Whenever a new year starts, it always feels like everyone is keen to reinvent themselves. As soon as January 1 (or perhaps 2, or perhaps whenever you go back to work or school) rolls around, we tell ourselves that this is our year. We look at productivity blogs and YouTube videos for advice and we put new systems into place to try and improve our lives in some way. This year, I had a new time blocking system for my day where composing was aside for a sacred hour in the mornings. In previous years, I hadn’t been composing as much as I would like, and I thought this was a good way to warm into the day with something creative to get my juices flowing.

Unfortunately, this lasted all of one week before I got injured. While I hope to get back to my productive ways later this week, I still find myself so tired in the recovery process. I sleep for 10 hours every night while my body tries to repair my ankle, which is far more than I usually would. My days are tiring, but I have some thoughts on that which I might explore in a later post.

Today, though, I’d like to cover a useful way to set habits with technology. See, while I’m inactive over the next 5 weeks, I have to inject a medication which stops me getting blood clots. I have to take it at approximately the same time every day. I have a good incentive to do this; if untreated, blood clots can lead to serious medical complications (and even death). To help me with this, I set up a reminder in the Health app on my phone. I was quite impressed with this app, having only used it for sleep focus usually (I don’t have an Apple Watch, which limits me in the usefulness of the app). The app dings me every night at 8.20pm, which then leads to me asking my girlfriend to go and get the medication for me (sadly, it is hard for me to carry things on crutches). But of course, every app can send a notification these days, meaning we often ignore the buzzes we get. So why is this so effective for me?

A few years ago, I cleaned out the notifications on my phone. I had one rule: an app could only send me a message if it was a real person. So an app like Messenger was fine, and the messaging component of Instagram is allowed, but any notifications about likes or comments, or FaceBook updates, or Duolingo notifications, etc. wasn’t allowed. I also banned all email notifications. Since then, I’ve expanded this slightly. Now, I allow “useful” notifications, like my pomodoro timer, to let me know when 25 minutes have elapsed or this Health app, or even something like reminders would be OK (but I tend not to use Reminders, instead just checking my to do lists or reminders when I need to). This means there is no garbage in my notifications — every notification that I get is either an actual person, not a corporation, who is talking to me, or a very important reminder (like, hey, take this medication so you don’t get a blood clot and die).

Why not try this if you’re after a way to set new habits? I also find my brain is less cluttered when my phone is not constantly pining for my attention. Do you have any other tricks for setting habits? I’d love to hear about them either by email or in the comments below.