Advent of Controlled Media Usage

One blogpost ago, I wrote about Stuff I’ve spent entirely too much time on. That title was of course in jest, as I think I’ve spent a (somewhat) reasonable amount of time on VPN and DNS, given that it makes my setup quite a bit more secure and also makes certain things simpler.

There are, however, things I have also spent a lot of time on, where I’d say “yes, that is actually a waste of time”.

If my phone stats are to be trusted¹, I’ve spent 3+ hours on my phone every day of last week. That’s 21 hours per week, or half a full time job. Simply looking at that, it annoyed me quite a bit, since that wasn’t an atypical week - meaning I’d spend about 1000 hours on non-fulfilling, short-term content over an entire year.

I decided that that’s too much, and it’d probably do me good if I simply stopped doing that. As I believe in extreme measures, I’ve decided I want to reduce my phone’s screentime to less than 30 minutes every day.

How do I plan to achieve that?

• Replace my phone alarm clock with a dumb one to prevent any temptation of using the phone when getting up.
• Uninstall the apps I spent the most time on (instagram, youtube)
• Unmute my phone - this way I know I didn’t miss anything because my phone will make a noise when someone wants to reach me. quite convenient :)
• Go through the apps that are able to send me notifications and decide if they should keep that privilege.
• Put my phone in my backpack
• Never look at it unless it makes a noise

Yesterday I spent some time changing all the settings for this to work. Today, I achieved a mobile screentime of 4 minutes :)

Today has been an extremely boring day. However, it has also been a rather productive day - I finally updated my CV, wrote a cover letter, and stopped procrastinating the application I wanted to send out since about 2 weeks.

I expect the upcoming days to continue being extremely boring - but I also have hope that I’ll get to do more of the things I’ve procrastinated for too long.