I've been considering going "cold-turkey" and packing my laptop away for a while in order to unlearn some bad habits related to focus/distractions/procrastination, but obviously there are downsides to this for someone based in tech.
I'm wondering if anybody in the community has ever attempted this and would like to share their experience.
A handful of questions to seed the conversation (but please don't feel obliged to answer them all):
- What did you give up? How long was this for? Was this intentional or due to external circumstances?
- What were your motivations for giving the technology up?
- Was your overall experience positive or negative? In what ways?
- Did you notice any changes in your happiness, focus or stress levels?
- Is an "all-or-nothing" approach as such unrealistic? Would a strategy of using tech "in moderation" be more suitable?
- Do you have any advice for how someone could regain focus, avoid distractions and generally use technology in a more
mindful manner?
If you happen to know of any interesting blog posts/articles/previous discussions on the topic, please share.
Thanks in advance for your insights!
During those two weeks, my entire lifestyle changed, obviously, so it's difficult to know what changed because of that, and what was just the fact that e.g. I went from sedentary tech work to nailing salvaged roof scrap on top of the house on our farm.
But - my blood pressure dropped. I lost weight. I did a lot of reading of books. My notes are more interesting for those two weeks because they were ink on paper and I could insert drawings and diagrams wherever I wanted. They were more thoughtful and less reactive.
I fixed a mosquito zapper by sheer force of will (the capacitor was shorting across a resistor - poor design, but once I figured it out I could fix it. I'm still using that zapper today, and only shorted the capacitor out across my finger three times. Ow.) That day, I was become death, destroyer of mosquitoes.
I guess I quasi-fixed the roof on the farm house by sheer force of will, too. Had to dig the nails out of the scrap - no hardware stores open. My son considers it a formative experience.
So I didn't choose to go cold turkey, and it was only a short time, and its lifechanging nature is impossible to tease away from concurrent events, but still - anecdotally, it's probably worthwhile to try it voluntarily.