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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport is a book that I discovered when reading about strategies for replacing digital addiction behaviors. I have not read it, but the way it's described sounds interesting:

"This book advocates for a minimalist approach to technology use. Newport provides practical strategies for decluttering your digital life and focusing on what truly matters."

"Newport emphasizes intentional use of technology, replacing passive consumption with meaningful activities, and engaging in offline hobbies and social interactions."

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To create a healthier relationship with tech, for the next week I will:

1. Review the social media and news apps I use and either:

1. Delete them from my phone completely.

2. Include them in iOS Screen Time settings for both types of apps that restrict overall use to 20 minutes per day, which is what I'm considering to be enough to get informed about news and be updated/entertained by social media while not allowing for endless scrolling without intent.

2. Each time I hit the limit OR pick up my phone to engage with one of these apps after I've already hit the limit, either:

1. Add to a list of activities that I could be doing instead, such as hobbies, exercise, human interaction, or any number of other healthy things.

2. Pick something from that list and do it instead.

3. Stop procrastinating and do what I was doing before I stopped to hit the apps.

5 days later, here's how it went...

The process of reviewing what I use frequently and deciding what to put an end to was simple. iOS’s Screen Time feature in Settings has the data about where the time goes. For this challenge I elected to go with option 2 exclusively at first, to see how it went. While there are apps I could definitely live without (for example Instagram), I thought it would be interesting to first try a challenge that had escape hatches, to see how I behaved, and Screen Time limits offers that. Any time you hit a limit, you can get prompted with the option to extend by 1 minute, extend by 15 minutes, or ignore the limit completely. I set limits for two classes of app: Social Media, and News/Information. These include a variety of apps and so it seemed easier to lump them together.

What I found instead was that both the classing of these apps and the way I use them turned out to be more complicated than that. Instagram wasn’t a big deal, it represented the majority of its category for me and I could hit a limit there and just be done for the day. News and Information was much more difficult, because there was a lot of information there I a) cared about, and b) actually needed, especially while in school. I kept turning off the limits in order to just get things done. I needed a more sophisticated approach, so I targeted specific apps instead. This turned out to be more effective, and was still a pretty easy way to set reasonable limits, though it’s still kind of a problem to be fussing with multiple things like that. For example, if you have say 3 apps of a certain kind that you want to limit, and you want to keep your limit overall to 20 minutes, now you’re limiting each of them to what might be too little time to even get a daily check-in (which for my purposes, I intended to keep allowing). This went on for a couple of days but was a struggle.

I still felt like there were adjustments to be made and I softened the hard limits approach, but doubled back to focus more on the second approach I had been working on, which was to make a list of better things I could be doing and engage with that list when I hit limits. I turned my focus more to intentionality, worrying less about how many minutes I was spending or whether I was going to run into a limit, and instead being mindful of why I picked up my phone at all and what I should be doing instead. This turned out to work a lot better for me; the practice of noticing when I started an activity on my device without purpose came fairly easily and I found myself not just doing that pretty effortlessly, but then catching myself before I even reached for it. I got better at turning my attention back to whatever I was procrastinating on, more than anything else. I keep pretty busy, so I didn’t find myself at a loss for what to do when I would have been scrolling instead. There were a few occasions where I also picked up something more constructive, including doing some rowing and engaging with a hobby for a while. By the end of the five days, I wasn’t running into app limits nearly as often, and I wasn’t fretting when I did.

The conclusion, in terms of what worked best for me, was that practicing mindfulness as much as possible and simply noticing when I was behaving unintentionally was the biggest change. There was some value in using technology to defeat itself, but the part I am going to keep working on is providing more opportunities for better choices through a practice of paying attention to how I behave when I’m not sure what to do.

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Healthy Relationship with Tech KEY POINTS

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Healthy Relationship with Tech KEY POINTS

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5 key points I learned from the resources reviewed:

1. Time is precious, and therefore so is attention. Attention is investable currency and should be valued as such, invested where it will provide returns. Every weak investment of attention is lost opportunity to create value.

2. Much of the internet is designed to hold attention, without regard for the quality or intent of the content. Outrage, for example, grabs attention more readily than pleasant feelings, and our attention to things that inspire outrage tells algorithms that's what we like, so they give us more. This cycle is addictive distraction.

3. Lost time, chronic distractibility, and negative online persona are all potential components of struggle in school, career, and relationships. Passively misplaced attention can be damaging in numerous and significant ways.

4. Children and teens need active intervention to understand the potential impact of how they use the internet, even passively. They are particularly susceptible to both receiving and believing online bullying and need to be taught the right approaches to managing it, and how to get help with it from adults, before they come of age where they should have access to it.

5. Numerous organizations have been founded and grown around developing and disseminating strategies for managing digital health. Many of these are focused specifically on school environments and how schools can help students, and free resources for developing a plan for how your school will approach technology are abundant.

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The following resources were really valuable and I will return to them in the future.

1. Icanhelp.net is a really robust, well-organized, and education-oriented collection of documentation about why digital health is important and how schools can build a program around helping students.

2. I liked this article on mindfulschools.org for the way it frames digital addiction around the feelings it can create and how an adult can best serve as an ally to a student struggling with it.

3. I loved this video of Tristan Harris's TED Talk, where he broke down the way competition for our attention has strayed into the realm of complicating how we think about what we want. He does a nice job of highlighting how different our attentive drive can be from our intent, and it would be a good thing to share with students as a window into what can happen to them, and probably has happened to them.

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Welcome to Digital4Good, where students are part of the solution.

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Digital4Good + #ICANHELP educate and empower students to create positive online communities and become inspirational digital citizens.