For the past month I’ve been checking screens only once a week, a sort of Inverted Digital Sabbath. I wanted to break my entrenched sense that screen use is required to say on top of my life.
On my first Inverted Sabbath, I spent most of the day on my computer doing digital chores, writing emails to friends, and looking up how-to tutorials.
On the second, I spent half a day on the computer, felt like I’d finished, and shut it down.
On the third, it was a sunny calm day, so I quickly did the bare minimum digital chores and then spent the rest of the day sheathing the studio build.
The fourth was holidays, so I checked email once or twice but spent the rest of the day with family.
Now that my Sabbath Rules are over, I feel no urge to dive back in to screen world. I assumed I’d want to sent up ‘rules’ going forward to keep a tight reign on my digital habits, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary.
I’m going to proceed without any specific guidelines, and simply observe what my relationship to digital tools settles out to as a result of the perturbation of this experiment.
Analog GTD is a Game Changer
For about a decade now, the information I needed to answer the question “What should I do now?” existed in my GTD system. And until a month ago, my GTD system was entirely digital. This tethered me tightly to the digital realm in a way I’ve only come to appreciate.
Having to go digital to answer the “what to do?” question biases the answer to be “something digital”. For one thing, you’ve already gone to the effort to enter the digital realm. Exiting it takes some amount of energy. Also, the digital realm is full of distractions. It’s difficult to check digital GTD without also doing a loop through all inboxes, news, weather, and chats, all of which are more likely than not to send me off on a tangent.
I now go to my 3-ring binder when I want to figure out what to do next. My inboxes and other internet-based distractions are all safely tucked away in a dark cabinet somewhere. And the materiality of the binder puts me in an analog mood. After using my dip pen and feeling the grain of the paper under my fingers, I’m much more likely to pick up a mending project or wood tools, which is what I want to be spending more time doing anyways.
Marshal McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message. When asking “what to do?” in the digital realm, you get a “something digital” whisper. Fine if that’s what you want, but it’s not what I want, not right now, so I choose to bias my decision medium to the analog.
The Joy of Being Impossible to Interrupt
I’d gotten used to frequent interruptions, to the point that my subconscious didn’t believe it was possible to do any one thing for more than an hour. Even if I didn’t actually get interrupted, I expected to be.
As a result, my attention tended to be frantic, irritable, and tense. I knew I had to rush to get whatever I wanted done because a random interruptions was inevitable. I’d get fidgety after 30-45 minutes on task and typically do an anticipatory interruption on myself, to my endless frustration.
At three weeks into Project Analog, I realized that I’d made it exceptionally difficult to be interrupted. I’d shrunk the potential pool of interrupters from “anyone with an internet connection” to “my girlfriend”. And her interruptions are often of the pleasant sort, the kind I can happily grow accustomed to.
The subtle sense of personal sovereignty and peace this is bringing me is profound. Tension that I didn’t realize I’ve been holding for years is seeping out of me, and I think I’m only at the beginning of undoing hardwiring in my brain to trust this new position.
My Analog Future
I take at least one full month off of alcohol every year, typically January as a matter of course, and then any month when I feel like it. I’ve done this for at least half a decade now, to the point that I have the “how to” down pat. It’s not difficult at all anymore, in fact I look forward to it.
I think Project Analog will become a similar kind of thing. It’s a new behavioral tool in my kit that I’ll be able to employ anytime I want, now that I’ve done the work of figuring out the mechanics of it.
That said, there are some visible changes to my life that I’m keeping even when not under Project Analog rules.
permanent changes
Analog GTD
A dedicated Digital Chores day (financial spreadsheet update, inbox clearing, scheduling posts, etc).
I now compose blog posts and most emails with pen and paper first, and then copy to digital when ready to transmit.
Traditional sketching and drafting for builds first. I’ll only got to the sophisticated 3d tools for specialty tasks that analog isn’t suited to like daylight simulations and making materials decisions.