Or: The Satanic Digital Sabbath
Since 2009, I’ve spent eight to sixteen hours a day staring intently at glowing glass rectangles. I’m deeply accustomed to screen use, so much so that it makes me uncomfortable to be away from them for very long. This is because screens are the medium in which I maintain control of my life. Screened devices inform me of issues or borderline emergencies I need to address, bring me information time-critical to important decisions, and store what I’ve come to think of as my external brain, my GTD system.
Being away from screens makes me uncomfortable because I don’t know how to stay on top of my life without them.
Unfortunately, I’m accustomed to using screens a lot. My life used to honestly require that 8-16hrs/day just to maintain baseline control. My life is different now, but my unconscious sense of how much screen time I ought to be spending hasn’t caught up.
I drift towards the glowing screens out of a desire to maintain order in my life, but I arrive and find I have nothing in particular to do there - everything is actually already in order. But the urge to ‘put in the time’ is strong, so I check news or email again, browse a few forums, fart around in my GTD system, poking and checking in on things that don’t need pokes or checks.
My screen efficiency is very low - the amount of value I get from screens is low in proportion to the amount of time I spend on them. If I didn’t have anything better to do with my time this wouldn’t be a problem, but in fact I have a long list of activities I’d rather be doing; sewing projects, building things, writing, working out, spending time with friends and family, fiddling with DIY passive solar devices, building expedition carts. Every hour I fritter away uselessly in front of a glowing rectangle is an hour I’m not spending doing something interesting or fun, something that hits my stoke button.
So I’ve decided to do something drastic: six days out of every week for a month are to be screen free. On only one day a week I’ll allow myself to use my devices. I intend that this ‘extreme’ constraint will compel me to use my screen time very efficiently. I just completed a soft start week, and am now going in to the real deal. What it looks like so far:
I moved my GTD system to a 3-ring binder. So far I love it, and wish I’d done it a long time ago. I can “see” everything in a glance in a way I’ve never pulled off with digital tools.
I dusted off an old analog watch to tell time, although I rarely use it because almost nothing in my life at the moment requires a precise estimate of time of day. I don’t have an alarm clock, but I wake up between 5 and 6 so it’s not been a problem yet.
I compose all writing (blog posts, emails, etc) on paper, and then copy them over to the computer on Screen Day. This post, for example, was typed up on Sunday and scheduled for publishing.
I reference books when I need to know how to do something, or I wait. For example, I referenced some old carpentry books to confirm joist spans for the cabin we’re building, instead of just googling it.
Of course I never could have done something like this when I was fully (or even partially) employed. I did a Cal Newport-style digital declutter this past April, when I was still working part-time and it was, y’know, fine. Honestly it wasn’t extreme enough to make a dent in my hardwired relationship with screens, or maybe I didn’t do it right. If you read that post, there’s a whole list of rules, exceptions, and protocols. I needed to carry around notes just to remember what was allowed and what wasn’t.
This Project is much simpler: no screens at all, except for helping Robyn out with her holiday cards (<2hrs/wk) and scheduling that call with that one client (<<1hr/wk), both of which will probably drop off within another week.
What I’m doing now is a lifestyle sortie only available to people with lives arranged for maximum autonomy. I’ve always wanted to do something like this, but thought I had to strike it rich to buy enough freedom to pull it off. Turns out I just had to learn to live on very little, which is way easier (and probably funner) than becoming actually wealthy.
Who knew? The key to the ability to do whatever I want is learning to let go of most of the things I thought I wanted.