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How To Stop Wasting Time On Chat

The art of tiered communication with WhatsApp and other messaging apps

Niklas Göke
Better Humans
Published in
6 min readDec 12, 2017

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Over the last seven days, 53% of my iPhone’s battery usage has gone to messaging apps. About five and a half hours.

What’s surprising is that this is a lot for someone who uses his phone very little, but even more so that it’s still below average. Up to 65% of the 5 hours we spend on hour phones each day go to communication. Here’s a random sample of messages I sent in the past week:

"yo!"
"haha!"
"yes, that's right"
"this sucks"
"let's wait and see"
"I'm not sure"
"it doesn't matter"
"are you sure?"
"hmm"
"whatever"
"yeah, right"

Scanning your recent chat history, how many of those would you find? More than half? While this doesn’t show the full picture, it’s enough to show that much of digital communication isn’t communication at all.

But what is it then?

The Purpose of Mindless Communication

As Tim Pychyl notes, procrastination is mostly a problem that results from mismangement of emotions:

“Avoidance acts as short-term mood repair. It works in the short term but not in the long term. We may escape the task and its associated negative emotions — like anxiety, frustration, resentment, or boredom — but the task doesn’t go away.”

It’s easy to file digital communication under ‘productive uses of my time,’ because you can tick a mental checkbox each time you hit send. However, since so much of it is meaningless filler, it appears that most messages benefit the sender more than the recipient: mindless communication calms us down.

Whether the source of negative emotion is mere frustration with the task at hand or sudden awareness of a bigger problem in our lives, the outcome remains the same. Your present self gets off the hook, while future you pays the price.

As a result, we spend so much of our working day repairing our mood that by the time it’s fixed, the working day is over.

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I write for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. Read my daily blog here: https://nik.art/