I need an intervention
The internet is great, but maybe too much internet is… not great? I’m way beyond the point where I feel like my internet addiction is getting in the way of work, life, and even happiness.
Increasingly I am finding that my default setting is to be online, whether at home, at work, or even in between. The hamster wheel of email -> Twitter -> Facebook -> news -> Feedly -> email is taking up more and more of my time, and the benefits are getting smaller and smaller.
It seems like the more time I spend online, the worse I feel.
Cal Newport’s blog has some great posts about this.
I’ve decided to try and change some things. To start with, I’m going to try to have a completely offline day tomorrow (and hopefully every Friday going forward). Depending on how it goes, I might report back here.
The plan is to sync up all my work computers, then put them in airplane mode before going home. Tonight I’ll put my phone in airplane mode, and will only reconnect it briefly at lunchtime and before leaving work (in case my wife has been trying to get hold of me). I’ll leave everything in airplane mode until Saturday.
Hopefully this will also help me kickstart a few stalled projects (and clean up my office). Wish me luck!
How about you? Do you have trouble managing your online time? Any experiences dealing with it?
I’m online a lot, but am not too worried about it. It’s mostly reading, music, news, and simple browsing and stumbling around (I don’t have facebook, no twitter, no other things like that).
One thing with my phone, tho, is that apart from incoming calls all other notifications are turned off. It took some patience to extinguish them all (whack-a-mole), but I’d rather just look now and then to see what might be there. It’s still a smart phone when needed, but it never nags or demands attention.
That’s a good way to make it more deliberate for sure. I will do this for the times when I switch mobile data back on 🙂
Hey, I recently started to feel the same. You’re probably not going to like going completely “cold turkey” so quick – it’s too much.
One thing that really motivated me is that I was finding these things were getting in the way of my primary “goal(s)” – (which is Japanese, Jujutsu, and a project).
What inspired me to take these steps is something that Warren Buffet said years ago:
https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/warren-buffett-really-successful-people-say-no-to-almost-everything-ab78832ffebc
The key point is 25% down the page.
The KEY takeaway is this. Write down 25 goals you want/like to achieve. Do the top 5, AVOID AT ALL COSTS the other 20. Obviously when one is done, you can bump one into the.
This doesn’t exactly translate into what we’re talking about here, but this – combined with an overwhelming sense of being unable to focus due to information/distraction overload recently – caused me to want to start cutting things out of my life.
Since my day job is at the computer, I decided to do my best to physically stay away from my desk at home (it’s linked up to my TV, so I just go over to change what I want to watch occasionally – but mostly control it with my phone). I have a fairly uncomfortable chair at home, and decided NOT to bother buying a new one.
On my phone, I have slowly delete apps at a time. First was Facebook, about 6 months ago – and that was purely because my phone is old and it slowly it down a LOT.
Recently was Instagram – literally just the same as the Facebook wall now, what’s the point.
I deleted Reddit too believe it or not. Because I noticed I always get pulled into interesting topics/conversations, but they are usual just an unfruitful way for me to get my “sense of importance”, or it is some shocking news which micro-trauma’s me for a while (bad stuff happenin’ in the world)
I have an anon Twitter-lite for a bit of entertainment sometime.
I have Anki for studying.
I have LINE for communicating with my Japanese friends.
I have WhatsApp for communicating with Family back home.
I do have Facebook messenger still, but that will be the next to go (for some Japanese friends/non-whatsAppers)
I feel much more focused now on my goals. You absolutely said it yourself:
“and the benefits are getting smaller and smaller.”
The benefits are next to nill in terms of my goals.
I’m only even taking the time to reply here to try and pay you back a bit for your very helpful articles on living in Japan!
Good luck!
Thanks for the comment! Actually, and not to jinx things for myself, I am shocked at how easy and fantastic it has been so far. I’ll be posting about this again in a few weeks.
I also deleted the Reddit app 🙂
At some point I wanted to cut back on my online activity, only to realize that
1) Most of my online activity is required for either my work or my side gig
2) For everything else, when I cut back on one thing, I end up replacing it with something worse. E.g. I cut some form of social media only to go browse even more useless subreddits, or I stopped reddit only to play some dumb freemium video game on the phone, etc…
I ended up picking my poison: I browse the financial independence websites. If I’m going to be procrastinating online, it might as well be in a semi-useful way like this 🙂
So far I am finding that the things I replace my mindless online grazing with make me feel better. So far it has been tidying up, making notes (on paper), and talking to my family 🙂
It’s an admirable thing to cut back on the immediacy of the internet. It’s turned us all into news junkies, which is no way to be. As Alain de Botton says in The News (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/919168410), trying to understand the world by reading tweets and Facebook updates is like trying to understand a Tolstoy novel, one shouted line at a time. I’ve more or less cured myself of my twitter addiction by reading books instead. You’ll feel so much better. I then only post book reviews and my crappy art to instagram linked to all my other accounts, which has the double benefit of encouraging me to get better at things I enjoy and driving away online engagement from others. Win win.