Tag: Personal Reflection

As I was getting ready to write this post, I came across this quote:

“The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent but pays off on character.”

John Gardner

This quote sums up one of my main purposes for a digital declutter. It’s not about being a better programmer. I won’t learn how to write better code. There isn’t a programming language that I’ll suddenly know at the end. Instead, the goal is to learn how to live with the technology that’s in my life. To discover self-destructive behaviors and replace them with self-constructive ones. Sure, as a nice side-effect, that should result in having more time to learn those hard skills, but that isn’t the motivation.

Now, on to some reflection on what I’ve learned so far.

In the first few days, it was interesting to see how often I would check my phone for no reason. Even though everything I would normally turn to was gone, the habit was still hard to break. I found myself scrolling through my list of apps, looking for anything to do. I ended up having to uninstall a few more apps that I hadn’t expected to be a problem. During this time, I definitely also looked at the weather more often than normal.

After some time, that tendency started to fade. I started reading a more: two books in the past week and a half or so. That’s something I want to emphasize. It wasn’t the case that I put these restrictions in place, then suddenly became super productive. Actually, for several days I’ve been far behind on my todo list. Example: I intended to write this post six days ago as a “end of the first week reflection.” Now it turned into a “almost halfway through reflection.”

The point is, reading those books actually felt good. Those hours I spent on my phone were, at worst, draining, and at best only mildly beneficial. I’m sure there will continue to be ups and downs in my energy to be productive. I believe that I’m learning how to recover that energy better, though, instead of throwing it away.

To wrap this up, let me just say that the feeling of freedom alone has been worth the cost of giving up some of the digital distractions I clung to. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk about doing your own digital declutter.

Recently, I decided to do a digital declutter. This has been on my mind ever since I read Digital Minimalism, and I’ve half-heartedly implemented some aspects of a digital declutter, but never fully committed. All the recent stress, though, has had me reaching more and more for cheap distractions, like phone games, scrolling through social media, and such like.

The goal is to create some mental space to be able to examine what works best for my life. What will best help me accomplish what I want to accomplish?

Here are some at actions I took before starting, to support me in this process:

1. Talked to my wife about it. As my partner in life, and the person who knows me best, she can help me be accountable and reflect on how I’m changing.
2. Made a list of categories of services that I spend my time on, and how I wanted to handle that. For example, for Twitter, I needed to change my password to something I can’t remember (so that I must use a password manager to access Twitter).
3. Made a new user on my laptop dedicated to work. I set up a new work-only Protonmail email account, work-only Lastpass account, etc. By not having easy access to the passwords for distracting services, I make it more inconvenient to get on Facebook than just Ctrl+T, F, Enter. Plus, it was a good opportunity to be more mindful of the services I wanted to use. Instead of the data-hungry Gmail, for example, I went with privacy-focused Protonmail.
4. Set up access controls through PAM to restrict my old account to be used only during certain times of the day.
5. Removed various apps from my phone, and disabled the ones I couldn’t remove. I also made sure it would be inconvenient to get the passwords for services like Twitter on my phone.
6. Decided on a time frame: November 28 – December 28.

During this time, I want to reflect on what high quality activities can replace my low quality ones. Instead of browsing the suggested articles that Google bombards me with, for example, perhaps it would be better to sign up for one or two high quality newsletters that cover topics I’m interested in.

So far, my preparations seem to be helping me stay focused. I expect there will be some difficulty adjusting and figuring out what works best for me, but I’m excited for the possibilities!