I know what you’re thinking, “No, you did not!” And you’d be right, but I did find a way to return to 2010 in spirit.
In 2009 my daughter was born, but that’s not what this is about. Around that time, my brother had bought an iPhone. I remember seeing him looking down in the pose of the modern thinker, staring at it while we talked with our parents. “Hello, we’re all sitting right here.” What could be more important than talking with your aging parents? I soon found out.
In 2010, I also bought one. I wanted a better camera. I had a baby, and the camera was going to capture memories of her for the future. I didn’t go with an iPhone at first. I wasn’t a fanboy back then. Instead, I opted for an Android, and one of the early photos from that phone still sits as my Google profile picture. A year later, I bought a Windows phone. The display was edge-to-edge and the most beautiful on the market. I disliked Windows since they didn’t have default social media applications, so the next year, I bought an iPhone 4. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem since, and the cameras have been good.
The metallic, glass-surfaced rectangle became like a second appendage.
My screen time over those years has exceeded even my wildest expectations, but not in a good way. In early June of this year, my daily screen time average sat around six and a half hours, an incredible amount of time. So I started paying attention to my device usage. Around that same time, I started listening to Cal Newport, an expert on productivity, digital minimalism, and doing deep work.
My day began with checking Reddit, showering, eating (watching some TikTok videos), and sitting at my desk to work (checking Robinhood). At intervals during that first hour, I would reach for my phone due to notifications; these would alert me to breaking news from the NYTimes, fasting updates from Zero (a fasting app), and a buddy finishing a book on Goodreads, among dozens of others. And that was only the first hour or two of my day.
I started by tuning my focus settings and removing notifications. That worked for a bit, but I was still reading my phone at all possible times: eating, watching TV, bathroom breaks, during lulls in conversations, at stoplights, and brushing my teeth. What was I learning, other than performing my own Skinner box experiment?
So, two weeks ago, I decided to make a change. I watched a video about the harms of social media and how it shifts our thinking toward dopamine mining on our phones. We’re these scavengers searching for the next fix by flicking a thumb on the endless scroll adventure. I started with social media. And what a great time to give up social media, with the Presidential election coming. I highly recommend it.
I stopped cold turkey. At first, it was hard. I had to move my phone to the kitchen during work hours. I put it in a drawer during lunch. I took a magazine to the bathroom. But it worked. In a few days, I didn’t even miss the endless scrolling. Instead, I’d found lost time (hence the title). Buckets of time. Six and a half hours mostly comprised of social media gave back a lot of time and produced a lot of boredom.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt that nagging boredom for the first time in a long time. A very, long time. I don’t even recall being bored in the last decade. My dopamine pickaxe was sharpened and able to mine in even some of the dullest moments of my life.
Boredom also brought rewards. I was able to focus more. I read a book, then another, and another, and one more. I read magazine articles, dove into the backlog of short stories, and New Yorker magazines towering in my office.
For the books alone, I finished:
- The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
- The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
- Babel by R.F. Kuang
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
- Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
I was on vacation for a week and read most of those during that break and the subsequent July 4th holiday. But my days no longer revolved around my phone, giving me ample opportunity to read, as you can see. I found my attention to a task could be stretched longer and longer the further from the screen I went.
I’ve also done the following during these two weeks:
- Written more than 5,000 words toward new and old short stories
- Three different writing exercises amounting to around 2,500 words
- Journaled and began a commonplace notebook to capture any rogue ideas that popped into my head
- Walked for a half-hour most days
- Wrote a critique of someone else’s writing on Scribophile
- Programmed several features for a friend’s web project
- Cooked and spent more time with my daughter
I also gave up video games during this time. That at least bought an hour each day, as I would regularly spend from 7-8 pm playing a game, sometimes longer. I watched some TV during this time, usually an episode a night. I finished Sugar on Apple TV and watched a few episodes of The Boys on Prime.
My screen time average over the past week was 1 hour 26 minutes, and that’s not completely accurate. One day my messages app was reading over two hours in a row, setting that day’s peak for the week at around 2 hours and 30 minutes. Clearly, I didn’t read messages for two hours straight, so my average for last week should have been below an hour each day and likely was much lower than that.
I’ve noticed Apple counts standby mode as screen time. I have a charger stand that my phone sits on while I work, showing me weather and time info, but if I use that, then my screen time goes to nine or ten hours a day, so I didn’t use it this past week. I hope they fix this in a future update.
Do I think this is sustainable?
I can continue living like this. As I mentioned earlier, Cal Newport talks about slow productivity in his latest book. The idea is to make small increases over time as someone working their way through a school curriculum would. I’ve intuitively been doing this with programming for years. I’m applying that to my writing now. I’m doing this now because I’m off my phone, living in the real world.
I’ll go back to playing video games at scheduled times. Emphasis on scheduled. I’ll likely not be going back to multiplayer or MMOs though. Games that can be paused. That’s the criteria.
Reading has always been a part of my life, but now I have a daily goal: read an essay, a short story, a poem, and fifty pages in a book. All told that takes about an hour and a half to two hours of my time — time I used to spend endlessly scrolling.
I’m going on a long vacation in the next few days. I worry I’ll break the positive flow I have going now. But I have a plan laid out. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Until then, gain back some of your time. I know I will be.
