💊 Digital Detox
So I spent 10 days without my laptop this month. It might not seem like a lot, but it’s my longest stretch in recent years. On top of that, my mobile got damaged in the trip, making me cut off from everything!
I got a lot of anxiety that day - the FOMO on all of those notifications: slack, telegram, discord, twitter, email - and I couldn’t do anything because I didn’t have internet connectivity.
I switched to my backup phone the next day, which is just a really old phone with calling and sms functionality. After using it for a couple of days, I realized that most of my notifications are anyway useless, just trying to get my attention and trick me into opening their app. I learnt two things from this:
- Backup everything!
This is something I knew I should always be doing but always kept putting off due to laziness. Losing all data on my mobile hit me hard and I’m cursing myself why didn’t I back up all data. - Reduce urgent but unimportant notifications
Notifications feed on our urgency to act on something. But 99% of them are unimportant. I understood this after being without a smartphone for 3 days. I then did a sweep of my notifications when I saw that I was getting 500+ notifications daily (which is a LOT!). However, there were a lot of notifications which I just dismiss without even reading the content. These needed to go. I’ve now muted most of the group chats, turned off notifications from a lot of apps, and I’m down to <50 notifications a day.
Fasting from electronic devices can be scary at first, but trust me, it’s an amazing experience. I now use the zen mode (which basically turns my smartphone into an old phone and mutes all notifications except incoming calls for a set duration) while reading a book and it helps me get into a focused state much faster.
How often do you detox from the digital world?
Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap