Experimental June: week 1
As promised last week (and beaten by Manuel), it's time for the weekly update.
As a reminder, here are the rules for the month:
- No social networks with timelines or algorithms
- YouTube only as a search engine, or if a link is shared
- All content must come via RSS, email, or directly from a human
- No online news. If I want to know what's going on, I'll grab a newspaper (thankfully, I work for one)
- No podcasts
- No phone while doing anything else
- Daily screen time limit: two hours (Manu picked that number; I might hate him by June 30)
So far, I think I have mostly respected the rules I've set for myself.
My screen time has decreased by 26%, though I realized I can't respect the daily limit of two hours for one simple reason: I don't lock my screen. Often it just lies there with the screen turned on while I do something else. This might explain why my ScreenTime in MacroFactor (my calorie tracking app of choice) is so high. I enter one ingredient, continue cooking, and the phone just lies there. And I don't have it set to auto-lock either, because it annoys me too much to unlock the screen when it lies flat on the surface. But besides that, I mostly stopped using the phone as a second screen. If I watch a TV show, I watch the TV show. And I am nearly done with The Bear S03 and Severance S01.
Also, I completely stopped watching YouTube, though I open the website once a week to save a few things from my subscriptions tab to watch after this experiment. I don't think I'll keep the No-YouTube thing up, but I will definitely clean up my subscriptions tab and only keep channels I watch. (Also, I uploaded my own video for the first time in a while.) There is simply too much good stuff on YouTube.
As for the other inputs, I can report that I've completely stopped checking them. I only open up Instagram once every few days to check if someone sent me a DM (they did, and still do, even though I stopped replying on IG and reply to them elsewhere instead).
So what's next for Week 2? Probably more of the same, though I think I might set my phone to auto-lock and see if I can lower the screen time some more.
