Over the past few days, I've gone through the process of reducing my screen time on my phone (an iPhone 15).
Fall is here, winter is around the corner, and I don't want to make my seasonal depression even worse! Time moves way too fast, and I get a horrible sense of existential dread every night thinking about how I'm not fully present in my day-to-day.
The last year or so, my screen time has been horrible. I've spent way too much time on TikTok and Reddit. I was even using TikTok first thing in the morning as a way to wake up and not go back to sleep, but of course, this would only end up stressing me out unnecessarily. This past year was also very tough personally. My parents got a divorce after more than 30 years of marriage, which was a huge thing to deal with, and the silly distractions on my screen served to numb any horrible feelings or thoughts. It probably wasn't the healthiest coping mechanism, but I was doing other "healthy" activities alongside, such as running multiple half marathons, so I'm not going to be hard on myself.
I was averaging around 5-7 hours on my phone on WFH days, and I have the goal of reducing that to around 2 hours. This does not count navigation purposes, calling family members, or reading books/magazines.
How have I gone about it so far?
1. I brainstormed why I use my phone, and I came up with these main categories:
2. After that, I deleted a ton of apps. Mostly around social media, but I had a lot of stuff I wasn't using (such as conference or race apps). I wish I had taken stock of how many I had at the start, I think it could have been around 100 and at the moment I have 65. I am very aware this is a lot!
3. I selected 12 main apps to show on the home screen. Most importantly so far, I changed the setting so that the apps don't have color. It makes it much easier to ignore the craziness of the App Library and to ignore some of the more "fun" apps I kept (e.g. Pokemon TCG Pocket!) so that I'm not constantly opening them.
4. I also changed the lockscreen to the weather mode, a background that changes with the actual weather in my location. In my mind, this keeps me connected to my surroundings and helps me not unlock my phone to check my weather as often.
5. I watched content on this topic, and many people make the switch to a simpler phone. So far, I don't think I'll do this because my goal is to reduce my screen time, not to reduce functionalities. Either way, watching content has kept me motivated to keep this up, as I'm not alone in feeling like we spend too much time mindlessly consuming content.
It's been only 3 days since I went through this first round of dumbifying my phone. So far, I've averaged 2-3 hours of phone use, with the caveat that I'm currently reading Parable of the Sower through Libby on my phone (it doesn't have a Kindle option), so it's more like 1.5-2 hours of screentime.
Overall, I hate that I'm still reaching for my phone every couple of minutes. However, I'm lucky that I'm a big journal and notetaking person, so I can easily reach for that instead. While at home, I can fill in the empty pockets of time with playing with my cats, tidying up, or messaging someone in a more intentional manner.
I've been seriously considering deleting my main social media accounts: Facebook and Instagram. I haven't been active in either of these for a long time, but I find myself feeling very nostalgic about my profiles as scrapbooks. I have lived in three countries in my adult life, and I have met lots of different people. I have lived through experiences I never thought I would, and these are saved in time through my profiles. I have read people on Reddit recommend downloading the data or even printing out some of these memories. I don't feel ready yet; they feel like little archives, and I am a very nostalgic person. Although at the same time, I am tired of big tech and billionaires profiting off these sentiments, and even using our data to train the cringiest of AI outputs. I hope that down the line, I'll feel ready to part with these digital memories. For now, I know that I have no intention of participating in these platforms.
I'm a 30-something-year-old, working full time in a tech-adjacent job. I feel tired and like my brain is turning into mush, I want to go back to a time when technology made me feel excited, curious, and creative. The last time I felt this way was when I was an avid Tumblr user (2010-2015ish?). I miss curating my own little digital home, and Neocities has the potential to fill this gap.
Currently, my process is to get inspiration from other Neocities websites, Pinterest, and my own sketches on my Hobonichi. I also put design ideas together on Figma to help me visualize it. As for coding, I am staying away from LLMs and relying on search engines (I still need to figure out how turn off Google's AI overview, or to use a different search engine), and other resources including YouTube videos and W3. I pledge to not use LLMs for my writing, art, or anything else that you see here.