Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City.

Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.

From WNYC, this is New Text City. We're digital gets personal.

I'm Anouche Summerodi and welcome to the Board and Brilliant project,

where we are rethinking our relationship with our phones and jump starting our creativity.

This is Challenge Week, it's day number one. Over 14,000 people have signed up.

And we've been measuring how much we usually use our phones, we've been using some partner apps,

and we are averaging just under two hours a day of screen time.

So that is our baseline. Now we're going to try some challenges and see what happens to that number.

Here's what some of you told us as you prepared for this week.

To prepare for the week of being Board and Brilliant, I have been going on a cell phone binge,

and getting my fix as much as possible before the challenge begins.

I haven't done much to prepare except download the app, and I've been looking at it every so often,

and crying over my terrible usage statistics.

I've been practicing leaving my phone at my desk when I get up to do things around the office.

Those were Board and Brilliant participants, Francis Coco, Eli Mendel, and Amanda Katz.

Now some instructions.

Okay, so for the next six mornings, here's what's going to happen.

You're going to start your morning with a Board and Brilliant mini podcast.

Each mini podcast will explain your mission, your challenge for the day.

And these challenges have been designed to guide you through a week of rethinking your relationship with your phone

to start discovering the lost start of spacing out, and then have some big ideas.

...