I usually got so much done during that time that I'd prefer to keep them off for a few more hours, even after I was "allowed" to turn them back on.
The only real impact was that I was locked out of anything that required two-factor authentication.
Old phone stays in a safe, and only pull it out to add new TOTP codes.
The email providers I use all require 2FA, but as long as I had paper backups of recovery codes for those I could probably use those to get back into most other accounts. No comment on whether I do have aforementioned paper backups, or whether I'm just relying on having a couple of devices with access to the codes, and then hopes, prayers and obsolete e-waste in drawers...
Of course, travelling makes the puzzle even harder, and that's when it's often even more important to not get locked out of accounts. I had intended to offer a suggestion to worry less, but instead I'm going to go away and think about this more myself.
I'm all about eliminating phones, but I'm curious to know what you accomplished for several hours without network connectivity in general. Whether I've been working from home or in an office, a network outage basically meant taking the rest of the day off because nothing could actually get done.
Making your bed, organizing your room, taking a shower / getting a haircut, doing laundry, whatever. You know, the stuff people tend to get behind on.
Unless you start putting on dirty laundry. That’s probably worse.
That aside, people have depression, or no access to a shower, and so miss showering for weeks even. Amongst other reasons.
On my procrastination list right now: replace bathroom faucet, replace bathroom fan, replace belt in car, clean out garage floor, dust servers in my rack, move rack to new location, decommission old server in rack, clean wood floor, clean oven, caulk around the bathtub, finish reading about 20 books I have only read halfway through... could go on and on.
As someone who has used The Internet™ as a reference for more projects than I can count, I strongly disagree with this. There is definitely a middle ground where you know just enough to do some basic things on your own and feel comfortable venturing a bit deeper, but not without some help.
> It will not help you because bathroom fans may have different ways to disassemble them, car belts may have different bolts position etc.
I dunno, I can usually find at least one guide online for how to do a specific thing with a specific model of something. Search "change timing belt $year $make $model" and you'll get at least a handful of videos walking you through the whole process.
Having said all of that, this entire discussion is a bit moot because it's easy enough to download YouTube videos or tutorials locally ahead of time and pull them up on a tablet without internet access.
In theory, yes. In practice, I usually encounter new problems when fixing something that I need to learn. Kind of like Brian Cranston in Malcom in the Middle.
Things I need to do tomorrow include oil change on my truck, laundry, trip to the hardware store, fix the sink, and call my parents.
I don't need the Internet for any of those, and checking the news can social media when I roll out of bed won't help anything. At worst, it might derail my day.
git commits are local things.
I found myself missing Google for language and API related questions frequently, so I used DevDocs, a website that can also "install" itself in the browser to work offline. For the stuff I couldn't find there, I just made a note to Google it after lunch and worked around it or switched tasks.
Note that this was before LLMs got good at programming / saying mostly true things, so there was no loss from not having access to them. Recently I've been experimenting with local LLMs, though they're not quite there yet (the ones I can run at least), and they're already fun enough to be distracting!
I started sticking my phone in my bag or in another room during my afternoon work session and my productivity with that time doubled, in terms of actual output - tasks completed, lines of code written etc. and probably better ideas generated.
I started turning it off after dinner as well as running a simple script that blocks FB, Reddit etc. on my desktop - my "productivity" with my evening time also basically doubled, whether it was books read, games played, extra work done, time spent with people who matter, keeping my place cleaner, etc. just more life happening basically.
The more hooked you are, the more massive the benefit of quitting cold turkey. Once you see it a couple times the dynamic inverts and it gets harder to go back.
From personal experience, yeah of course if you rip the phones out of the kids' hands they're going to experience a variety of improvements... that's what happened when I ripped it out of my own hands.
I do find it interesting that this study saw little in cognitive improvements - it was only a 21 day study. I thin they are there but they're a long burn, reading books for instance is a skill that has returned to me but it's been very slow and gradual, I should probably lean even harder into turning off my phone and any short-form socials trash.
Which is to say that I find this claim highly unlikely. You're very lucky to have such immense latent productivity that was just waiting for the smartphone dam to burst.
I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their time on their phone at work.
It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably goes into garbage content on the phone instead.
I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see the value in it.
When I work at home or during evenings when I can focus for long duration my productivity explodes.
I have no issue believing the level of impact.
This is part of a bigger principle I've noticed where I can rely on sheer willpower, or I can simply make a small change to my environment (e.g. move the phone to another room) and that's a much more efficient way to achieve the same result.
It's partly about reducing the Temptation, and partly about setting a strong intention / setting a strong message to yourself. If you're serious about getting some real work done, then why are you even looking at your phone?
Eventually you can get to the point where wasting time in any way starts to feel gross and you catch yourself more and more, but for most people it takes a bit of recalibration to get there.
So that is positive, but reading and playing games on a phone is negative?
I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling, and many of which are more useful.
Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)
So we have a bunch of data that points to these conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key insights
- We know that attention spans are just massively shorter on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web for example you always see higher bounce rates and shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement
- When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the gold standard is still reading from paper, and then handwriting notes about what you read
- It follows from the various above points that you're going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.
Phones are wonderful objects full of possibility, but in this context they're objects of mass distractions. That's 99.9% of their reality. Nothing wrong with normalising them as such.
Cocaine might be wonderfully productive for certain people, but that's not how it should be broadly discussed when we talk about its usage.
Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to où the blame on me but every time it’s the others who bullied me. Anyway — without a smartphone keeping your mind busy, how do you mask negative thoughts?
I listen to podcasts and youtube science, tech ans history videos (with non exiting voices and without music or other sounds) to block out thoughts. It works. I guess audiobooks should work too.
Mind you I keep thinking that I should try meditation to build up my capacity at directing my thoughts, but with everything going on I can't seem to find the time.
Using my phone for anything else though (reading, watching videos) have the inverse effect and keep me awake.
I'd recommend (ironically) an app for that, but the important part is that you practice every day, even if only for a few minutes.
Alternatively, being too busy and/or social to spend any time thinking — I joked the other day that I had "backdoored" my way into enlightenment by simply having no time/energy to think.
I didnt create that situation on purpose, both aspects are due to poverty (working two jobs and living in shared accomodations) but they've both had powerful unexpected benefits, to the point where I'm not much looking forward to getting my own place and going back to being alone all the time again.
I can’t pretend to truly know your situation and realize you may have received similar advice already, but in case you haven’t or someone else reads this who feels similarly, here is some anyway.
Firstly, keep in mind this advice also applies inside the work place, for example think of having lost a client as someone who was largely responsible for preventing that from happening.
When something bad happens, we can have one of two mindsets about it, a victim mindset or alternatively a mindset of “how can I improve myself from this experience?”.
The key thing to understand is that the victim mindset is disempowering, that you’re resigning yourself to be helpless to stop it happening again, while the other mindset allows you to potentially be stronger and more capable for the future.
So when something bad happens, it’s necessary to reflect on what happened, and it’s okay to acknowledge that the circumstances were largely beyond your control, but you must be sure to focus on what _you_ can change or control to try be in a better position for the future.
And because the past can’t be changed (although not easily forgotten either), what you can change is what you choose to do about it going forward.
This change in mindset is often something that takes time to acquire, so don’t expect it to just happen, but the important thing is to constantly reflect with the goal of continuously moving towards achieving it and one day you may find you have.
I wish you the best of luck for the future.
It’s maybe usual to see people victimizing themselves in that society and that they’re so systematically wrong that “Take responsibility” is good advice.
However, I’m a white male who dwelled into work and got good results, and literal hate does exist against me.
Of course, some people who were talented early enough did succeed to build a balanced life. I didn’t learned to date early enough, and when 25 years old came, girls went systematically batshit crazy when they saw that I didn’t know how to handle sex, so that I reached 40 without a single positive experience.
It’s possible to recover with women when you get accepted in groups, but I’m a white male and I refuse to apologize for being white, because it’s been harassment all my life, and yes people are cunts, so no I won’t recover.
Lift heavy objects and acquire mass, lose yourself in classic nerd crap (old school fantasy/SF novels, obscure music, do the Advent of Code in Lisp/ML/Forth/Prolog), solo hiking, drive fast, etc... embrace the loneliness and become someone better than the rabble, choose the path of the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", not that of the brainrotten goblin!
I'm not saying that existential pain will cease, especially when being around people with a normal life full of joy that seems so unattainable, but it certainly makes you feel better in the long term.
There is still advice that I’ll use from your comment, and once again I love the vocabulary “Lift heavy objects and acquire mass”, which is typical from the meme world. You basically remind me of Jordan Peterson’s advice to stand up and do something, as soon as a lighter period of depression strucks.
I can remember constantly thinking how much life sucked, no matter how good it actually was. Slowly, the negative thoughts just went away as my physical conditioning improved.
If you ruminate a lot I would look into cognitive behavioral therapy and its variants and think about how their principles can be incorporated into your ruminations. The TLDR of CBT is it involves analyzing your negative thoughts critically, rationally and systematically in writing. Often when we do that the thoughts lose their emotional hold on us, even if some of them are true.
Avoiding may be better than ruminating, but processing is better than both. I spent way too much of my life thinking that ruminating was worthwhile on its own and eventually realized it is not unless you structure it narrowly and productively.
I can go cold turkey without any withdrawals. Not using no phone or computer on holidays? Not a problem. It would not be a great sacrifice for me to never touch a computing device ever again in my life.
But that using the internet only at certain times thing? Absolutely not. There will always be an exception because I need to look up something really badly and once the exception is done it is over. Restricting certain sites? But then there is that search result or that person linked me something I need to see. Away with the filter!
It sucks because as a software engineer I need to keep up with things so there isn't really a way to quit.
Though most of the stuff was just documentation, so I just downloaded offline docs and reduced the need to Google stuff by an order of magnitude.
Of course, it's going to depend on what you're doing (I assume it works better for solo work) and what kind of resources are available.
Another effect was that I started to become somewhat more productive during times when I did have access to my phone, or rather, more reluctant to start wasting time even if the option was easily available to me.
It’s a great signal I need to go to bed.