Hi. I'm Bill and I am a smartphone-oholic

The steps I am taking to reclaim some sanity in an insane and constantly connected world

It’s been a minute, and I am sorry. 

It would be convenient to say I couldn’t settle on a topic for the newsletter. That would only be half true. The reality is I fill my day with unnecessary things, most of them either on or surrounding my smartphone.

Anyone who knows me even a little knows I am a bit like a Golden Retriever.  I’ll be doing fine, working on something intently and then – ‘SQUIRREL!’-- … … … What was it I was writing about?  You get the picture.

That’s me and my smartphone. It’s a portable rabbit hole I carry around with me like a child with a woobie. And I allow it to suck me down into its depths rather than focus on more important things and people. It’s time I let it go, or at least put it away.

Hey, that sounds like a good newsletter topic. Let’s go with that. (Did you see that pesky squirrel?)

So, this past Saturday, my spouse brought back from the library a copy of Cal Newport’s  Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. “I thought you might find it interesting,” she said.

I’m a big Cal Newport fan, and his previous book, Deep Work, had a profound impact on my decision to reinvent myself from a public relations executive into an academic. So, I opened the book and started reading.

In typical Cal Newport fashion, Digital Minimalism struck a chord. I would read 30 or so pages. Put it down and go do something else. All the while, however, I kept thinking about what Cal was writing. And I would go back and dip into another 30, 50, or more pages at a sitting. He was making sense. More importantly, I saw myself in the people’s stories of smartphone and digital distraction he highlighted to make his points.

The book’s premise is that social media, apps, and the smartphone are sucking value and meaning out of our lives. In fact, these technologies were designed and intended to create a sort of dependency with their users (Think: tobacco companies jagging cigarettes to make them more addictive except with technology; Newport refers to this “attention economy” and its purveyors are “tobacco farmers in t-shirts”). Those companies do that so you spend more time with their technology. More of your time = bigger revenues for them. Our attention (time) on these apps is the product the “attention economy” sells to advertisers. They get rich while we convince ourselves the smiley-face emoji someone added to the last cat video we posted provides us and ours with a high-value.

Newport argues all those little clicks and swipes and likes add up to occupy more and more of our day. At the time he wrote this (2016), it was estimated the average person spent nearly an hour a day on Facebook, alone. Looking at the smartphone habits of my children, my college students, and myself, I suspect that number is multiples higher today, especially when you factor in binging on streaming services. The kicker to all this, Newport writes, is while the attention companies receive extremely high value for your time, you get something that is drastically less in value than something more interesting and intentional you could be doing. In short: we are giving it away, people. Newport’s remedy is to deep cleanse from the crud smartphones and mobile technology has left in our lives – we must detox ourselves.

This need to put the phone down is a big concern in the Nowling home. Our teenagers are on it constantly, and we see the negative effects unfold before us…the lack of attention, the anxiety, the open hostility to differing points of view. This was not how I and my wife grew up.

Lisa said her reason for checking out Digital Minimalism was the hope it might offer some strategies for us to help our kids find more meaning and value with the time they have each day.  I also think she intended the book to spark some inward reflection on my part, and it did.

So, I decided to accept Newport’s challenge and detox my digital life. How can I ask my kids to put down the phone when I can’t do so myself? It’s akin to telling them not to smoke and stay away from drugs while I suck down a coffin nail and pound an Old Fashioned.

Cal makes it very clear this exercise will not work unless you are grounded in a solid philosophy about technology in your life and bound by a set of values and clear rules. He suggests this as a guiding philosophy for our newfound Digital Minimalism:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support the things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else (Newport, 2016, p. 28).

Newport doesn’t advocate we eschew all online technology, only that which provides low value to our lives. Our online use should reflect and embody our values. To that end, here are my values I will be using as compass points during this exercise:

1. My time is my most valuable asset; don’t give it away for free; get value for value;

2. Human interaction is critical and takes precedence over online/digital activities;

3. Whatever I do must edify me and others;

4. Technology is a tool, not an end for it owns sake; be strategic in how you use it;

5. Give priority to ‘richer’ forms of communication (face-to-face meetings over electronic messages; letters over emails; phone calls over texts, etc.);

6. Create space and time for deep thinking and work (this one of the things I wanted from an academic life that I couldn’t find in PR); and,

7. Be more mindful and present in what I am doing.

With those values in mind, I’ve come up a set of rules to guide the first 30 days of my digital detox.

• No purposeless scrolling or tapping of apps or sites. Period.

• With exception to my immediate family, turn off text notifications. Respond to non-prioritized text messages once a day.

• No constant digital news checking. Read selected digital news sites once each day, flagging longer/in-depth articles for weekend reading when I have more flexibility.

• Use YouTube to build skills (woodworking, auto mechanics), and limit screen time to one video per day.

• No TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels.

• Check and respond to email once each working day, in the afternoon.

• Suspend social media use while in digital detox. Since I no longer need social media for my job, I have just posted and pinned a message on my sites informing people I am taking a 30-day break. They can email or call me if they need me.

• No entertainment apps except for the NY Times Crossword and Wordle.

• No phone on the nightstand; I just ordered an analog alarm clock. How OG is that?

• Except when needed, my smartphone stays in my satchel.

• Electronics between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. Quiet time afterward, unless the Lions are on.

I am on day two of this journey.  We shall see how it goes. But am committed to making this change in my life. I must. There are too many important things left to do and only a finite amount of time in which to do them.

Share your experience with de-digitalizing your life in the comments. I’d be interested to read about them.