Actively online

Always online vs Actively online

I’m always battling for my own attention. In this battle I’ve already gotten rid of social media. I’ve installed a plugin in my browser to disable all the features that draw your attention on YouTube. But I noticed I still grab my phone too often. This is both when I get notifications but also during quiet moments.

When I think back on my childhood, things were a lot different. Internet at home was relatively new and expensive. The web was novel and innocent. Social media was truly social. These are all quite obvious differences. However, a key difference that I did not think about is that you were actively online. When playing with friends, you would ask if they would be online that evening. Being online was not a given. Being online meant being at home being a computer with a few minutes boot time and dialing into the internet. Being online was an activity.

I was wondering if this might be a way to help get a better grip on my attention, so I devised an experiment

The experiment

For the experiment I will start being actively online. This means I will turn off my internet access on my phone during the day and only turn it on at specific locations. These locations are my desk in my home office and my desk at work. That way I will not get distraction during my interactions with friends and family. Work, however, will still get distractions, but at the same time being online is already part of work.

To counter distractions from outside of work, I’ve also adjusted a lot of notification settings. I’ve disabled a lot of notifications of apps that aren’t urgent enough to be allowed to notify. In addition, I’ve installed a new android launcher called Before launcher. This launcher allows you to filter out notifications and put them on a separate silent notification list. That way you get the notifications but keep control of when to consume them. Urgent notifications can still go through normally.

At home, I would put my phone in my office to help not slip back into habits. To stay available for emergencies, I would still get urgent notifications and calls on my smartwatch

Two weeks in

The experiment went better than expected. Because of it feeling novel and fresh, it was easy to keep it going. Having a dedicated moment and location for going online helped give it a place for me mentally. Going into the experiment, I did experience a lot of FOMO for group chats with friends and family. However, it turned out to actually be more fun this way. Now I had something to look forward to when going online. “I wonder what they talked about today” or “I can’t wait to share this” were thoughts I often had. Going online was something to look forward to again.

It wasn’t all positive, though. I had some notifications turned off that turned out to be more important than I thought. This caused me to miss some things like the next trash pickup or a flash sale. Adjusting the settings for these notifications solved the issue. In addition, I noticed that having the phone at hand at the (home) office during work did not help. It was easy to slip back into the habit of opening it for the sake of opening it.

Two months in

Unfortunately, I regressed more. I started to forget putting my phone away. A few times at first, but as the habit slipped, it became more frequent over time. Because of this, a lot of the positives went away. Digital social interactions went back to throughout the day. Checking my phone was continuous again. The only thing that was kept was the better notification setup. So I wasn’t actively pushed to draw my attention to my phone.

This reflection did prompt me to attempt a restart.

Will be continued…