A month ago, I had committed to a 30-day isolation from Twitter and Reddit based on a similar exercise that the writer Cal Newport had his followers perform. The objective was to not dip into these two destinations during the snippets of spare time that I had. As I wrote in that blog post, the one piece in the original article that stayed with me was
The ability to lift your phone at any moment is slicing good hours into time confetti. It’s preventing us from accomplishing big things and focusing…
That was enough to convince me to give my own isolation a shot. That 30 day period ended on Monday, 20th July 2020. Here are some reflections of that period.
- The early withdrawal symptoms were unconscious. As I had logged on the first day, “[I] Once launched Twitter app without realising, scrolled, even screenshot-ed an interesting tweet before realising I had even unlocked the phone, tapped Twitter and was in the app”
- I didn’t miss Twitter much, but I found that disconnecting from Reddit took some joy away from my life. So I added twenty minutes of Reddit into my wind-down routine. That did not take away from the objective of reducing fragmentation. Unfortunately, I have found it hard to limit the time on Reddit to twenty minutes only. This is something I am working on.
- I realised how much the endless rapid scroll-and-read tired my brain out. I was starting each working day with a depleted brain, right after I had refreshed it overnight. Starting my day with my small list of websites and my RSS instead of scrolling through Twitter and Reddit makes for a much clearer rest of the day
- Similarly, last year I had been bothered by a mental fog. The act of committing to write daily, and the required structured reading, thinking and synthesis reduced it, the distancing from continuous casual reading has had an even sharper beneficial effect. I wonder if it is the relief from the continuous dopamine hit that scrolling gives you.
- As I had written before, I have been spending some time, about twenty minutes, daily in solitude – not meditation, simply spending time by myself not doing anything. I have found that the temptation to reach for my phone has significantly reduced. If at all, it is now often to note down something that I am thinking about, or something that I want to remind myself of. While I don’t think that using my phone for quick note-taking will send me into a rabbit-hole of browsing, I nevertheless use a pen and notebook.
I am still not sure how I will use these sites again after the isolation.
But as an immediate step, I plan to use Twitter time-boxed to twenty minutes just like with Reddit. I will probably do this early in the day along with my RSS feeds and sites, since Twitter is also a source for a lot of articles and essays that are relevant to this site. I’m also going to use Twitter Lists even more to take friends and high-frequency posters off the main feed into their own separate lists.
I considered using Nuzzel, an app that displays a list of websites that people in your twitter feed have linked to. That may have been useful a few years ago, but people’s use of Twitter has changed in the last year. The cumulative effect of the doubling of character limits, the ease of creating Twitter threads, the grouped display of conversations and Twitter’s own quality-filtering is that there are interesting, valuable discussions on Twitter itself, making reading worthwhile.
In short, the plan is to use Twitter and Reddit by deliberation instead of by default. Twitter, as we have seen, is probably more a professional network for the passion economy than a typical social network, and therefore useful to me. Reddit is important to me simply because it brings me joy. The plan is to enjoy their benefits without letting them fatigue my brain.