Social Hibernation

As you may not have noticed, I recently ducked away from social networks for a month. Not that I posted much to begin with but for those awaiting part two of my new hire orientation series, fret not, that arrives next week. Before continuing the series, I wanted to first write about my recent foray offline and how it allowed me to get a lot more concentrated thinking and working done.

tldr; It wasn’t hard at all. Try it sometime.

I’m not the first person to do this. I didn’t do anything dramatic or delete any accounts. It was only a month and not even a year completely offline like some people have done. The catalyst that got me started was Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work. His book happened to be the culmination of a recent routine re-structuring that I attempted so I could focus better during the day. I wanted to find better ways to work deeply and richly and although his book provides great tips in that area, I came away with a desire to break away from social networks, which is one of the asides he recommends in the book.

My social guilty pleasures are twitter and reddit. I can’t get enough r/AskReddit and twitter gives me bite-size news on a variety of interests; an endless supply of solid recommendations. As much of a boost as these feeds provide, I still despised my compulsion to check my phone when I had a free minute. Often not even that was necessary, merely a spare hand to glaze over my feed as I cooked or queued up my next activity. Instead of practicing patience, I’d float on the internet in-between activities. I started to forget that my life includes the interim as much as each separate activity. I was being lazy during the intermission and stuffing my brain to distraction as soon as it had a moment of peace. Remember that being bored is a good thing. Being bored means we have a chance to check in with the act of living and let our mind tell us what we’re missing. And sometimes it isn’t about anything at all.

Take a gander up through the clouds two paragraphs above and you’ll see that I found it easy. Let me explain. Before taking this break, I implemented quite a few changes that made the actual hibernation effortless. Staying disconnected for a month may be harder for you depending on your social ties and notification practices.

Here are the three habits that assisted me the most ahead of my break:

1. Dynamic Meditation

Recently, I made it a goal to meditate daily for a year and after doing so, I looked for ways to transition that practice into meditating actively throughout my day by finding moments to stay attentive and experience life as it is (while doing chores, during my commute, showering, before bed, etc.). In this case, mediation itself isn’t a necessity but it will go a long way to help as you work on breaking bad internet habits. I’m starting to get used to behaving more like my cats. Staring out the window for long stretches of time a’int no thing to me.

2. Limited feed checking

I went from checking apps on my phone every few hours to reserving time to do so at the beginning, middle, or end of my day. The only problem was that checking at the tail-end, especially with reddit, stretched out a good long while and that behavior prompted me to shut ’em all down.

3. Reduced notifications

Hands down, the biggest help has been to turn off notifications. If you haven’t reviewed your settings in a bit, I’d highly recommend excluding all but the most essential notifications. At the very least, turn off badges. I felt such a huge sense of relief when I didn’t have these glaring red badges on my apps all the time constantly reminding me of pending tasks. Your phone is a social instrument. It doesn’t need to become a swash of obligations with red bubbles grabbing your attention. Being ruthless about my notifications has done more for me than an entire month away from social networks.

As you can see, I grew into a few habits, which made the actual act of cutting off from certain sites easier than if I tried doing everything at once. Granted, I didn’t leave the internet altogether. My rules were pretty straight-forward and focused on eliminating my vices. I decided to do the following:

• No twitter, reddit, facebook, or instagram
• Limit internet usage — I used the internet only for specific tasks such as ordering supplies on amazon, finding an answer to a specific question, logging a finished book on goodreads or a film on letterboxd. If I followed an account on twitter, I wouldn’t cheat and visit the main site. If I heard about a newsworthy headline, I tried to avoid learning more except from people themselves.
• Physically hide app icons — My off-limit apps were moved to a folder on the 3rd page of my phone called “Open June 24”. It goes without saying that you can temporarily delete the apps if you’re worried about self-control. In my case, it was more of a hassle so I double checked that all notifications were off instead.
• Don’t mention the break if you can avoid it — Newport advised not telling anyone, which can allow you to see the true impact of your social presence. We’re all NPC’s in someone else’s world. We worry so much about being present but ducking away doesn’t make that much of a difference. For some, that can be hard to acknowledge. For the most part, I held to that idea but I did tell some key people after a few weeks, namely my parents and best friend so they wouldn’t think my lack of response was intentional. I think once you set-up the expectation that you’re not constantly engaged with a platform, it frees the obligation, which for me is most of the pull. It can be huge to realize that you don’t need to respond to every notification, text, or email.