Go warm turkey on screen-time

It’s Thanksgiving, or near enough to it, and that’s enough of a segue to another article about the benefits of cold-turkeying your phone screentime. And I owe you an update on how I’m doing since last week’s effort. Here it is.

And while 1.5 hours a day (where it’s sat since) is a huge improvement, and I’m pleased that a lot of that screentime was substituted with being present with my kids or doing actual work, it is still too damn high. So I continue on my scrolling-reduction buzz; I hope you’re all cool with that. Luckily it seems like the one bad habit we all share.

During one of my occasional trips to Reddit I felt seen by a post in r/millennials, a nostalgia subreddit that is becoming upsettingly relevant:

I have a full time job. I sleep well. I have no kids. I’m single. I don’t party or drink. I’m not particularly stressed in day to day life. Yet I’m fucking exhausted. I don’t want to leave my apartment on the weekends unless I have something planned, and even then I’m pretty picky. In my 20s my weekends were full of non-stop activities, cooking, going out, and posting on social media. But now in my 30s I just want to come home, have my groceries delivered, chill with some Netflix and sleep. Please tell me I’m not the only one!!

Of course, the entire concept of a DAE (Does Anyone Else) bait post is that nearly everyone is indeed experiencing what you are; and with the millennial cohort now either in or rapidly approaching their 40s it’s really no surprise that folks feel tired. But I do think there’s something else besides aging going on, and a short scroll revealed that others do too.

“It’s not just the work culture,” opines DarkLordFrondo, “it’s the entire culture. It is unending overstimulation and high anxiety with decisions repeatedly made for the sake of convenience instead of quality. It permeates into everything, so we still feel like we are at work even when we come home.”

“Well said!” agrees DowntownResident993. “Constant overstimulation and the need to appear or BE busy, even if that is just putting our head down into our phone. Access to everyone and everything at any given notice makes people carry their work everywhere they go.”

“It’s not just working, it’s our diets and constant media consumption especially short form,” adds KD_42.

And they’re right. We are tired all the time, over and above all the things that would normally make us tired (parenting, hangovers.) It’s not just normal tired, like you get after physical labour; it’s an inherently disjointed brain-tired body-not experience. You should have more energy, but you don’t.

And at the risk of succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, it’s the phones. Or rather, it’s the screens, but the phones are the worst offenders, because they’re everywhere you are and they’re constantly calling your name.

As always Casey Johnstone has the goods, in this excellent article about how to read more. Kill your phone, she says.

The best way for me to read more is to choose to do it instead of something else already do, something I can stop doing. This is less and less controversial to say every day, but your phone is not your friend. It is specifically, categorically your enemy in almost every way, and especially when it comes to reading.

I don’t know about you, but basically all the time I spend on my phone is time I could be reading a book instead. Sometimes, that was four hours a day. That’s bonkers. I nuked my phone a couple of years ago and quit social media this year and these were amazing decisions for someone with my particular set of mental challenges. I imagine there are people who have a sustained relationship with social media who read books. I am not one of them, especially now that social media is such a cesspool of stuff I never asked to see. If you are able to open Instagram, close it five minutes later, put your phone down, go into another room, and then read a book for an hour with total focus, I’m in awe of you.

I think the most important and broadly scientific insight I can provide about scrolling is that it takes up about the same amount of mental bandwidth, or fuel (to use last week’s metaphor) that actually doing something you want to do would use. Or to put it in meme format: 1 scroll = 1 fuel.

But 1 fuel = 1 thing you actually wanted to do.

If scrolling really has hijacked your urge to create, the adverse is true: for the mental effort expended on scrolling you could be doing something you want to be doing. They take about the same amount of mental energy – the difference is that scrolling is easier to fall into.

I think it all adds up to a good argument for putting the phone down.

But what if you can’t?

If you are unavoidably welded to your phone — first, side-eye. Is it really unavoidable?

But at some times, for some people, it is genuinely difficult to do anything else. If you are a new mum in the modern world, your phone is your umbilical cord to the rest of it. And if you’re sick, why would you decide to put down a device that can keep you in touch with your friends and watch shows on without needing to hobble to the TV while sneezing?

If cold turkey is not an option, what about warm turkey?

Why not use the screentime to do something you want to be doing?

Why not write the great American a novel?

I’m serious.

Phones are a bit annoying to type on but that doesn’t stop us when we need to text a friend, or spend many hours texting many friends. And one good things AI has going for it is that voice recognition is getting a lot better.

Apps? Google Docs is free. The notes app on your phone is free. Novelist is free. Obsidian is free. iA Writer is paid (but very beautiful.) There are umpteen more writing-on-your-phone apps.

If you think it sounds ridiculous, I have news for you: author Emily Writes (who I work with now!) wrote two books on her phone.

While wrangling a kid or two.

If you’re using it to enable creativity on that scale, screentime goes from “cause of hives” to “badge of honour”

Even if you’re not a perpetually thwarted author there’s always reading on your phone. Kobo, Kindle, whatever your OS’s native book reader is.

If you can’t not be on your phone, it beats scrolling.

Lifehack: muttering to yourself

A lot of my personal productivity problems come from not being able to decide what to do next, and it turns out I have a lifehack for that: I talk to myself. Like a nutcase.

If I’m stuck in a task or have suddenly arrived in the kitchen without knowing why, I’ll say “What are you doing?” to myself — ideally not in an annoyed way — and I find that if I actually take time to talk myself through what I’d like to be doing the thing starts getting done.

I thought this was just being weird and therefore not worthy of mentioning but apparently it helps with executive function, which is something those of us blessed with ADHD struggle with. Don’t take my word for it, take psychology’s:

And there’s the slightly less authoritative but still useful word of Reddit:

I jokingly tried talking to myself, it somehow made me A LOT more productive.
byu/sorgh_om inADHD

Talking to yourself is also good to prevent you falling into or staying a scroll-hole; if you’ve just picked up your phone aimlessly (again!) just ask yourself “What am I doing?” or “What do I want to be doing?” and that can help steer you into either putting it down or cracking on with Chapter 34: The Clonosaurus Rises.

Thanks, as always, for reading.