I am too many things at the same time, and it takes its toll. Family and friends in Europe, business in Americas, being a boss to 25 people, having numerous clients to answer to.

Burnout is real – here is the way how to contain it

The main thing is to control your mind. You can only burn out if you give in. There are ways to take more control over yourself.

So I started to insulate myself away from distractions and dopamine chase. And here’s how I did it:

Compartmentalization of your digital experience – second phone

When you are doing so many things, you need to separate things out. One of the first things was the fact I got a second smartphone.

My second smartphone at first was containing fun distractions and separated them from business ones. The idea was so that I can take a break.

But taking a break from distractions with even more distractions didn’t make sense to me after a while.

At the next point, I’ve muted all notifications on the secondary phone and turned it into low to no notifications tablet almost.

The goal of this was to create an environment where I can produce deep work and not get distracted. If you wonder how successful it was, this blog post should serve as a proof. It allowed me to turn my smartphone into a blogging tool.

Other hardware environment

Besides two smartphones, there is Mac Mini sitting on my desk, retired PC mining ⛏️ rig, an iPad, a Macbook Pro, Lenovo Yoga Linux powered laptop, and an Apple watch that I barely use.

I enjoy having all this technology. It is my work and play environment. Out of all these devices, I am feeling the happiest at my desk.

Software environment

However software is where it is at, because most of the applications I use are cross platform. They provide the real context to my work.

Here are the applications that I use on daily basis:

Omnifocus – for personal offline task management

Notion – for artificial intelligence prompts, management team, wikis and company wide note sharing

Evernote – for personal notes and research work.

Drafts app – for text entry, ideas and notes

Obsidian and Alpha Cloud (our self hosted version of Dropbox) – where I store text file notes for portability. It is also AI free environment for me

Hubstaff productivity suite for managing the company

Tweet Hunter and Buffer for creating and curating content

WordPress for blogging

There is so much more I need to cover, but I think this is a good starting reference. This raw blog post needs to be reshaped in a better format for Alpha Efficiency main blog at some point.