Everybody wants to rule the world. Tears for Fears said it, but people were saying it long before that. But how do you manage to stay disciplined in a world where we can't tell distractions from hobbies?
There's a growing rise in screen time because the algorithms that platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube use are just too good. Short-form video (SFV) viewing rates have skyrocketed because of the "recommendation accuracy, serendipity, and perceived effortlessness" that these platforms offer through their complex designs. They can keep you locked in for hours - according to Pew Research Center, a study of 5022 US adults surveyed in 2025 relevealed that among them:
- 50% use Instagram
- 37% use TikTok
- A whopping 84% use YouTube
These are startlingly high numbers, even for a small sample size. It is certainly reflective of a larger demographic and is undoubtedly a persistent pattern. But the issue is that even with the changes that we can clearly see being implemented to ruin our attention spans, it feels like there's more work to do than usual.
The thing is, I don't just want to write some generic blog post about discipline in the modern day. You read the title - that's not what this is about. I want to write about the phenomenon that I am living through, and that I am sure you are too, where it feels like there's so much out there for us to do and accomplish every day that feels genuinely impossible with all of the technology we have actively working to steal our time.
People around me ask me all the time: "Nava, how do you get so much done? Do you have more hours in a day than I do?"
But the truth is that I really don't get all that much done relative to everything I want to do. I'm not diminishing my own projects and accomplishments, don't get me wrong - I consistently challenge myself, and this website itself is a testament to my relentless, unforgiving, aggressive drive to accomplish the things I want. But there's also about a million things that I want to do which feel so out of reach to me because it feels like there's just too much working against me and getting in my way.
Have you ever heard of the 50 page rule? According to Nancy Pearl, you should give any book the grace of reading it's first 50 pages before you decide to give up.
Now here's the thing: I hate wasted time. I'm a utilitarian, and I do consider the sunk cost fallacy to be something to live by to optimize time and money, but sometimes I just can't bring myself to abide by this. Why? Honestly, BOREDOM!
I get told a lot that I'm bursting at the seams with energy and hyperactivity, which definitely does contribute to my ability to accomplish a lot in a day. A cognitive assessment that I had done on me 3 years ago actually revealed that my brain processes information in the 99th percentile of speed. That's pretty damn fast.
Is my brain like a GPU? When you want to accelerate a GPU, you should actually give it more operations/more to do. Giving a GPU less to do, and things that could easily just be offloaded to a CPU, can slow it down and deteriorate performance.. When I'm not that busy (which is rare because I'm usually fixated on something all the time), I find that I'm a lot more stressed than when I'm functionining at maximum capacity. When I have a million things to do, I can't think too hard about any one of them in particular, and I end up feeling a lot more calm, in a weird way.
But here's the thing: that's all fun and games, and I think I've got it all figured out, until I realize that there's a serious lack of leisure time in my schedule book. I'm constantly doing something "productive" and I don't award myself enough downtime. Back to the GPU drawing board we go: this is kind of like performance degradation when your GPU overheats.
They say that identifying a problem is the hardest part of problem-solving as a whole. That's all fun and games, and sure, I do see some truth in that, but what exactly am I supposed to do next?
The way I feed my brain is by constantly giving it more and more to do: Nava reads difficult books. Nava plays sudoku. Nava develops an app she's had in her brain for months. Nava starts writing a blog. Nava... starts a podcast?
One of the things I've really wanted to do for the longest time but had all the distractions in the world preventing me from doing is starting a podcast or a YouTube channel. I have so much in my brain that I need to get out there, and I really want to be able to do that in a way that is constructive, benefits me, and challenges me as a person.
That's why I wanted to start The Nava Show to be able to just talk as much as I want about whatever I want in a way that helps me genuinely get out of my comfort zone. This is a pretty vulnerable moment for me, but even if nobody is listening, or reading this for that matter, I hope that this brings me even an inch closer to meeting my personal goals.
Is my brain like a GPU? Well, we'll have to see!