My war against Screen and against Online is over and this is the peace treaty: No screen without a matching TODO item.
I can spend any amount of time online or on devices or watching TV and do anything on there as long as I do this:
Away from the screen, with the screen off or out of view, I look at my “to do” list on paper, I look through the whole thing (things I want to do onscreen or IRL), and I write down things I want to do. I can then go to the screen, “enter Screenland” so to speak, and try to do as many things as possible on the “to do on screen” part of the list. No gimmicks, no app limits or blocks or guilt.
And then I can’t do anything else on screen that wasn’t part of the list. If my screen life prompts more screen life actions I can’t do them right away. I write them up on the paper (in a way I can tell it apart from the original “to do on screen” list I’m already working on) and then I can do them later after again leaving the screen and weighing them against everything else. If something mediumly urgent comes up I can write it down, pause all the other to-do-on-screen stuff, quickly close the screen and look at my lists. So far I haven’t had to do that. And if it’s a life-or-death real things are on actual fire then that would need an even bigger exception.
Everyday routines like “check messages” have a pre-printed daily allotment. Or that sounds way too fancy for what’s really going on in my case: I use a pen to draw circles in the corner of my calendar the day before how many times I am supposed to check messages the next day and then check those circles off as I use them up. It’s just a shorthand for “open mail app and RSS reader and respond to everything in there that I want to respond to”.
GTD fans, hark: there can no longer be any two minute rule for stuff in Screenland. I absolutely use that rule (which says that if you want to do something that takes less than two minutes, there’s no need to bring out the pen and paper lists for it, instead just do it) offline as much as possible, now more than ever, but the idea behind this peace treaty is that Screenland time is not allowed to beget more Screenland time. Within the context of “message replying time” I’ve alotted a little bit of time to do random undefined things as long as it’s both in direct service of each message, and it’s something I actually want to or have to do.
That “in direct service of” items on my “to do” list is a good mindset to cultivate. No longer do I have to feel any guilt for looking at a maps app or travel planning app in order to get to an IRL meeting. But this requires a judgment call. It’s easy to get nerd sniped into yak shaving for tangentially related minor connections to what you actually wanted to do.
I talked to a friend on the phone about this system and he was a bit incredulous. “Wait, did I get this right… You just have to look at your other lists, you don’t need to do anything on them? You can read that you’ve written ‘wash windows, make bed, sort books, prep food’, and then decide to not do anything of that and scribble in ‘watch cartoons’ and then go watch cartoons on screen?” Yes! Because this peace treaty is about doing what I want to do on screen as opposed to doing things I’m compelled to do, or that I do mindlessly.
I never said this peace treaty solved all life and productivity issues. It’s a life-long commitment, I don’t want to deprive myself of all rest and relaxation.
But my problem with Screen and Online hasn’t been that I’ve been doing anything bad on there. With a few exceptions, like when I’ve been a li’l addicted to chatbots (they are bad for the environment and bad for mental health), I’ve mostly been doing good and productive things online. Learning, being entertained, or talking to people. (Or even making programs, texts, images or other art.) The problem has been the compulsion. The lack of control. The runaway hours. The neglect of all other parts of my life.
It’s like serving up a big bowl of delicious food and then closing the door to the kitchen before eating it.
Notifications are now turned off by default all the time. I turn them on during “message reply time” and I can also, with the help of my pen and paper and looking at my other lists, decide to turn them on for specific time stretches. This is the inverse of my previous setup where notifications turned on every morning and I turned them off only when I wanted to really focus on work. Here, instead, they are off and I can turn them on when I want to be extra reachable. I haven’t been experimenting too much with this; so far I’ve kept them on for a few minutes during “message reply time” and one time I decided (not on a whim, I used the lists&paper method) that I’d have them on while watching a movie and then turn them off again when the movie only had fifteen minutes left. I didn’t end up getting any messages during the film and maybe that was lucky because maybe that was a dumb idea.
I’ve written before that being interrupted by messages while I’m doing something else isn’t all bad. Sometimes it has helped me get into what I’m doing because I can do it without fear of missing out. I was like “I’d rather hang out with friends than read comics but I don’t have to worry about that since if there’s a ping I won’t miss it while reading comics”.
But it’s not just the pings and buzzes. I’ve set it up so that when notifications are off, I can’t even see them. No badges, no pull down banners, no nothing while it’s in do not disturb mode. That’s the best part. Because say I’m playing a board game with a friend and we need to look up a rule. Now, I try to learn to just be like “it doesn’t matter what the official ruling is” but sometimes we do end up looking it up and in the past I might’ve seen a disturbing or upsetting message in the notification bar and I’ve been like “okay the rule is… Uh… Oh. Wow. Okay the rule is…” and then back to explaining the rule, trying my best to put the message out of mind for now even though it’s one that has stirred up a lot of sadness and worry.
Because of how I now have notifications off most of the time, I’m grateful that I have a dumbphone as another way for fam to reach me. I quit smartphone in 2017 but it was a short-lived bliss since in 2020 I got addicted to using a tablet at home. It was better than the smartphone era since it was only at home but it wasn’t much better since I ended up being at home a lot. It wasn’t a happy, ignorant addiction; I was kicking and screaming against it the entire time.
That’s not to say that the dumb phone is entirely pain free; I use a Light Phone III and it’s surprisingly bad at setting notifications. You can block specific numbers or you can turn the entire sound on and off and that’s it. Through an supported hack (and I think I heard that the modding route I used has been turned off) I’ve set it up to mute automatically at night. But the first Fair Phone had a slider to let you airplane mode for up a few hours and then have it automatically turn on again (perfect for movies or hanging out with friends) and even my Nokia dumbphone had a way to only mute text messages while leaving calls on; it was hidden behind a menu dive but it could do it and I often used that and I miss that capability on the Light Phone.
I’m back on the wagon with GTD but this could work with almost any system even ones that are incompatible with GTD, like time boxing. But no fair making a long list of films and then being like “okay it’s on a TODO list so I can watch it”; Screenland is a hostile land and my idea of what I want to do needs to be specific to each particular visit there.
That has been the biggest mindset-shift here. I’ve gone from living in Screenland and making uncomfortable and unsettling expeditions into reality when I really had to eat or sleep, to living in reality and making perilous expeditions into the world of screens with a map drawn up before hand. (“Map” being a metaphor for the list written on paper.)
The terms of this “peace treaty” also means that I can do anything I want on screen for as long as I want with no guilt or anxiety. I’ve tried desperate measures in the past, like giving my iPad’s app limits password to a friend so I physically couldn’t use Safari longer than an hour a day. Then whenever I actually had to use Safari for work stuff or to pay bills or whatever it was a breathless, anxious affair. When I switched to using this Android tablet (because of it’s more comfortable screen—it doesn’t glow! At all! It needs a lamp or the sun in order for me to see the text) that wasn’t possible anymore because Android doesn’t do app limits. I mean it has the feature but it’s pointless since it’s like “Okay your fifteen minutes are up! Do you want to turn off the limit” and you can just turn off the limit and it’s not actually a limit. That’s why I needed to come up with this entire mindset shift instead of relying on software solutions.
I’m also trying to become comfortable with not looking up every li’l weird trivia question that comes into my head. When I’ve tried similar approaches in the past my “to do on web” list has quickly grown and I’ve just been adding overhead because to look up things like “how many squirrels are in Central Park”, instead of just a quick web search I’ve had to write it down on paper, then later look my paper list up and read it, and then after I’ve learned it I’ve had to mark it off, and it’s just a lot of steps and a lot of fiddliness for little value. So “embrace ignorance” was my motto for the first few days of this new approach. I’m trying to find a good balance there.
Now, how to actually stop myself from doing things that aren’t on the list? That is an unsolved problem! Send advice! So far I’ve been doing pretty good (I’m writing this first version of this essay after one week into this peace treaty), but maybe that’s a fluke and I’m gonna end up having to head back to the zafu. It helps that I know that I can do anything I want online just as long as I do it according to the terms of the peace treaty.
It helps even more that I’ve been feeling so curious about how I feel about being offline. That has not always been easy—it’s been like being kicked out of the matrix, lost my way out from the “world soul”.
Whenever I’ve traveled the past few years I’ve tried to not bring internet with me (partly for “digital detox” reasons but also because one of the points of traveling is to experience life differently than at home and if I see the same RSS feeds and the same day to day virtual locations then it’s not that much of a journey) and the worse I’ve been feeling lately about my screen addiction, the more I’ve dreaded returning home to internet. But with this new approach it feels like that all the time. That was painful at first, painful but interesting. Maybe this new “disconnectedness” feeling was the third and biggest benefit of turning off notifications.
So in practice there has been a lot less screentime. I’ve been reading paper novels, embroidering, and trying to hang out with friends.
I’m motivated by the idea that the world of screen is illusory. It doesn’t really quench my thirst for connection. It seems to, in the moment, but in the long run just stokes the flames. That’s not a slag on the friends I’ve made online. I’m still gonna keep on talking to you.♥︎ Probably not any less, either. Talking to friends isn’t exactly what I’d call “wasting time online. It’s just that it’s going to be when we both really want to as opposed to compulsively or unhealthily.