When I Accidentally did a Digital Detox
If you're like me, you've sometimes fallen into the trap that can emerge when getting immersed in productivity videos on YouTube. Channels explaining how to live without a smart phone or social media, write everything down on pen and paper, or how to completely over engineer your preferred note taking application. The trap being that you only feel like you've taken something from the videos and become a more productive person, when in actuality this is only a simulated feeling of work efficiency produced by the video for you, the consumer. Just the idea of removing colorful icons and backgrounds from your smartphone sends that same related dopamine to your brain.
While I do practice some examples, there was only one time I followed one of the more radical steps and almost completely abstained from using a computer. And that was only by accident.
During my time in college, my favorite professor had us using Linux during our courses, and I was immediately hooked. I had already made several attempts at using different Linux distributions alongside windows on a desktop, but after these courses, I knew I wanted to leave Windows forever and have a standalone Linux system.
At this point, I will admit, I was kind of a Linux purist: I had Arch Linux with the least resource-intensive desktop manager on my old ThinkPad. Anything that can be written in Bash or C had to be. I was writing all of my notes in bare bones Vim (I never game myself the time to configure it). This phase is definitely behind me now, but suffice to say, I knew what I was doing switching to Linux. However, my PC was giving me much more trouble. For reasons I could not explain, my download speeds were horrendously slow. After several troubleshooting attempts, I came to the conclusion that my hardware was not so compatible with Linux as I had hoped.
So, what did my stubborn self do? Re download Windows so that I had a usable system? Nope. The better option in my mind was to just spend the rest of the semester with no desktop, doing all of my schoolwork from the most bare bones laptop imaginable.
The first few days were a pain, as I felt I had so much less to do in my day since playing games on Steam was what I usually did to pass the time. But, after about a week or so, I noticed that I was reading a lot more than usual. I began to journal as a hobby. When studying in the library, instead of immediately reaching for my phone, I started drawing doodles on post-it notes. I felt much more accomplished in all the little activities that I had started compared to just playing the same games every night.
Yes, I still had my smartphone with me and a Switch to play games on, but the frequency of those activities drastically decreased nonetheless. Giving up one device influenced my decisions with others.
I still look back and have no idea how I went almost an entire semester with no desktop. Today, I still try to adhere to some of stereotypical productivity advice. I cut back on social media for periods of time, I write more on paper, and I make sure I dedicate time for hobbies.
The dumbest thing about this? The reason why my Linux desktop had such slow internet in the first place? I accidentally had it hooked up to an old network switch, meaning I was getting less than 100 Mbps.