Experimental July: Week 2 Reflection
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.
Experimental July
Experimental July: Week 1 Reflection
The second week of July went by like a breeze; lo and behold, we're now almost past mid July.
This week, I made significant progress in my books and podcasts and managed to be pretty productive in some other offline chores.
Screen time, unfortunately, still isn't looking as good as I envisioned last week, but the time spent on social media has been very tightly constrained by my self-imposed time limits (a good thing!) The only exception was Saturday, when I had forgotten that I -- for various reasons -- turned off app-specific time limits the day before and so it was the only day where the accumulated screen time went past the 4 hour mark.
Here is the full list of each day's total screen time on my phone starting from Monday.
- 3h 22m
- 2h 34m
- 3h 42m
- 3h 39m
- 3h 17m
- 4h 6m (oops!)
- 3h 11m
Although the goal I set for myself was 2 hours, I did allow my self some leeway to going up until 2h 59m as a strict limit. It is now slightly embarrassing to admit that I had not only failed to comply to the 2-hour soft limit, I didn't manage to get the screen time consistently below 3 hours.
Some of those days were affected by usage of online shopping apps, which in my optimistic defense, is inevitable and should technically be deducted from the total. That said, even after having deducted time spent on online shopping, many of those days still failing to get under the 2-hour limit is still slightly concerning.
One change I'll make starting next week is to lower the specific app limits I have set for social media. It was previously 1h 30m based on past experience, but I will now be setting it to 50m. One 5m extension will be allowed, but applying a manual extension will permanently affect my perception of whether that day was a "clean" or "perfect" day.
For prosperity, my initial three goals will be reiterated:
- 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"
Goal 1 can be considered achieved; goal 2 will continue to be worked on (hopefully).
As for goal 3, I'd rate myself around 70% of the way there. Although I have made significant improvements to my book and podcasts progress, I'm still reaching for my phone a lot; and never really had any motivation to actively produce output (through writing or crafting) except for writing journal entries and weekly reflection posts like this one.
To improve on goal 3, I will be adding a new metric to my radar for observations -- unlock counts. Each time I reach for my phone increases the counter for the number of times my phone is unlocked. Opening counts per-app is also recorded in the android built-in app I have on my phone. Based on statistics from the past week, I'll try aiming for a total unlock count of no more than 40, and a count of opening social media apps of no more than 50.
Overall, the experiment isn't going too well, but positive changes were still observed, including the hope that ignites within me when I write about ideas for improvements and setting these new goals. 🌟
#experimental-july
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