Anyone doing or thinking about doing a digital detox?

…and I’ll admit that in spite of all my loud distaste for AI, I used Deepseek to get that line.

Good one I fell for it

I dunno, some people seem to do it! Or maybe they don’t? I dunno!

Re: meditation, this is helpful and I’ve heard some (much?) of it before, I just have a hard committing though I don’t want to say why

I remember my friend telling me about ICQ and I was like, “That sounds like a horrible idea, who would want that!?” Weeks later I was addicted and my friend had moved on

In terms of trick of you find yourself “needing” social media, particularly Facebook for Markeyplace (even temporarily), a great extension is Stylus. I use this to hide the news feed with CSS. It’s also essential for LinkedIn…

Speaking of which, a year ago, I was sleeping on a friend’s couch. This morning, I closed a $2M deal before my 6 AM cold plunge. The pivot wasn’t easy. Here are the 3 things I had to unlearn… [read more]

I agree that it’s definitely an ingredient, but I don’t think it’s nearly enough on its own to have a healthy relationship. I’m sure most of us have caught ourselves or others compulsively checking and re-checking sites and apps.

Digital detox in general is an amazing thing. You will feel much better if you would go for some time offline and it would not really hurt you for sure. In few last years I didn’t took a job as I was mainly focused on improving my healthcare and focus on my hobbies.

I’m not really using smartphone. Sometimes I took a photo of some document as I’m simply living in country with a language I don’t know well enough. Once or twice per month I’m receiving a SMS codes to access my bank account(s) and that’s all.

I have reduced the notifications to things that really interest me - many of them are not even IT related. No social media, rather poor contact (except for forum and job offers) and so on … All of this would make you feel better bit by bit.

Also here is a good tip for someone that for some reason have to use smartphone. Just place it far away your bed. Charge it in another room or so. Once you do that no matter if you hear the notification, before you get up and go to your phone your attention would focus on other things. Don’t force yourself and just change the environment to support your detox. That’s simpler than you think.

Why would you be ever successful at that? It’s extremely clunky and it makes me want to tear my hair out.

Mediation is one of those very open-ended things where people often over-fixate on a method or two and if it does not work for them they just give up. One way I have made an ex-girlfriend discover mediation was tell her to just lie down, close her eyes and avoid any particular train of thought; thinking about anything and everything was permitted but not thinking about it for more than a few seconds. It took her 7-8 sessions and she reported feeling much better and we then moved on to the more classic Silva method of just focusing on counting backwards and making a focused effort to banish all other more conscious thought. She succeeded, though it was very difficult, but ultimately succeeded and genuinely changed as a person.

Meditation is not like learning to do, I don’t know, wood crafting or anything like that. It’s basically connecting with yourself by silencing the voices that get in the way. Some people achieve that by drinking or drugs and if they don’t get addicted, the effects of those temporarily used substances actually become a net positive in their lives.

Prayer by the religious people is also one powerful meditation technique; by the mere virtue of concentrating on just reciting the prayer and believing in it and genuinely feeling what is said in it you achieve the peace of mind that is required for your brain to shift to the more relaxed state. I am not religious and never was but I kind of envy religious people for that particular thing.

There are other ways. The thing with meditation is that it’s not a metric or a goal by itself. It’s a way to find how to connect with a more deeper you, one that usually sits isolated and is whispering to you but is constantly out-shouted by everything else in our lives. It’s like the super warm introvert person sitting in the corner of the party and never wanting to get in the way or shout in order to be heard and paid attention to – but if you go talk to it you’ll feel much better after.

Me too. But after I last responded I took a couple of days off and then was overwhelmed with the responses. I’ll have to review.

I have not been very successful with meditation, though have started carrying around a notebook instead of my phone at sometimes. It’s been a big help in actually writing stuff down. I’ve never been successful at taking notes on my phone.

Another thing I’ve been doing lately is a massive de-clutter, mostly in preparation for moving, but also because I’ve been carrying stuff around with me I’ve had since I was a child. Some switch just flipped and now I’ve gotten rid of SO much stuff. I just made ~$600 selling records Nowhere near what I would have paid for them but I haven’t listened to any of them in 10 years. Anyway, I highlighted your response as I’m accepting that I wouldn’t actually need to keep such things, just pass 'em on when I’m done with them. This is obvious to many people but not obvious to so many others.

I’m fortunate in that I never got into social media. I never really saw the appeal. I think the key to maintaining a healthy relationship with our devices is to adopt a pull model instead of a push model.

Social media and other content-based apps are designed around a push model. The device or app pushes content to you in an attempt to get you to engage with its ad platform. I prefer a pull model where I explicitly pull specific things I’m interested in. I can still keep up well enough with what’s going on by checking in on the few youtube channels I actually like that cover current events in different tech spaces, or when someone in one of the discord communities I’m a part of posts an article. If I find the article or topic the youtuber covered interesting, I’ll do a search for the topic, and when I do that intentional search, I usually find much more interesting things than what gets covered in the clickbait that gets the most attention and “shares”.

Due to this slower more personal approach to content, I can’t really participate in meme culture and I often can’t keep up with whatever new slang or trend is happening on the internet, so I’ve been told I’m really old for my age, but I find that I don’t really miss out on anything meaningful because the things that are actually important to me are the things that I intentionally seek out myself.

The irony: books/seminars/programs about decluttering are themselves more clutter.

A great book to read about this is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. The book is all about developing your own personal philosophy on how you use technology. Part of the program includes a 30 day digital declutter, where after some time away, you only re-integrate things that have value to your life, and you do it in a way so you get the most out of it with the least negative impact. I highly recommend it. I honestly think everyone should do a digital declutter at least once a year. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport | Goodreads

There’s a few other super easy tricks and tools to help you change your habits. Don’t have your phone with you in your workspace (you can get authentication codes on your machine or just get up and walk to another room). Use blockers like Freedom or Cold Turkey to add some friction to any sites or apps you find yourself compulsively using. Wear a normal wristwatch so you’re not looking at your phone to just see what time it is.

When it comes to a lot of these things, most people don’t need an all-or-nothing approach. What they really need is some time away so they can re-calibrate, and some different habits. Awareness is a huge one, it’s amazing to see how often you are reaching for your phone and going to check out something on total auto-pilot. This is why blockers can be so huge - it’s not that you couldn’t circumvent these, it’s that you are mentally tabbed-out when you go to open HN or Twitter, and it’s like the device is now stopping you and saying “hey, what are you doing?”