Background

This is the COVID world. Staying at home, staying away from people, working at home, attending zoom calls all day long are part of the new normal for a lot of people. In the last 6 months, I had started feeling that I am online (or in front of a screen) more and more. Lately, I have been feeling a digital burnout. It’s like this feeling that when you are not in front of a screen, you feel restless.

I did not plan to read this book well in advance but it was pretty much spur of the moment. I was scrolling my Goodreads (see another app that I scroll endlessly), when I saw someone add a book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport into their to-read shelf. The title was intriguing so I decided to look up the book. It had a good rating and I could relate with the descriptions. So I bought the book on my kindle and started reading it later that day.

This was about a month ago when I also took a couple of weeks off from work to rest and recharge. It just felt the perfect time to explore how to be a minimalist in the digital world. The rest of the blog is about my key learnings from the book and how I used it as a catalyst to improve my life.

How did it start

It’s hard to imagine what happened 10-15 years ago but it is always good to read about it and have an wow! moment. It’s easy to imagine that the full-glass-screen 6″ smartphones have been around forever. That one morning we woke up and we had these smartphones that we could exploit to master our lives.

But the beginnings are usually more humble. The first iPhone was not trying to be a device that does everything. Steve Jobs first keynote introduces a device called iPhone that could replace a phone and an iPod in your pocket. I doubt even Steve Jobs imagined a super powerful computing device that does everything and allows endless scrolling on which people will spend hours of everyday when he first imagined the iPhone.

Facebook did not start to be this mega money making machine but all it wanted to do was to build a virtual directory for college communities. I doubt Facebook imagined being this global community of billions of people trying to increase user engagement at all costs and becoming the platform that could undermine democracy and give rise to extreme polarization.

None of these companies had aimed to be where they were when they started but a mix of user expectations and investor pressures along with the force of money has gotten them to where they are.

Attention economy

Most companies exist so they can make money. If they can’t, they will go out of business. So when a company is able to offer a product for free, it has to make money somewhere. Usually if the product itself is free, the company most likely makes money of advertising.

In the advertising industry, you make money when you show an ad (usually called impressions). If you want to make more money, you need to show more impressions or raise ad prices. Usually raising ad prices is a limited possibility in the competitive industry. So in most cases, to make more money companies try to show more impressions.

To increase impressions, you have to either increase number of users using your product or the amount of time they use the product. The longer they use a product, the more they will scroll or access different parts of the product and more chances to show ads. Hence it is in the company’s best interest to increase “engagement” or time you spend on the app. Higher engagement means more ads.

Now imagine that these companies have billions of $$ of revenue and hundreds of billions of $$ of market valuation riding not just on the money they make now but how fast that profit and revenue is growing. 30% growth rates are more valuable to the stock price than 5%. So the companies have a very strong incentive to show more ads and make more money.

They can afford to (and to some extent they need to) pump billions of $$ of R&D to increase engagement. They did not start with the goal of hijacking our attention but over time they ended up at that point. The more you can hijack a user’s “free” time and engage them with your app, the more financially rewarding it is for the company. This is why it is often termed attention economy where the commodity being traded is the limited time a person has to spend across all the various apps and websites. Companies keep on inventing new techniques to hijack a user’s attention and monetize it

We are always using our phones. We carry these devices with us all the time and they are easy to access compared to laptops. Hence the age of smartphones has supercharged the attention economy. Remember the last time you stood in a queue, or waited at a bank or doctor’s office for your turn without using your phone. Remember the last time you went for a run without music. For a lot of people in their early 20s, the answer is never. They have not experienced a world like that.

For the rest of us, we have forgotten (and to some extent are scared of) spending time with our own thoughts, completely disconnected from any form of connectivity. Being able to think, to explore your own ideas no matter how uncomfortable is part of our creative process. That’s one of the reason there’s now an increasing number of tech-savvy people taking low-tech vacations to disconnect from the constant connection. Not only does this constant stream of information hijack our attention more, it leads to an increased sense of anxiety.

When you don’t get enough likes on a photo, or you don’t know second by second detail of an event unfolding on twitter, it makes you anxious. When you can’t find a photo to Instagram during your awesome vacation, it makes you anxious. When you suddenly run out of things to scroll on your phone, you become restless (like I do).

I am not advocating that these companies are bad. I think they are here, at this point, trying to increase engagement because of shareholder pressures to some extent. We as a society have a collective responsibility of what’s happening here and how we got here. We also have the ability to engage constructively to mitigate the harmful effects.

Moderate not abstain

One of the key points the author tried to make is we are not vilifying all technologies. Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, YouTube are not inherently bad. They have brought a lot of good to a lot of people. You can now stay in touch with family on the other side of globe via Facebook. You can learn new languages or get educated on YouTube. You can find wonderful insights via documentaries on Netflix.

Similarly some of the older technologies like email have improved our communication ability and moved the world forward. Slack allows real time communication and information sharing among teams leading to increased collaboration. So making a blanket statement that “all technology is bad” is not the appropriate conclusion. By themselves, these technologies cannot be portrayed as wrong or evil.

Our time is actual $$ for these companies. So as they incentivize us to spend more time on their platform, we need to see past the freebies and visualize the hidden cost we are paying here for these freebies. The cost is our time. The side-effects are anxiety and fear of missing out on the latest update (FOMO).

The important outcome is to moderate your use of technology by making conscious and deliberate decisions. These decisions would be around what apps to use, how to use them, how long to use them for and how do you set guard rails for yourself so you don’t get sucked into the ecosystem. The goal is to ensure that you push back and can counter the addictiveness of these technology so you can derive the benefit appropriate for you while mitigating the harmful effects.

Author’s approach

The author’s approach on how to reduce your digital footprint starts with a 30 day disconnection from all but necessary to live technology. The assumption is that while we humans can do detoxes, even from technology, we tend to go back. People may somehow force themselves to do a weekend phone detox or give up social media for a couple of weeks but it is easy to go back.

For lasting change, it is important that we first give up all technology that we can live without. He does not try to make a point of what you can and cannot live without but leaves the choice up to individuals. However, the approach is to exclude everything by default including phones, and TVs, and laptops and internet unless it is necessary for you to survive.

The next step is to ensure you find activities in real world like reading books, socializing, playing sports, volunteering etc. that will ensure you don’t crave technology when you get bored and are having withdrawal symptoms.

The last part is to consciously add the technology back one at a time in the right amounts after a 30 day period. For example, you may choose to ask what do I really need from Facebook. Maybe you can check Facebook once a week for 30 minutes on your laptop. Or you can choose to watch Netflix only with one more person around but never alone. Or you can choose to follow specific Instagram accounts that inspire you but review it once a day.

The goal is to be conscious and deliberate about what you want from this technology and not use it just because it might be somewhat useful once in your life. Like that random game app you might have installed, just in case you got bored on flight, which now takes up 2 hours a day in your life.

My approach

I did not follow the author’s approach obviously. I did not feel my life was threatened enough to give up Netflix for 30 days. However I was inspired to make changes to my life. I think the desire had already been there but reading the book motivated me further to reduce my digital footprint.

The results of my small experiment is described below:

Two weeks	Average Screen Time per day
July 12-25	1 hour 52 minutes
July 26 – Aug 8	54 minutes (Started implementing changes ~ July end)
August 9-22	40 minutes

All told I have reduced about 1 hour of screen time every day since I made these changes. I would highlight that perhaps some of this screen time has moved to my laptop. But my goal of spending less time being distracted on my phone has definitely been met. It led to less scrolling, less random google searches, less random browsing and more time to just be with my own thoughts.

Here are some of the things I did:

On my laptop

• Gmail Filters: I wanted to reduce the number of email notifications I get on Gmail because notification is a distraction. To accomplish that, I used the Filters and Labels functionality in Gmail to ensure that irrelevant email does not come to my Inbox.

• Freedom Plugin: You can install the free chrome plugin called Freedom. This allows you to set time limits per day for various websites. I set it to 5-10 minutes for News websites, social media and even LinkedIn.

• RSS readers: I use a RSS reader website called Feedly. In this I have subscribed to a bunch of news websites where I get those articles. I set a personal rule to only scroll and read articles if there are at least 50 articles. This ensures I don’t mindlessly open Feedly and start reading news. You can organize your news sources into relevant topics. 

On Mobile

• Digital wellbeing (Android), Screen Time (iOS): Both major OS allow some form of screen timers. It allows you to set timers on the apps you have. I set timers on my Chrome browser, feedly, and even Grab app.
• Night-mode: The same digital wellbeing tools allow you to set night mode that ensures you don’t get any notifications during the set night hours. The screen can also be turned into Grey-screen to reduce incentive for you to look at screen.
• Notification settings: I basically turned off app notifications from almost all apps except WhatsApp, WeChat etc. There’s no need for Chrome or Google maps or Grab to send me notifications. I can open the app if I need something.
   

• Uninstall apps: I uninstalled all the apps that I had not used in last 2-4 weeks. Including social media apps. If I really wanted, I could browse FB on my browser.
• WhatsApp Group unsubscribe: I am not a lot of WhatsApp groups. But I basically left the random WhatsApp groups that were not relevant and muted all the other groups to reduce notifications (and hence distractions)
• Block websites on Chrome app: The digital wellbeing functionality in Android also allows you to set website timers. If you set the timer to 0, the website can’t be accessed on your phone. I basically set 0 minutes for m.facebook.com and voila!, I can’t use facebook on my phone anymore.
• Changing launcher: I had 2 gripes with Google’s launcher skin: it had this endless scrolling on Google Now view that surfaced news articles to me and there was no way to hide apps in the app drawer. I changed to Microsoft launcher skin and both of these gripes went away. By doing this, (1) I don’t have any personalized news section that entices me to scroll (2) only 5-6 important apps show up in my app drawer. This reduces my restlessness on “what do I do now” looking at my phone.