Our
family has a rule that when we’re apart we have to check in with each other
once every 24 hours no matter where in the world we are. I had given up my smartphone at Christmas, so my upcoming
travel means I have to reengage with the online world in the days ahead.
Before
I blindly resumed where I left off in 2016, I asked my friends and family for
advice, both online and off. I knew other people who had gone on digital detoxes and social media diets/fasts, I asked them what they had experienced and what worked for them. I've received app
suggestions like AppDetox and Moment. I got links to Time
Well Spent, and articles from all over about how Smartphones are
really stressing Americans Out and
how I should Quit
Social Media. Your job may depend on it. I had to laugh out loud at the
XKCD cartoon captioned
"Wanna
go for a walk?"
"Sure,
just need to grab my device that feeds me a 24/7 stream of opinions,
context-free scary world news, and random emotional stimuli. Plus a spare
battery so the feed won't be interrupted"
Misery
loves company, so I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one searching for a better way. I finally ended up taking a friend's advice and tweaked it for my own purposes:
I disable all notifications except text
messages. I also disable notifications for some "chatty" text message
groups. That means no Facebook notifications, no Snapchat notifications, no
Email notifications (and no automatic email checking). Nothing. If I want to
check an account, I do so manually by launching & forcing a refresh. My
phone rarely lights up, and I find I don't reach for it terribly often anymore.
Of course, if you lack the discipline to keep yourself from polling constantly,
none of this will help much. Oh - it also really helps battery life so your
phone is ready for those photos... :)
As for the smartphone, for work I installed Pages Manager from Facebook as well as Messenger, but all notifications are turned off. I can see notifications if I click on the apps portion of my screen, but they don't jump out at me. I'm probably going to install facebook and twitter on this upcoming trip, but my plan is to uninstall them once I get back.
What's the single biggest change? I've given myself permission to not check my phone compulsively. The rest is just details.