* Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone; only use the computer (or other device that's not constantly in your pocket).
* Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something (eg. check the social events, send a message), and use private/incognito mode for this; use 2FA - besides being good security practice, it's an extra hurdle so you won't default to "quickly check" the sites when your mental energy is low.
* When you do use tw/fb/..., unfollow/block/opt out of all the meme/cute/funny stuff (at least n my fb feed, there's basically 10 sites that'd constantly crop up - blocking posts by all of these greatly increased Signal/Noise ratio on FB);
* Have a reading list ready. I use iBooks on my iPhone to load up interesting articles, but you can use whichever method you prefer. The goal is to have something interesting/worthwhile to read available for the moments when you do want to look at your phone and/or kill some time (eg when in a long queue or waiting for a train). This something shouldn't require special focus or mental energy/capacity.
* Develop heuristics to ignore content that you know is junk but that tends to drag you in. I suspect this is slightly different for anyone, mine is: anything cute, funny, outrageous, sad or is a list of things. I am aware this potentially cuts out some genuinely worthwhile stuff and I'm okay with it. Considering my attention & time is finite and the Internet is (for all purposes) not, I'd rather have false positives than false negatives.
* I also have a high bar for what's newsworthy for me: anything that personally affects me (meaning I have to change my intentions or react in some way), and stuff that'll still be considered newsworthy in a month. Anything else gets ignored, no matter the medium. Again I'm okay with false positives. Also, since my friends are colleagues typically don't have the same approach, if I miss anything important (or really interesting), I'll probably hear it on the grapevine.
Couldn't be happier.
- Do not follow newspapers RSS feeds. They bombard you with news that are not relevant at all. Their newsletters are better. I get all my news from daily or weekly newsletters. I would like to get weekly digests only, but I havent found a good one from a newspaper I like.
- Actually quit Facebook. It's pure evil. I was so shocked to hear how it showed you your old, forgotten photos/memories from past just to engage you. If you can't engage with people through messaging (including whatsapp) or phone calls, they are not that close friends.
- On reddit, avoid controversial subreddits, especially on things relevant to you. As a Turkish citizen I avoid /r/Turkey because it's idiots idioting on things that directly affect me, and the urge to rant and answer is hard to suppress. Nowadays I usually only comment on /r/emacs and HN, and avoid all the controversy everywhere. Also, I push all the funny, interesting etc. stuff on reddit into multis, and subscribe only to some low traffic subs where I do not thing my participation would be a loss of time (which is basically /r/emacs, /r/istanbul, and a couple others).
- If you use HN often, subscribe to the front page RSS and to the digest [1]. This way you won't ever miss the important stuff but have less need to actually check the frontpage.
- Disable email notifications. Don't let the sender dictate you when you'll interact with them, decide it yourself. The last time I had an email notification was quite some years ago.
- Declutter your email inbox. Try to make sure that most of what's in there is what you'd just immediately read. Try to redirect the rest in relevant mailboxes. Your email setup should allow you to dispatch incoming messages on headers and body content. Especially useful are List-ID, Subject and From headers.
[1] Twitter is weird. I only follow ~15 accounts for events and (want to) use twitter only for that, but the way people usually post updates about events is to repeatedly post what is essentially the same tweet, and even with that many accounts followed it becomes a mess. I end up never checking it because it's basically a puzzle.
Does such a service necessarily have to be anti-privacy? It could be created with open-source tools and run on a cheap low power server in your home, scouring the web for stuff that it thinks interests you based on data you feed it. You will still be in charge of your data then.
Applications Drawer\Google -> Hamburger Menu\Settings -> Your Feed
How can you delete a website?
No seriously, how do you keep the browser from hooking you?
I don't have any apps installed and I often fall into a reddit-hn-local_news1-local_news2-it_news1-it_news2 cycle that I start all over when I'm done with it just to check if something new happened in the meantime! Especially on Weekend mornings or when I come home from work, I can sink hours into that cycle and feel increasingly miserable about it, but the sweet endorphin rush of new bits of information can push that away momentarily.
I have tried editing /etc/hosts in the past, but this tends to only shift my cycle to other websites.
And set your browser to open new tabs with your homepage.
Seriously. The gentle smile of playing with this silly little low-res lion can break you out of that loop sometimes.
Does not work if you tend to just keep on reusing the same tab of course.
This was a really big issue with me too. What I did in the past was to signup for low bandwidth internet connection (not by speed, but with yearly limit of 18 GiB), which made me limit the frequent visits.
These days when I do some serious work, I decides to disconnect internet for the next 45 minutes (or so). I have locally installed manpages, devhelp and devdocs.io documentations. Even if I'm tempted to visit some website (eg: stackoverflow), I delay until the time reaches.
dnsmasq is rather good for this.
I think the birthdays only counted as "costless" when I was already checking and filtering through Facebook notifications, but that was an illusion.
I find I can't really read/comprehend from an LED screen well at all these days. I got into the habit of sending items of interest to my e-reader. Any long form article goes there.
Sadly I sat on my e-reader, and my system went to pot. I've just stacked up my reading list. I have no idea what is there. Going back to scrappy reading, feels like a real time and brain drain.
A middle ground is turning off badges and other notifications. Switching to a paper newspaper also helps.
I had to uninstall it, because the addon developer stopped maintaining it and the performance bugs made browsing bigger sites much too slow.
Absolutely. Latest Firefox helps here. There's an option to use private by default for all windows. This means when you close it (another habit to develop perhaps) you don't stay logged in to these social media sites.
I've actually started deliberately looking at the cute stuff. It's a welcome antidote to the outrage apparent in other threads/sites. I have enough natural spleen already without needing to top it up.
Even without going as far as "incognito mode for everything", this can dovetail well with a privacy-conscious cookie or browser-profile policy.
Do you know of an app/browser extension that lets you bookmark arbitrary HTML pages, and keeps track of how far down you've scrolled; maybe let you write notes? Or maybe one that converts an arbitrary page to PDF, and stores it locally for you?
And I'm 100% with you. It was a huge revelation for me personally when I realized new technology doesn't necessarily make me happier. Probably like a lot of us, I grew up obsessed with new tech, new computers, new gaming consoles, new phones.
2 years ago, I traded my iPhone plus in for an SE (the smaller one). Then I moved all slot machine apps either off my phone or at least into a folder on the second screen. Primarily, my phone is for maps and camera. Everything else is suspect.
Tony was the founder of Lift.do which became coach.me.
His blog on betterhumans is fantastic and I highly recommend it.
Keep up the fantastic work Tony!!!
Ditch your sim card/mobile plan, get a voip number, phone only works on wifi like a home phone. When out and about you only have the media you pre-downloaded (podcasts, mp3s, audiobooks, offline maps) no more staring at the screen in public.
Move all personal communication to email/signal, check it in the morning after your routine (exercise, meditation etc). Ditch instagram/twitter/reddit(turned to shit anyway) etc, keep facebook just for contacts but a single post with your email and never log on. (We really need a different phonebook platform). Never look at news sites except this one and other neutral biased ones like economically focused news.
Take a note of everything you want to google, allow 1 hour a day internet/research time where you google the questions of the day. You find the phone is inferior to desktop when at home so you spend little time on your phone. Make a life plan and use your new 4 hours a day to achieve these goals. No screens 2 hours before bedtime.
The downside is you cant receive calls when out and about (for me an upside), there has been 2 times in the past 2 years I've had to stop at a coffee shop to send off a message, worth the $2000 savings.
Phone is still a great tool, camera, mp3 player, maps, guitar tuner etc etc. Knowing the latest tweet from your favorite celebrity while walking in the park isn't adding to your life. Unless there is a nuclear strike or a national draft then news wont effect you.
edit, should have read the replies, seems there's a bunch of similar responses
It (AT LEAST) frees you to decide when to check the phone, rather than letting these companies, (through notifications) decide for you when you're going to check your phone.
I also turn off the ability of most apps to display notifications. That helps.
Second is to restrict your internet use to specific times or to just say an hour every night from 9-10pm. Lets say start out by saying internet only from 0-15 minutes on the hour (initially). The idea is to get you used to not reflexively use the internet to prevent boredom or distraction.
How you accomplish that, say by killing your internal dns server to not respond or even firewall off your network from reaching the internet is up to you. But the key is to make it so you change your habit of when using the internet is ok.
Oh also, leave the phone at your desk, only pick it up when you need to look at it or if it rings etc...
Another good tip, reward yourself for each milestone, you want to encourage yourself to do the right thing. Don't use negative reinforcement unless you really know how to make that work. Its easier to do stuff like: if I don't go online at all today, I'll eat a container of ice cream (bad example if you do this every day but you get the gist) as a reward.
I still pull the phone out of my pocket several times an hour, but a quick push of the home-button and a confirmation that there's nothing of interest leads to it going straight back into the pocket. It's liberating!
Step 2 was removing the browser shortcut from the main screen, so there's less temptation to just 'fire it up and check HN quickly'.
I quit facebook back in March. Yep, some people don't talk to me anymore. But you know what? I talk with other people more, and I'm enjoying those relationships more.
It's also hard; this is a top-of-class addiction. There's nothing easy about rewiring the reward circuit of your brain. And definitely Facebook, work email and in my case ycombinator news, are wired in to the reward circuit - for the relief of boredom, or even the relief of hard work (or the appearance of that relief anyway.)
A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same way you would have done it in 2000?
Phones and email still exist. If your relationship is predicated on a single internet based communication service then it's probably not a relationship worth maintaining.
Just use a different communication mechanism. It's really not that hard.
Send a postcard, it's fun, I promise.
It's not for everyone, but I have a very addictive personality when it comes to technology.
Edit: I see you can't do that because of professional obligations. What about carrying around an iPad - it could be more of a barrier to just random surfing?
Having a cap forces me to be mindful about how I interact through my phone. If I use too much Reddit, for example, I run out of data and fallback to 3G - acceptable for social/professional obligations but way too slow for wasting time. Lately I've been considering switching to 3G entirely.
And why would you like to "quit internet"? Yes, many sites try to get your attention, try to manipulate you into buying their products. But you can avoid that. Using ad blockers wherever you can. And regarding Facebook. You can use it more like a newsreader (subscribing to newspapers, ignoring my friend's posts mostly).
Edit: Re smartphone. I also have my phone on `do not disturb', permanently. I try to educate my friends / family members that I don't necessarily pick up the phone when it rings, but I will always call back. They are ok with that.
Ditching reddit or hacker news is much harder. I mean, how do you even use the internet these days?
I'm both happy and sad to discover that I don't even know what to do on the internet when they're not available. Happy because it forces me to do something else. Sad because I remember when I truly loved the internet, before reddit or HN, and I wonder why I don't have that love anymore.
I really don't know how to use the internet these days.
Same for me. Nowadays when I get bored and have some unproductive time to kill, I usually surf hacker news because I can't think of any other website to read as I quit other social media websites.
It's the same happiness/sadness you mention, although the lack of options on the internet has been turning out to be more positive than negative as I've been reading much much more.
An RSS reader really helped me with this. Over years, I found a good handful of blogs that I find insightful more often than not, and I can reliably find something in my RSS feed when I choose to look at it. The SNR is much higher than somewhere like Reddit and Hacker News, and the lack of an account and upvotes means that a big chunk of the dopamine fix is removed.
I would be lying if I didn't mention that I occasionally feel something missing: if I read an article that I think is insightful but wrong in some important way, I miss the pressure-release valve of being able to discuss it with others (Obligatory Xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/). But I view this more like a compulsion than a legitimate desire, akin to someone with a bad diet craving sugar.
Sadly I find my attention span, even with a great read, has suffered greatly. I blame the internet, but maybe it's just me. It's very difficult to suffer through even a brief boring stretch now.
Now, I either mean to do it or I don't go. My social life certainly feels more organic:
met my girlfriend at a former job, not social media. I get invited out with her colleagues from time-to-time or we go on a date or spend time together at home or I commit my time to studying or some other enjoyment. I'd like to think I can build a new social life in that way, but maybe it's a pipe dream now.
It does feel like there's a whole other life going on that I'm not a part of sometimes.
Without the Facebook, Twitter, etc thing, the internet is either topical discussion, news, study/research, music, or nil.
I was an adult before Internet use was widespread, and many things were better back then. People don't really need to be connected to everyone on the planet at all times of the day.
I already left Facebook, and it was a great decision. I avoid all of their products, including their software libraries whenever possible.
I would recommend you to write these plans in a notebook (real notebook with pen/pencil). Write all of your plans, whenever you plan. The problem with software solutions is that once you reschedule, its history is lost.
I have such a book which has now almost run out of pages. Once a week I read them. Most of them are not yet done. But it makes me feel good, and helps me prioritize better than software solutions.
What's stopping you from not having social media apps on your phone, or even using a web browser? Nothing. Like quitting your tobacco, stop making excuses and just do it. As for social events, if none of your "friends" choose to invite you to social stuff over an SMS or a phone call if you were to quit FB, then that's not friends I'd care to keep.
1) Accept that my phone should be working for me, and I shouldn't be working for it.
2) Disable all non call notifications except a small favorite group. Not much can't wait 15-60 minutes, and if so, they will call. I mute WhatsApp groups liberally.
3) I access facebook via web browser, at https://mbasic.facebook.com, including for instant messaging. You'll be surprised how less you use it when it's painful to use. Now I just go interact with the events I need, and take messaging offline.
4) No more push emails - that benefits no one except the person asking the questions and most often having others do their work for them.
5) Install separate chat apps for small circles of people. I use one with my wife, another with friends, WhatsApp is the generic muted text, and I have let myself have LinkedIn as an app on my phone (minus notifications) to message work stuff. Compartmentalizing helps.
I always have my phone on silent, and the only time it even vibrates is when I receive a phone call. IM notifications are displayed on the screen, but as it doesn’t make a noise or vibrate I might not find out until a few hours later. For group chats I usually set them to muted, so I need to purposely go in and see what’s going on.
For most other apps I usually have notifications disabled, and some I have a badge count displayed - one day I will probably get around to sorting out those 2382 unread emails, but I’ve learned to ignore the 101 unlistened podcasts.
It would be nice to find some sort of community that's pushing back against these things. It's hard to do alone - for instance, when I tried going back to writing long e-mail to friends instead of merely liking Facebook posts, I got little response. People had moved on, and weren't interested in going back.
I agree for those with children it becomes a different story.
Anyone who has managed to get control back from an addiction has my admiration, but I have a special extra bit for people who are successfully coping with a food addiction.
This is what I do, and it's drastically reduced my information addiction.
For me this made using my phone enough of a hassle to break any habit I had. It's been a few months now and I have the password memorized, but I still almost never use my phone.
Facebook has an API. Script a poll on those events and push them to somewhere you'll see them? Log in once a week to see if your script missed anything you cared about, and modify the script if yes?
Please allow me to recommend my two favorite print magazines:
New Yorker London Review of Books
Highly recommended. Please subscribe. I read the New Yorker on my Kindle but I read LRB in print.
Still have an iPad, but I’m an iOS developer. (Perhaps I should change that?)
Due to idiosyncrasies in how it works, I'm now stuck with both!
The problem is that the watch is dependent on the phone for notifications. If the phone is off the watch will not get notifications for Gmail or Google Voice. I can setup the regular mail client but the I get the Primary, Social, and Updates Inbox from gmail instead of just the primary inbox. Google voice notifications do not come at all so i miss text messages to my google voice number which is my primary/public phone number. The workaround would be to port my number back to the carrier and use the carrier for SMS/Text messages.
ATT has number sync so calls to the watch and phone will hit each other, but it is not as smooth as you would hope and gets disconnected sometimes.
Battery life is much better using bluetooth than wifi or cell connection.
Just lots of little issues that are a pain to try to work around.
My goal was for me to have access to my important notifications but not have my phone "at hand" to tempt me.
There are plenty of people having real problems. If a phone in your pocket is the biggest problem you're having - you're not doing enough with your life.
I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful.
I can compare this to the couple of times I've tried to "quit the Internet" (i.e. social media, reddit, etc.). The problem is that there's nowhere to run from the Internet. I can avoid tobacco stores, I can't avoid my iPhone. For what it's worth, I'd love to smash my phone and throw it in a ditch, but there are certain social and professional obligations that require me to hold onto it. I have to be able to check my work email on the go. I have to use Facebook to stay in the loop about social events because all my friends use Facebook to schedule those social events. I have to call my parents once in a while. One device is a tool for all of those, in addition to being an ultra-high-tech meme-box with which I can mainline information to make myself feel good. It is of course not all bad, but the wonderful connectivity of the Internet is inextricably wrapped up with the "DoS Attack on Your Free Will".
To get back to the analogy, I'd like to think I was successful at quitting tobacco because I can avoid it. If I were giving someone tips to quit something, that's the best advice I could think to offer: avoid it. If you want to quit smoking, wouldn't it be preposterous to buy a pack of cigarettes and carry it everywhere? The temptation would always be there.
So it is with smartphones. When the best minds in attention capitalism are trying to pull me in every time I send a text message, how can I quit that? It's always in my pocket, and I can't simply throw it away because there are now certain expectations that I carry that tool with me almost everywhere I go. There is nowhere to run from this modern media, and that terrifies me.