Time for a confession: I’ve drifted back into some bad habits of mine around media consumption. I’ve been browsing the web and watching YouTube videos when I should be writing, coding, or spending focused time with those I love.

This last week I spent almost 28 hours on Firefox between my phone, iPad, and laptop (the 9 or so hours on my tablet and phone are most concerning). That’s almost two-thirds of a full work week! I’ve also spent 11 hours on Slack and 1.5 hours on YouTube. Add those up and it really is a full work week’s worth of time. That’s a sobering thought to say the least.

Another week done in my digital declutter experiment! This time I decided to just post a weekly update, because frankly it was taking up too much time doing the daily updates. With all of the craziness going on in the world, I wanted to prioritize spending time with my family outside of work hours, rather than on compiling statistics of my technology usage (which ironically lead to more usage).

What went well?

This week saw a marked drop in my phone usage!

This is my post detailing my notes and experience of week one of my digital declutter experiment. It will be updated daily-ish with a final summary on Sunday March 22nd, 2020.

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Day 1 - March 16th, 2020

What went well today?

I did stay off social media as I planned. There were definitely periods where I felt a strong urge to check, however I was able to surf the urge and return to the task at hand. This happened most when I was waiting for some asynchonous operation to complete (such as waiting for a build to finish). I felt fairly present around my family without the temptation to pull out my phone and check things.