Maintaining a good relationship with my phone is hard. We just didn’t evolve with a pane of glass mesmerizing us with aesthetic stimuli one second and then triggering our nervous system the way a tiger jumping out from behind a tree would. Usually in the form of a DM from someone or worse yet, an automated notification from some server.

I’ve been trying on two habits for varying lengths of time that stack nicely. They are:

1. The phone sleeps in my office, not the bedroom (~3 years)
2. Get photons from the sun into my eyeballs before photons modulated by algorithms enter my eyeballs (~2 months)

Relatedly, I happened to break my Twitter addiction on a hearty three-day backpacking trip through Holy Cross Wilderness over Labor Day this year. Something about the analog nature of that trip, compared with the lossy digital representations of an analog world (social media) broke something in me and I’ve hardly scrolled that site since.

It’s tough. I’ve met many friends through Twitter. I’ve recommended people get onto Twitter to progress their careers and hobbies. It’s an incredible sensemaking source in the right context. There’s fun stuff happening on all the other new platforms. But maybe that chapter is over and I’m entering a more longbrain chapter of my life; one more focused on what I put into my mind, more diligently mulling over things and then sharing them back with other longbrainers.

Substack notes will still get me for five or ten minutes at a time (and to the people putting shortform videos into Substack notes, may your phone go off silent at the worst times). I’ve mostly been off Youtube Shorts. Tiktok always felt like meth so apart from a couple multi-hour binges I’ve never been on there meaningfully. Hacker News and specific subreddits (/r/boulder) are decent places to go from time to time but I don’t get sucked in like I do with endless feeds.

An ideal morning: wake up, walk past my office into the bathroom without grabbing my phone, read an easy-to-grok paper book first thing. Make coffee, get outside, and only then do a scan of my notifications. Reply if someone is waiting on a confirmation for a meeting later that day, put phone away, and go for my morning walk.

Can’t say I achieve that often. Maybe a few times a week. I’ve had (many) times in my life where I’d scroll Twitter before leaving bed. Exposing myself to the unfiltered signal of the internet (and not the best parts of the internet) before caffeine molecules have had a chance to cross my blood brain barrier. That’s addict behavior. Hell, there were times where scrolling in bed would be the most grounding thing in my life compared to rest of the chaos around me. So I get it.

I do allow myself a Daylight Computer in bed. Primarily this is for ebooks, previously-saved Readwise Reader posts, and Substack posts (not for scrolling notes!). There have been periods where having a smart watch gave me more distance from the internet, and times where it gave me less; but I am wholeheartedly looking forward to my Pebble. And some friends and I are cooking on what we hope will be another lovely addition to this paragraph soon.

This is an ongoing experiment in my life and will likely evolve as technology itself evolves, but our attention is precious and it should be treated as such.

appendix

• longbrain: media that takes time to digest; not exclusively longform but often is. Blog posts, zines, podcasts. The sort of media where I can be too tired to make sense of.
• shortbrain: media that conveniently fits in a feed. Like french fries, I can consume it when I’m hungry, when I’m full, when I’m half-distracted by four other tasks and avoiding the one I really should be doing.
• s/o to Dave Gorum on these