Case Study 01 — Chapter 39: Technology, Social Media...

Jordan: The Audit

Context

Jordan has been in the CJC initiative for eight months. The second phase is in full production. The running group is a fixture. The relationship with Dev has entered a quieter, more sustained chapter — not dramatic resolution, but accumulated small repairs. The session with Dr. Nalini where Jordan named the compulsive work behavior (Chapter 33) happened nine months ago. The time mastery principles from Chapter 23 are practiced, imperfectly, but practiced.

There is, however, one thing Jordan has not examined.

The phone.

The Trigger

It starts with Rivera.

They're in the cafeteria between the cross-departmental leads meeting and a one-on-one, eating quickly. Jordan is mid-sentence about a vendor timeline when Rivera sets down his coffee cup and says, not unkindly:

"You're more present in meetings than you used to be."

Jordan looks up. "What do you mean?"

"You used to check your phone about every fifteen minutes, even in the middle of a point. You've stopped. I noticed maybe six weeks ago."

Jordan starts to say I didn't realize you noticed, then catches it. Receives it. "Thank you for saying that."

Rivera shrugs. "I'm telling you because whatever you did, it's working. I track these things. You're more present."

Jordan drives home that evening thinking about it. More present. Which implies there was a period of significant non-presence. How long had that been going on? And was the phone behavior that Rivera noticed actually the tip of something larger?

The question is more uncomfortable than it should be.

The First Audit: Collecting the Data

Jordan already uses iOS Screen Time for a productivity experiment from Chapter 23's work. Has never examined it closely. Opens it for the first time with genuine attention.

Week 1 data:

Total daily screen time: 4 hours 47 minutes (average)
Breakdown: Social / entertainment — 2 hours 3 minutes; Productivity — 1 hour 12 minutes; Communication — 58 minutes; Information/news — 34 minutes
Pickups per day: 68 (range: 51–89)
First pickup: 6:47 AM (before coffee; before getting out of bed)
Last use: 11:23 PM (in bed; lights off)
Longest phone-free stretch: 2 hours 11 minutes (Thursday — a long run plus shower)

Jordan stares at the numbers for a while.

The estimated screen time had been two hours. The actual is nearly five. The pickup count is particularly disorienting: 68 times per day. That's once every thirteen minutes during waking hours. Sixty-eight times. Most of them, Jordan realizes, without any conscious intention to pick it up.

The first and last use times map onto something from Chapter 33's compulsive work behavior audit: the phone is the first input of the day before any deliberate thought, and the last experience before sleep. Whatever is entering the system at 6:47 AM is shaping the morning before Jordan has made a single conscious choice about what it should contain.

The Second Audit: Mapping Against Values

Jordan has a laminated card from Chapter 11's values exercise in the desk drawer. Five core values: Competence, Intellectual Freedom, Impact, Authenticity, Connection and Care.

He builds the grid.

Competence — Being highly skilled and continually developing mastery; bringing full capability to what matters

How digital behavior serves this: Productivity apps, calendar management, LinkedIn reading (occasionally useful professional development), access to research
How digital behavior conflicts: Gloria Mark's 47-second attention span finding. Jordan has a version of that. The deep analysis work he's most proud of — the CJC financial modeling, the evaluation framework built with Rivera — required extended uninterrupted focus that he protected carefully. The habitual phone-checking pattern produces constant micro-interruptions to that capacity. The Monday mornings spent in a social media drift before getting to the actually important work.
Net score: −2 (modest negative; productivity tools help but attention fragmentation costs more)

Intellectual Freedom — Pursuing ideas without constraint; forming independent views; thinking for myself

How digital behavior serves this: Genuine access to ideas. Jordan reads widely and credits some of the perspective shifts in the last year to articles found through curated feeds.
How digital behavior conflicts: The information environment audit (Exercise 39.7) is sobering. Jordan's news and commentary consumption is predominantly from sources that confirm the professional and cultural sensibility he already holds. When did he last read something that genuinely disrupted an assumption? The filter bubble question is not abstract. The algorithmic amplification of outrage — the Brady et al. finding about moral-emotional words — Jordan recognizes his own reaction pattern. The posts that produce the strongest pull toward engagement are the ones that confirm moral certainty. He clicks. He shares. Rarely does he leave these interactions more curious, more uncertain, more open. Usually he leaves confirmed.
Net score: −1 (genuine access to ideas, but information environment is more insular than values would endorse)

Impact — Producing meaningful change in teams, organizations, communities

How digital behavior serves this: Communication tools are genuinely necessary for coordination. LinkedIn is a legitimate professional presence.
How digital behavior conflicts: The deep work/shallow work distinction from Chapter 23 appears here in sharp relief. The work that has produced the most genuine impact — the CJC proposal, the evaluation framework, the team restructuring — required sustained analytical attention. The phone-checking pattern that Rivera named, the morning social media drift, the notification-driven interruption of afternoon thinking time: these are direct subtractions from impact capacity. Not abstract, counterfactual subtractions. Actual hours with actual opportunity costs.
Net score: −2 (communication tools necessary; attention fragmentation directly costs impact capacity)

Authenticity — Presenting my genuine self; not performing for approval

This is the uncomfortable one.

Jordan thinks about the LinkedIn presence. The posts about the CJC initiative — worded carefully to position well, tagged correctly, written with awareness of who would read it. Not dishonest. But not quite the same as what Jordan would say in a private conversation with Rivera about the same work. The gap between the presented version and the experienced version is not large, but it is real.

More honestly: Jordan watches the likes and comments on LinkedIn posts. Is aware of it. Checks back. The number of people who engage with a post about the initiative produces something — not quite pride, not quite reassurance, more like a relief that the performance landed. This is the quantified social feedback loop the chapter describes. Jordan has been inside it without naming it.

How digital behavior serves this: Selective transparency is sometimes appropriate. Professional presence is legitimate.
How digital behavior conflicts: The performance layer is real. The monitoring of reception is real. The gap between presented self and experienced self — particularly around the received professional identity vs. the actual uncertainty of the work — is something the digital environment amplifies by rewarding the polished version.
Net score: −2 (professional presence legitimate; performance-monitoring loop is a direct conflict with this value)

Connection and Care — Genuine sustained investment in relationships; being fully present with people I love

Rivera's comment comes back. More present than you used to be.

Jordan thinks about Dev. The meals where both of them were technically together but Jordan was monitoring the phone for work messages. The conversations that would have gone deeper if Jordan had not been partially elsewhere. The running group — Leon and Chen — where Jordan has been increasingly present because runs are, by necessity, phone-free. The quality difference is noticeable.

How digital behavior serves this: Text and video calling genuinely maintain long-distance relationships. The running group social coordination. Occasional genuinely connective exchanges.
How digital behavior conflicts: The partial presence pattern. The monitoring behavior during shared time. The substitution of social media browsing — other people's curated lives — for actually reaching out to the people Jordan cares about. Time logged scrolling vs. time logged in actual conversations.
Net score: −3 (the partial presence pattern is the most direct conflict with the most important value)

Total values alignment score: −10

Jordan puts the grid down.

The negative score is not a surprise, but the weight of it accumulates. Across every value, digital behavior costs more than it serves. The costs are not catastrophic. But they are consistent. And they point in the same direction.

The Third Audit: What the Phone Checking Is Actually About

Dr. Nalini, in the session three weeks later, asks the question Jordan has been avoiding.

"When you pick up the phone — the sixty-eight times a day — what are you looking for?"

Jordan considers it. "I don't know. I don't think I'm looking for anything specific."

"What do you feel just before you pick it up?"

Long pause. "Slightly uncomfortable. Like there's something unfinished."

"And when you check?"

"Either something was there — which provides brief satisfaction — or nothing was there, which means I need to check again in a few minutes."

Dr. Nalini: "What does 'nothing was there' feel like?"

Jordan stops. "Like I'm not quite real. Like the day isn't quite happening."

That's the honest answer. The phone checking isn't information-seeking. It's an existence check. A continuous low-level inquiry: Am I landing? Am I registering? Is anything responding to me? The variable-ratio reinforcement schedule delivers occasional confirmations — a like, a message, a notification of some kind — enough to maintain the behavior at high frequency.

Jordan journals that night: The phone is doing something emotional, not informational. The question is what the underlying need is and whether the phone is meeting it or substituting for meeting it.

The answer, with the values audit in front of him, is fairly clear. The underlying need is for connection, impact, and confirmation that the work matters. The phone's response to that need is intermittent, shallow, and maintains its own seeking rather than satisfying it. Actual Rivera conversations, actual runs with Leon and Chen, actual focused work that produces real results — these satisfy the underlying needs. The phone provides a simulation that cycles back to more checking.

The Design: Four Specific Changes

Jordan doesn't approach this as a total overhaul. Chapter 29's habit principles apply: small, specific, structural, tied to implementation intentions.

Change 1 — Temporal containment of social media

Implementation intention: "When I am about to open LinkedIn or news apps, I will check whether it is after 5:30 PM. If not, I will close the app and redirect to the actual task."

Practical: no social media before 5:30 PM on workdays. This is already a principle from Chapter 23 that Jordan has applied imperfectly. Make it structural by removing apps from the home screen and placing them three screens deep.

Change 2 — Phone out of the bedroom

Jordan has known this one for a year. The first and last use times (6:47 AM, 11:23 PM) are direct products of the phone being on the nightstand. The chapter's research is unambiguous: the mere presence of the phone captures attention.

Implementation: phone charges in the kitchen. Alarm clock (actual clock, purchased that week) replaces phone as morning alarm.

Dev's response: "Thank god. I've been wanting to say something about that for two years."

Jordan: "Why didn't you?"

Dev: "I didn't think you'd hear it before you were ready to hear it."

Change 3 — Genuine presence protocol for shared time

Implementation intention: "When I sit down with Dev for dinner, I will put my phone in the kitchen drawer before sitting. When I arrive at the running group, I will put my phone in the bottom of my bag before anyone arrives."

This is not a rule about never checking. It's a structural commitment: certain contexts are designated present-time contexts. The phone's physical location enforces the intention.

Change 4 — Social comparison curation

Jordan spends ninety minutes on a Saturday unfollowing and muting. The exercise from Chapter 39 produces the honest categories: habitual (many), aspirational (some — inspire nothing, produce mild comparison), negative comparison (three accounts that reliably produce inadequacy without corresponding motivation).

What remains after the curation is noticeably smaller. The feed, when Jordan opens it at 5:30 PM after the temporal containment, contains mostly actual content from actual people Jordan knows, occasional information he genuinely values, and nothing that produces the familiar downward social comparison pull.

The Assessment: Thirty Days Out

Jordan sends Rivera a message thirty days later. Not about work. Just: The phone thing you mentioned — I did something about it. Thanks for saying it.

Rivera: Results?

Jordan: The deep analysis work is better. Dev says I'm more present. I check the phone about thirty-five times a day now instead of sixty-eight. I still check thirty-five times a day, which is thirty-five more than I'd like. But the direction is right.

Rivera: Small wins.

Jordan: Small wins.

In the next Dr. Nalini session, Jordan says something that surprises him in the saying: "I spent twenty-plus years building an external tracking system for my own significance. The phone was the most efficient version of it. What I'm building instead is harder — it requires actually trusting that the work matters whether or not anyone confirms it in the next fifteen minutes."

Dr. Nalini: "What would it mean to trust that?"

Jordan, after a long pause: "I'd have to stop checking."

Next section: Amara examines what clinical work looks like in a digitally fragmented world — and what the attention economy is doing to the adolescent clients she is beginning to see.

Case Study 01 — Chapter 39: Technology, Social Media, and the Digital Self