[AKN #31] Quick notes on my digital minimalism experiment
another krappy newsletter #31
Sup homies?
If you are not subscribed yet, click the button below to receive a weekly email about nothing.
Another week in the books!
With it came exciting news: There is light at the end of the tunnel for ending the pandemic in America through vaccination.
Tomorrow every paper will publish an article explaining why enough supply doesn’t mean we will get injected by May. We will get the detailed breakdown of how this is an empty milestone. Then the criticisms will be criticized for not being critical enough.
But how about just today, we cheer on the effort and pretend to be optimistic? I feel like we could use some optimism.
On to the newsletter!
I only have one topic today.
Quick notes about my Digital Minimalism experiment
Last week, I talked about my upcoming experiment with Digital Minimalism.
This week I am going to provide you with an update.
Update: This is harder than I thought it would be.
I did not realize how intertwined my physical life and my digital life had become. Perhaps this is not news to anyone, but it is hard to unplug and maintain a productive life. “Productive” meaning:
Work productive: Getting work done that is required at a typical office environment.
If your boss reaches out to you, is it OK if you don’t get back to him or her immediately? I think a lot of places would say “of course that is OK!” but in practice, it is actually “of course that is OK!…but also get back to me immediately or I will find a weird way for it to show up on your performance review.”
Social productive: Staying in touch with friends.
For example, if your friend reaches out are they actually going to be OK with waiting hours for you to respond? What if you are trying to finally plan that underwater basket weaving class you always talked about? Can that really wait?
In both cases, it is hard to change up your response cadence overnight. This might take a bit longer than I expected to find a routine that works and chip away at it bit by bit. But this is why we run the experiment! I would have never known how difficult this would be until I started it.
Because I have found this so difficult in Week 1, I felt it would be useful to document how I adapted early on so that people who try this can set themselves up for success a bit better than I did to start.
Lessons from subtracting digital habits
If it buzzes or dings I will look at it. So if you want to stop looking, you need to turn these off. Seems easy enough…however, I am struggling with “how can I still get urgent phone calls, emails, and text messages without the alerts being on?” Maybe I am over thinking this and just need to make set points during the work week where I check my phone like lunch and dinner.
To curtail usage, sometimes you need to just delete the app on your phone. I tried eliminating badges, notifications, rings, dings, and visual cues (deleting from my home screen) so that they were on my phone still, but not visible. But what I found was that slowly my mind found work arounds to using these. Super weird, but my mind basically rebelled against me. It is hard to find out this way that you are not as disciplined as you thought.
When I removed the app completely from my phone, I had no choice. The pull is just too hard for some apps and the only way you will stop using them is by removing them completely.
Apps that fall into this category for me: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email. I compulsively check these if the app is on my phone.
If you are concerned about having access to any of the apps above, ease your mind by signing into these things on Safari and Google Chrome. That way you can check and it will give you that satisfaction. If you want to lose faith in the fact that you have free will, notice how much less you use it because the user experience sucks. We are all just monkeys in a giant Skinnerian experiment…
Some weeks you need to use your phone a lot. I am in one of those weeks. I cannot really just turn it off and be out of communication. My whole week is being on the phone and responding to text messages. I have to keep telling my inner perfectionist that this is OK and that this will pass. Just focus on the smallest amount of progress that can be made right now.
The phone is the major contributor to my digital consumption. Very often if I eliminate my usage of something (say Twitter) on mobile, it doesn’t get replaced by equal usage on my desktop. It just doesn’t happen at all. I allocate my time differently.
I do a lot of enriching activities on my phone and I am not sure how to work these into my routine. I am not sure what I should do here for things like Kindle. Reading books is unquestionably good for you and your mind. Kindle allows me to take these books wherever I go. I like Kindle because it means I don’t have to buy another physical book and it allows me to highlight and export notes to Evernote about the book. So I am not really willing to negotiate with this one. In terms of how I can do this, I am thinking that I could read in do not disturb mode.
It is hard to produce a newsletter with many interesting topics from a diverse set of disciplines when you aren’t plugged into the frenetic hive mind. My limited use of Twitter makes it hard for me to come across interesting content at the rate that I used to. My current notes system is all half read books instead of full articles and other pieces of content that are easier to point towards.
I also feel out of the loop on certain things. I think I can get back in the loop if I got into a better routine of checking Twitter on desktop and having good curated lists of who to follow instead of mindlessly following their algorithm which just optimizes for converting me to hating America. Like damn I started looking at kittens, how did I end up at this “end archaic Manifest Destiny policies” page? Ah dammit. Now I have convinced myself that I am the root cause of all issues. Didn’t think this trip down kitten Twitter would end in me hating myself. But here we are.
I need to think about how I can get all the benefits here with less of the drawbacks.
Lessons from adding analog habits
Morning pages are much better when done by hand. I loved adding in this habit. I have done this before by writing it out in a Word document and I was going strong, but I never really enjoyed it as much as I am enjoying the by hand experience. It is really cool to look back on the 21 hand written pages I have created over the last week. It gives you a physical artifact which I find satisfying. Yes my hand cramps pretty hard. This is the major downside. But I think I will get used to it as I go along.
There is a weird satisfaction that comes with doing and creating something in the physical world. I was recently soldering chips to a PCB. It was oddly satisfying as I melted the solder and created this nice little hersey kiss connection between my board and the component. I felt myself getting more and more satisfied as I got better at soldering. I was having a great time all the way up until I soldered a component in the wrong orientation. Then I was distraught. I was so close to having the entire piece assembled. Then I had to dejectedly get onto the Internet and buy a $2 part. Digital strikes back at my analog activities. This project is on pause until this small part gets here. Devastating.
My next physical world project is looking into purchasing a 3D printer.
Continuing on with a habit requires a lot of planning. As I look at my electronics set, I am already thinking about how as soon as I finish this, I don’t have another project planned that will take its place. I wonder if there is some way to set up a sustainable queue here to get more and more projects for when free time finds me. I usually fill this kind of time with books, but how could I instead fill this time with electronics building kits or engineering side projects.
Challenges that I need to address
How do you work in a modern engineering company without being plugged into digital tools all the time?
Where am I fooling myself by saying I have moderation where I obviously cannot control myself? Example: Mobile social media apps
How do you adapt to phone heavy weeks and still make progress towards a goal like digital minimalism?
How do you produce a newsletter with interesting content week over week without being constantly plugged into the hivemind?
What structures can I put in place such that these analog habits actually continue and are not just fads that I move through?
Hope this helps you in any future digital minimalism experiment you want to run! I will keep you up to date on where I end up with mine.
Closing time
You don’t have to go home, but you can subscribe here:
As always, reply to this email and say what’s up. Promise to hit you back with an artisanal, hand-crafted response.
If you enjoy what you’re reading, I’d really appreciate you sharing it with your friends.