Disconnect to Reconnect, My Experiment with Digital Minimalism | Shelf-Help
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It was a nondescript Sunday afternoon. The television was playing indiscriminately; my laptop was open with many tabs on display and I had a phone in my hand, scrolling through Facebook. In a sudden moment of clarity, I blurted out, “What am I doing?”
Screens and technology have become an inescapable part of our daily lives. Technology and the convenience it purports have become pervasive and sometimes disrupt our personal and professional lives. Social media and technology have been engineered and refined to retain our attention, keeping us glued to our devices. I wanted to re-evaluate my relationship with technology and come up with an answer to the question I asked myself that Sunday afternoon.
This is where Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism came in. As a librarian, I was aware of the book but never took the chance to read it. Its promise of a more mindful and intentional approach to technology intrigued me and seemed like a good place to start.
Digital Minimalism is “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimised activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
The book proposes a “digital declutter” — a 30-day break from optional technologies in our lives where we rediscover activities that we find meaningful. At the end of the break, we are to reintroduce optional technologies based on what value they serve in our lives.
Setting the Rules
Before I got started, I needed to decide what I wanted to cut out from my technology use. I looked at social media first, deleting Facebook from my phone. It was the one app that I kept opening as a reflex whenever I had a moment of idleness. Then it was a matter of going down a checklist:
- Turn off notifications for Instagram and Twitter,
- Limit my Netflix usage to no more than two episodes or one movie at a time to prevent binge-watching,
- Turn off personal email notifications on my phone, and
- Only check my inbox via a computer once a day.
Text messaging apps were a bit tricky as messages can be time-sensitive, so I muted many of the chat groups I was in, sans important ones for work and close contacts.
With that, I set off on my 30-day digital declutter.
Week 1: Getting Over the Itch
The first week made me aware of how much phone-use was a habit for me. I found myself unconsciously taking my phone out of my pocket looking for the usual apps to open. The book recommends that you rediscover non-digital activities or “high quality leisure” whenever you feel an urge to check a banned technology during the break. I found this frustrating at first. What “high quality leisure” could be done during commutes in the bus or train, cab rides, waiting at pedestrian crossings and other idle moments?
Maybe I misunderstood what “high quality” meant. High quality didn’t mean it had to be complex. So, I simply looked out the window when on the road, enjoying the sights. I got better at this towards the end of the week. It was both fascinating and frightening to sometimes notice I was the only passenger on the train not looking at a phone.
In the past, chores would get put off in favour of mindlessly scrolling away. Without my phone to distract me, laundry was completed faster, and I was able to get more chores done. I also decided to get out of the house more, walking to nearby coffeeshops to get meals instead of ordering in, leaving my phone at home.
WhatsApp and Telegram were still taking up a lot of my time as I sometimes used them as a distraction. Reading and replying to messages sometimes took up a lot of time, so I decided to refine my rules and only let myself use these apps for no more than 15 minutes at a time.
Week 2: A Helping Hand
This week, I was going on planned holiday. So I doubled down on the added impetus to “unplug” during my overseas break. What helped was the poor mobile reception, turning my phone into an “emergency only” device. I felt really present on the trip — I watched the sun set, looked out at the horizon, listened to the waves, and observed rainclouds close in towards me from a mountain top. I rarely took my phone out for pictures and have a slight regret of not having many photos to remember the trip by.
I found myself feeling less bored, and I’m sure being away from Singapore and all its associated hustle and bustle was part of it. But I was more comfortable with having nothing to do and just being alone with my thoughts. Although there were moments of anxiety thinking of all the things I had to catch up on, I felt I was able to articulate these thoughts clearer than before.
Week 3: Close to a Relapse
This week was tough. Upon touchdown, my phone exploded with notifications. I felt an urge to immediately catch up and the anxieties associated with “missing out” came flooding back. In hindsight, maybe the trip was an idealistic misrepresentation of an unplugged life. I made the misstep of turning the declutter into a detox. In his book, Newport mentions this: going cold turkey is not effective as you simply jump back in once it is over.
It took a while for me to return to my rules. At times, I caught myself doomscrolling again, and it took some mental effort to put my phone down. By the weekend I was back to following the rules, but I felt guilty over my lapses and this week made me realise how deep these habits run.
Week 4: What It’s Really Like
As I got back into the swing of things, I found myself being more cognisant of the thoughts and triggers that urge us to constantly reach for a digital comfort blanket. I realised a lot of “news” on social media is just content designed to gain our attention and engagement. There’s a lot of it that is redundant and doesn’t affect us in any profound way. This helped me get over the feeling that I was “missing out”.
I read the newspaper for the first time in a long while to catch up on news. I found myself filling downtime with reading or playing an instrument. I went to watch a movie in a cinema instead of streaming something at home. There was one day I found myself lying on the sofa, looking up at the sky — the television turned off, my phone somewhere else in the house, laptop tucked away. There were moments when I felt I was “wasting time” but then I remembered the adage, “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted at all.”
Reflections
The biggest takeaway I got from this break is that I don’t really need social media. Admittedly, it’s a great tool for connecting with others, but stronger connections could be made if I were to meet people in real life. I made a note to meet up physically with close friends and family more frequently.
The scrolling and endless content from social media just bores me now. When I reinstalled Facebook on my phone, I found everything to be banal. I think I can live without it and will probably delete it again. I didn’t miss Twitter either and kept the notifications turned off. Instagram is still useful, but I’ve decided to only follow accounts with content that I found educational or inspiring. I also switched off the notifications from most of the apps on my phone.
There are still some uses of the Internet that I need to define boundaries for. For example, Google and Wikipedia are great for satiating my curiosity, but if I’m not careful, they’ll lead me down the time-consuming rabbit hole of linked content.
But I’m happy to say I don’t watch as much television anymore, and watching more than two hours now gets me restless. I find myself enjoying reading again and will look to make this more of a habit.
The next part of the process that I need to work on is defining what leisure means to me. I want to work towards enjoying the process of learning, bearing in mind that not everything needs to have a productive outcome.
After all, the enjoyment of the process in and of itself can be the goal.
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