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| | Ask HN: Have you ever gone without a computer or phone for an extended period? | |
165 points by luddite99 on June 5, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 184 comments |
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| 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! |
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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.