The same way you plan a "cheat day" or make an agreement with yourself that you'll only have X number of desserts or Y number of drinks each week, the same goes with your attention. Email should be a consciously-chosen activity done at a specific time to maximize its purpose. It's not something you compulsively refresh every 30 seconds. Same goes for social media. Same goes for entertainment.

Below are the guidelines that I try to stick to and are working well in my life. Obviously, everyone's mileage will vary:

Email twice per day – I try to limit myself to two email blocks each day. Once in the morning and once at the end of the day in the afternoon. The morning session I only look at and respond to important/urgent emails. The afternoon, a couple times a week, I'll clear my whole inbox.

Social Media 30 minutes per day – This is a work in progress for me. I'm fine on my work computer, the problem is my phone. I still get caught on those loops of: refresh Twitter, refresh Facebook, refresh Instagram, refresh Twitter, and on and on. I recently removed Facebook from my phone (per above guidelines), but Twitter and Instagram still suck me in.

Entertainment only at certain hours – I'm pretty much too busy and traveling too much to get hardcore about this anyway. But once things calm down in my life, I may experiment with this. See below for methods of planning this out.

Leave phone out of office during the day and bedroom at night – I'm good about leaving it out of the office when I need to write. The bedroom is still an issue for me.

OK, this is all fine and dandy, but how the hell do we keep to this? Everyone talks shit about social media… while scrolling compulsively on social media. How do we actually implement these concepts into our lives? Because that's the most important part.