All problems are engineering problems
Yes this is another post about screen time/ phone addiction.
Everyone says "I need to doomscroll less", "I need to get off my phone", etc etc. These are probably the most relatable statements of the current decade (well, those and "we're all cooked"). People buy contraptions and download apps and treat themselves like drug addicts or prisoners just to break the "phone curse". But it never seems to work. Why? Because they never defined the success condition in the first place! You know, the success condition? The thing that tells you when you can stop working? Obviously, if you don't have one, then the task will never be complete. "Less" is a relative term. "Minimizing" looks different to everybody.
For instance, after another night staying up until 3am reading comments on HackerNews, I decided that I do, in fact, need to use my phone less. (If you've been here since the early days of this blog, you know this is an incredible reversal of opinion). But I had already done all the things! I had blocked all my social media, I had... okay that's basically it, but, that's the big one, isn't it? Social media is the big evil addictive giant that hooks us with its flashing images and such, right? So how was I having the same problem with non-algorithmic plaintext content? (pause and reflect that "non-algorithmic plaintext content" is probably the most academic phrase I have ever written).
It's at times like these that we have to approach the problem like an engineer. Enough self-recrimination! Enough fantasizing about "willpower"! What is the problem, what is the cause of the problem, and how do we remove the cause of the problem?
Herein follows a worked example, for your edification:
- The problem: It's 3am and I am not asleep
- The cause: I am on my phone in bed
- The cause of the cause: It's really easy to use a cell phone while laying down
- Removal of the cause: move all recreational internet activities to the computer, which is impossible to use while laying down
Thereby I blocked all the interesting websites on my phone. No Bubbles, no HackerNews, no Quxnet, etc. I have to work with whatever is in my 400ish open tabs. But if it's in my open tabs, then I've already seen it, so there's no novelty. And my computer takes nearly a minute to boot up (thanks, Windows 11!), so once it's off for the night, there's no "I'll just check such-and-such really quickly" that turns into three hours of surfing.
To make this whole operation feel a little less torturous I built NetSurf, which is a python script that keeps my links in different categories and lets me quickly save things and browse things. I also integrated that RSS reader I built a while ago into it, so now I actually check my RSS feeds. The code for NetSurf is currently totally tangled up with the rest of my projects folder, but if you want a copy, drop me an email, and I'll start working on a sharable version.
--Peace out