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- #260: 2 Reasons Why We Break Promises To Ourselves, By A Psychologist
#260: 2 Reasons Why We Break Promises To Ourselves, By A Psychologist
We have lost so much of ourselves to smartphones: can we get it back?
Jenae Spry
February 13, 2026
Productivity Stacks Newsletter
Issue No. 260
The Best in Evidence-Based Productivity
for Small Business Owners, Freelancers & Founders
Helping You Work Smarter and Live More
The Rundown
2 Reasons Why We Break Promises To Ourselves, By A Psychologist
YouTube Algorithm 2025: How to Get Your Videos Recommended
We have lost so much of ourselves to smartphones: can we get it back?
I finally changed these hidden Gmail settings, and I wish I had done it sooner
OpenAI Begins Testing Ads In ChatGPT For Free And Go Users
👉Did you miss an issue? Check out previous Productivity Stacks issues anytime here
🔥Quote/Prompt
The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
Use the quote as a writing or thinking prompt to finish your week strong.
A bit from mine:
(posted in our Doer Entrepreneurs Free Community — off social media)
This is for anyone who might need this reminder today. We've got this! 💪💪
Did someone forward this to you?
📈 Performance
You'll show up on time for a client meeting but skip your own morning workout. You'll deliver that project to a customer but let your business development tasks slide for weeks. If this sounds familiar, you're not failing at discipline. You're experiencing a hardwired psychological pattern where promises to others carry social weight while promises to ourselves feel optional. Understanding why this happens is the first step to actually following through on those business goals that only you are tracking.
"Promises aren't just spontaneous commitments that we make, they are strategic social tools we use to maintain our relationships. We keep them not only because we value others' trust, but also because breaking them can damage our reputation and, by extension, our interpersonal relationships. This creates an external incentive that goes far beyond our internal judgments. In addition to the social cost, promises to others also activate our neural circuits tied to social reward and identity, flagging the act as a social transgression. This is not just 'feeling guilty;' it's hardwired emotional processing tied to cooperation and trust."
Key Insights:
Promises to others come with immediate social costs like reputation damage and relationship strain, while self-promises have no external observer to witness your failure. This means the psychological pressure to follow through on client work is fundamentally stronger than the pressure to work on your own business strategy, even though the latter might be more important long-term.
When you promise your future self something like starting that marketing campaign next week, you're treating your future self like a stranger. Research shows we don't feel a strong connection to our future selves, which is why we prioritize immediate comfort over long-term benefit when there's no external accountability involved.
Self-promises tied only to long-term outcomes tend to fail because there's no immediate psychological reward. A 2025 study found people are more successful at sticking with personal goals when the process itself is enjoyable, not just when the outcome is desirable, which explains why "I should do this for my business" rarely works as motivation.
Read the full article for evidence-based strategies to close the gap between self-promise and action, including how to externalize your commitments, reduce psychological distance to your future self, and make important tasks intrinsically enjoyable instead of just important.
⚙️ Optimization
I've been researching YouTube heavily in preparation for relaunching my channel, and this breakdown is stellar. It was written a few months ago, but if you're working on YouTube as part of your business or considering it, this is truly a great overview of what has happened and why it might be worth your time. The platform changed more in 2024 than in the previous five years combined, and for the first time, YouTube is actively promoting channels under 500 subscribers alongside established creators. That's a massive shift for business owners testing video content.
"YouTube now analyzes your videos the same way a human would watch them. The platform uses generative AI models, including technology from Google's Gemini, to understand tone, on-screen elements, and what your video is actually about. What YouTube's AI can now detect: Whether your presentation style is beginner-friendly or advanced. Text overlays, graphics, and facial expressions on screen. Audio patterns like speaking pace, music choice, background noise. The actual topic and mood, not just what your title claims. This kills the old SEO playbook. A video titled 'SEO Tips SEO Guide SEO Tutorial 2025' performs worse than '3 SEO Mistakes Costing You Traffic' because YouTube's AI recognizes the second title as more specific and viewer-focused."
Key Insights:
YouTube doesn't have one algorithm, it has three separate systems for search, home feed recommendations, and Shorts. Optimizing for the wrong one wastes effort, like trying to SEO your way to Shorts success when Shorts actually prioritize completion rate over click-through rate.
The first 30 seconds determine everything because YouTube tests new videos with small audiences immediately after upload. If those early viewers drop off quickly, your video never reaches a broader audience, which is why starting with the result instead of a long intro dramatically improves retention.
Shorts hit 90 billion daily views and operate as the fastest path to discovery, but only if you treat them as teasers rather than complete content. The strategy that works is extracting a 30-second segment from your best long-form content to create curiosity, then linking to the full video where viewers get complete information.
Read the full article for the five metrics YouTube actually cares about, how to leverage the small creator boost if you're under 500 subscribers, specific thumbnail formulas that work on mobile devices, and why YouTube now rewards evergreen content by actively resurfacing old videos when topics trend again.
⏲️ Time Management
Four hours a day. That's what Guardian writer Will Storr discovered he was losing to his phone, mostly scrolling news sites and YouTube before bed and after waking up. Sound familiar? Here's the thing though: the popular solution of "dopamine detox" (deleting apps, going full monk mode) isn't just unrealistic for most business owners, it's based on a misunderstanding of how our brains actually work. I recently broke down exactly why dopamine detox doesn't work and what to do instead, and Storr's piece captures perfectly why our phones have such a grip on us in the first place.
"Smartphones have gamified and monetised these powerful aspects of human nature. They don't benignly offer us the connection and status we desire: they strategically withdraw it in order to drive engagement. Whenever we're outraged by the behaviour of an identity group that's not our own, it's an attack on our status: we are drawn further into our phones to find out more and perhaps take part in a counterattack – an attempt to restore our threatened status and reinforce the connection with our team. We're made to feel good or bad by likes, reposts, comments or follower-counts, but our phone issues these precious rewards unpredictably, just as a slot machine does – and just as Fogg described. It's this unpredictability that helps make them compulsive."
Key Insights:
The compulsive reach for your phone isn't a willpower problem. It's by design, using variable rewards like a slot machine to keep you checking. BJ Fogg literally taught tech companies how to build this into their products at Stanford before the first iPhone even launched.
You can't "detox" from dopamine because it's your brain's motivation system, not a drug. The goal isn't removing it but recalibrating it through friction, like making mindless scrolling harder by logging out after each use, moving apps to hidden folders, or using blockers like Freedom.
Social media has fundamentally changed how we interact with each other by manufacturing social competition and tribal conflict, making us angrier and more suspicious. The solution isn't abandoning these platforms entirely but designing intentional check-in windows instead of constant access.
Read the full article for Storr's personal account of compulsive phone use, his analysis of why we're all more irritated with each other, and his concerns about what AI companions could do to exploit these same psychological vulnerabilities even further.
💻 Tools & Technology
Managing your inbox shouldn't feel like a scavenger hunt, but Gmail's default settings almost guarantee you'll miss important emails or waste time jumping in and out of messages. Most of us set up Gmail once and never touch the settings again, which means we're stuck with choices Google made for us years ago. Turns out, a few quick adjustments can transform Gmail from a source of daily frustration into something that actually works the way you need it to.
"Gmail's conversation view is meant to simplify email by bundling replies into a single thread. In practice, it often does the opposite. Responses get buried inside conversations you've already skimmed, and because the subject line doesn't change, those replies don't always look new when they arrive. I've missed crucial replies simply because they were buried inside a thread I thought I'd already read. After I turned off conversation view, that problem disappeared. Instead of an expanding thread, each email shows up as its own message in the inbox."
Key Insights:
The reading pane lets you read emails without leaving your inbox, so the inbox stays visible on one side while the message opens on the other. This eliminates the constant back-and-forth of opening an email, reading it, going back, and repeating, which is surprisingly tiring when you're processing dozens of messages.
Category tabs like Promotions and Updates can hide critical emails for days if you don't check every tab regularly. Turning off everything except Primary brings all your emails back into a single timeline where you're more likely to actually see them, and you can use labels and filters for more predictable organization.
Gmail's Undo Send feature delays sending for up to 30 seconds, not five, but you have to manually change this in settings. That extra 25 seconds is the difference between catching a mistake and watching it land in someone's inbox.
Read the full article for step-by-step instructions on accessing each setting on both web and mobile, plus why the author stopped trusting Gmail's defaults and started customizing the experience instead.
🤖 AI
If you've been using ChatGPT on the free tier, get ready to see ads at the bottom of your responses. OpenAI just started testing sponsored content for U.S. users on free and Go tiers, which is a pretty significant shift from CEO Sam Altman's previous stance that combining ads with AI felt "uniquely unsettling." The move makes sense from a business perspective (they need to monetize those 800 million weekly users somehow), and for business owners, this opens up a completely new advertising channel with some interesting targeting capabilities.
"Ads appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, visually separated from the answer and labeled as sponsored. OpenAI says it selects ads by matching advertiser submissions with the topic of your conversation, your past chats, and past interactions with ads. If someone asks about recipes, they might see an ad for a meal kit or grocery delivery service. Advertisers don't see users' conversations or personal details. They receive only aggregate performance data like views and clicks."
Key Insights:
The targeting mechanism uses conversation context rather than search keywords, creating a different kind of intent signal. Someone asking ChatGPT for help planning a trip is further along in the decision process than someone typing a search query, which could mean higher conversion rates for the right offers.
This isn't a self-serve marketplace yet. Early access requires a $200,000 minimum commitment, with media buyers quoted around $60 per 1,000 views. OpenAI also won't show ads in conversations about health, mental health, or politics, making the inventory narrower than traditional search.
For users, free tier members can opt out of ads in exchange for fewer daily messages, while Go users can upgrade to Plus ($20/month) or Pro to avoid them. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers all remain ad-free.
Read the full article for details on how OpenAI's ad approach differs from competitors like Anthropic (which just ran a Super Bowl campaign promising no ads) and Google (no ads in Gemini despite running them in AI Overviews), plus what Altman's evolving position reveals about OpenAI's financial pressures.
🎉 Celebration Corner
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