Experimental July
I found out about Manu's rather interesting experiment to set goals for himself for a month and write about his progress at the end of each week. In Manu's case, it was removing almost all forms of digital inputs from his life and replacing it with activities like reading and meditation. I decided to try doing something similar this July.
June was behind me before I could even catch my breath. It was a hectic month, and like Manu succinctly phrases it, "life has this tendency to set itself in some sort of autopilot mode and you slip into weird habits without realizing it". My screen time usage increased significantly and I found myself spending more and more time on social media. There had been a few days where I noticed this and decided to implement changes. It worked, but only for a day or two. Phone usage recoils to high screen times the very next day.
I've also tried setting app limits, except they only work to a certain extent. I'm pretty much always in the middle of doing something when the time is up, and because my phone gives me the full power of overriding those limits, I always end up giving myself five more minutes, and then five more still, until the panic of the night comes without having accomplished anything productive and I decide I should just read a book.
One of the reasons, I figured, was that my primary way to keep in touch with a lot of my friends is through the DMs in social media apps. This is unhealthy and unfortunate. Catching up with friends will get me to scroll a few posts along the way. The internet culture of sharing social media content with each other also meant that the posts my friends share to me will send me down rabbit holes of looking at more content on the app. It makes sense: social media companies' promises of friendships and networking to reel us in, then make us stay through all sorts of strategies until we've forgotten why we're here in the first place.
This month, I've decided to set myself a few goals and by following Manu's example, I'll write about how well I'm accomplishing them as well as any other insights every Sunday.
- No manually extending any app's time limits
- Daily screen time of 2 hours for my phone
- Opt for a book, podcasts, or writing when I'm about to reach for my phone to procrastinate or "relax"
Unfortunately, I won't be able to completely eliminate social media usage for personal reasons I won't be explaining right now; but goals 1 and 2 combined should be enough to produce improvements compared to my current situation.
I started many books this year but got to finish very little of them. My podcast queue also just keeps growing. All that will change. Fingers crossed.
My writing habits has been on the crawl as you can probably tell from this blog; and committing to this experiment will hopefully make me start writing more often again. Let's see how it goes!
If you've decided to join me, I'll be glad -- let me know and I'll include a link to your post here.
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