the week for certain tasks. With a single click, you can restore all the tabs in a session and switch between sessions whenever you want to.

Happens to be my favourite feature on Sidekick. When I was using Chrome, this was something I constantly struggled with.

A lightning-fast search function

Having all your apps inside the Sidekick browser gives you one incredible superpower – a lightning-fast global search function.

Just hit Alt + S and search across your history, tabs, documents, apps and quickly find what you're looking for. It really makes everything accessible and saves a lot of time when you want to pull something up.

Wrapping up

I cannot emphasise enough the impact Sidekick has had on my day to day workflow. It's wild that something like this didn't exist before!

When Sidekick launched in December 2020, it felt like a Christmas present as I went playing around with it. There are many subtle features in Sidekick that I haven't touched upon. I'll let you discover them on your own ;)

You should probably give it a try and say goodbye to the data sucking giant called Google Chrome. Sign up for Sidekick – it's free to get started!

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That's all folks! If you liked this article, consider sharing it with a friend. That would really mean the world to me! :)

Thanks to Allen for reviewing the draft of this article.

YouTube has grown to become the home for videos on the internet.

Whether it be tutorials on how to go about doing something, content that keeps us entertained, or if we'd like to dig deeper into a specific topic, there's probably a video available for it on YouTube. The possibilities are endless.

If you’re on YouTube on a regular basis, you must be aware of how bizarre YouTube's recommended videos can be.

It often delivers good content that overlaps with our interests and helps us discover new creators, but occasionally, the recommendations are borderline criminal.

YouTube makes all of its money from advertisements, just like Facebook. More ads mean more revenue for YouTube.

So, at the end of the day, they want you to spend as much time as possible on the platform. And to keep people engaged, YouTube utilizes a strong recommendation system powered by AI. According to Neal Mohan, the company’s Chief Product Officer, over 70% of the time people spent on YouTube is spent watching recommended videos.

While what's under the hood of the YouTube recommendation algorithm is largely unknown to the public, there’s information available regarding how it operates on a high level.

If you'd like to learn more about how the algorithm works (from a technical standpoint), I'd suggest you check out this article.

Now, let's take a closer look at the problems with YouTube's recommendation system.

Engaging content ≠ what users want

Guillaume Chaslot, an ex-software engineer at Google used to work on improving YouTube's recommendation algorithm. While working on this project, he was able to witness the dark sides of the algorithm first-hand.

He now heads a non-profit called algotransparency with a mission to expose the impact of the most influential algorithms.

He points out that the motivation behind Youtube's recommendation algorithm is deeply flawed and it's not really aligned with what the user wants.

According to Chaslot, “The AI isn't built to help you get what you want – it's built to get you addicted to YouTube. Recommendations were designed to waste your time.”

The way YouTube achieves this is by optimizing its algorithm for expected watch time. The algorithm tracks and measures the viewing habits of an individual, pools similar users and then finds and recommends other videos that they will engage with.

But, since the AI is told to optimize for watch time, it doesn't necessarily reflect what the user wants.

It might be great for a company trying to generate more revenue via ads. That's why the AI favours longer videos that also return the best watch time. The longer the video length, the more ads YouTube can push to the user in between.

Due to the preference for watch time, on one side we have cat videos, baby videos, etc, ranking up in the algorithm. But at the same time, we also see a lot of shocking and controversial videos- conspiracy theories, hate speech, fake news, etc. spreading on the platform.

Controversial content grabs a user's attention and gets longer watch times, hence gaining priority in the algorithm.

With people relying more and more on YouTube as their single source of information consumption, recommendations can push people further to extremes — whether they want it or not — just because it’s in YouTube’s interest to keep pushing whatever content they deem engaging so that we keep watching for as long as possible.

Controversial content on YouTube

YouTube's recommendation system has been repeatedly accused of being designed to send people down rabbit holes of disinformation and extremism.

The platform has come under scrutiny for promoting terrorist content, foreign state-sponsored propaganda, extreme hatred and a number of conspiracy theories.

Mozilla started a campaign called #YouTubeRegrets, gathering stories from the public about videos that skewed their recommendations and led them down bizarre or dangerous paths.

After watching a video about Vikings, a user was recommended content about white supremacy. Another user shares their experience of starting out watching a boxing match. YouTube then went on to recommend the user videos of street fights, then accidents, and urban violence.

You can read the most alarming stories compiled by Mozilla about people who went down rabbit holes they never meant to go down. It's disturbing and equally eye-opening at the same time.

Mozilla has since come out seeking help from YouTube users to research more about the algorithm.

They developed an add-on called RegretsReporter that allows users to report controversial recommendations.

Mozilla pointed out that the harm that algorithm-driven content enables is not easily seen or understood because all of it happens in private. Insights from the RegretsReporter extension help Mozilla to hold YouTube accountable for the AI developed to power their recommendation systems.

Final thoughts

YouTube continues to leave independent researchers in the dark by not providing meaningful data to study the issue and help them improve the recommendation system. Moreover, users have limited options to control the recommendations they receive on the platform.

Added to that, as a user it's quite difficult to pass on clickbaity borderline content on YouTube. By engaging with such content, we give a positive signal to the algorithm and it gets boosted.

The way in which YouTube is capable of narrowing a user’s content exposure and ultimately shifting their worldview is frightening and something that we should all be aware of while navigating the platform.

One thing that you can do to improve your privacy on YouTube is to pause your YouTube history. By doing so, your recommendations will be less based on your watch history and more dependent on the channels you’re subscribed to.

There’s no reason to let a company profit from selling our attention- by exploiting the basic human desire of wanting to dig deeper into what engages us.

And it comes down to each one of us to be mindful and navigate YouTube responsibly.

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Thanks for making it till the end. If you found this useful, please do consider sharing it with your friends. I spent a few good hours researching the topic and writing this article.

Thanks to Gopika for reviewing the draft of this article.