Week One of the Digital Diet – Out of the Wilderness

My two days of digital detox are over, so my digital diet has truly begun. I’ll be honest: it was much harder than I expected it to be.

You don’t realise, until you start thinking about it, just how much time you spend using technology. It becomes a sort of nervous habit. What if we miss something? What if I don’t see my friend’s status update on Facebook, or a particularly amusing tweet? I’ll tell you: nothing. It doesn’t matter if you miss an update or two. You don’t need to know everything.

Remember the time before the internet? Before Facebook or MySpace or Bebo? How did people keep in touch then? They spoke to one another. And it didn’t matter that they didn’t know everything that was going on in the world, because that’s just how life was. You didn’t have all these screen-minutes adding up, sucking away all your free time. And as such you got things done in your spare time.

And that’s the main thing that my two-day digital detox taught me. If I switch off from the internet and step away from my smartphone, I can reclaim all these hours in my day that are usually spent staring at screens. Rather than look at Facebook or Twitter on my daily commute, I read a book. At home in the evenings I did some writing, read some more, spent time with my friends. And I began to realise how much more I could do with my time if I didn’t let myself get distracted by social networking sites, online shopping, even BBC News.

Now that I have completed the two-day digital detox as recommended by Daniel Sieberg’s THE DIGITAL DIET, I’m allowed to gradually reintroduce technology into my spare time.

The question is: do I want to?

Week One of the Digital Diet

According to Daniel Sieberg’s book THE DIGITAL DIET, the goal is to

“Slim down the use of everything from gadgets to social networks to video games in the hope of making yourself healthier, happier, and whole in the twenty-first century.”

The aim is moderation, not elimination, but it begins with a two-day detox, to put things into perspective. But here’s the problem: I didn’t switch off.

I thought it would be easy – if I timed the first two days of my digital diet with the weekend, then I wouldn’t be using my smartphone for checking train times, checking Facebook or Twitter on the train or at lunch, I probably wouldn’t even switch on a computer. But instead, this is how my weekend went:

Saturday:

Got up, got the train into London. On train, sent some texts to the friend I was meeting, checked Facebook, checked Twitter, checked Facebook again, signed in to check my blog stats, read for the rest of the journey. Met up with friend for a day of retail therapy and catching up. Mostly switched-off day until late afternoon when we stopped for tea and cake (shopping is hard work!). Quickly checked Facebook and emails while she checked her phone for messages. Then dinner with friend: she went up to order, so I stayed at table checking social networks, and then on to checking the Six Nations scores and the football scores. On the train home, sent more texts, checked Facebook and Twitter, checked the sports results. Got home and finished reading my book on the sofa.

Sunday:

First thing, I checked my emails, Facebook and Twitter. Still in bed. Later in the day I was visiting my parents who had been away for about three weeks. Great – a chance to catch up. Except while I was there I still sent a few texts, checked my emails, checked my Facebook, looked up the football results for my dad… So it’s hard to say how much catching up was actually done! On the plus side, there were no mobile phones at the table when we were eating dinner, which is a rare thing these days. So that was one good thing.

A quick skim through those paragraphs above will show that I definitely didn’t switch off. Not in the slightest. Of course, some of the texts that I sent were necessary – letting my friend know where and when I would meet her, for example. But other than that, it was just habit. I have a digital habit, it seems, and it’s one that I really want to break.

So today I am re-booting my digital diet. For the next two days there will be no checking my personal Facebook account, I will ignore my personal Twitter account, and I will ignore my emails. I am switching off… right now.

See you on the other side.

Starting a digital diet

Today is day one of my digital diet, inspired by Daniel Sieberg’s book THE DIGITAL DIET.

Of course, I can’t cut out the technology whilst at work – I’m not sure my boss would be too pleased if I were to announce that this month I’m cutting out emails and refusing to use the internet. No: in this day and age it’s simply too difficult to go without technology altogether, particularly within a working environment.

It will be my personal technology usage that I’ll be monitoring, working from the twenty-eight day plan outlined in Sieberg’s book. Which means I’m logging out of Facebook and Twitter, turning my back on my emails (which are all junk anyway, let’s be honest), and stepping away from my laptop.

How will I cope when I can’t use the app to check whether my train is on time on Monday morning? When I can’t while away another boring commute by checking Twitter? When I can’t Facebook message my best friend from university who lives on the other side of the country? I don’t know, but we’re about to find out.

Welcome to step one of the digital diet: the digital detox.

(I’ll let you know how I got on, once I’m allowed back on the computer!)

Are you going on a digital diet?

Take a look at what people are saying about the digital diet, and join me when I start on February 1st. Want to join in? Sign up!

“I’m going on a #digitaldiet because I want to reclaim my brain.”

“I’m going on a #digitaldiet because I want to connect with people in the real world, not through a screen.”

 

“I’m going on a #digitaldiet because I think technology takes up too much of my time and attention.”

 

“I’m going on a #digitaldiet because I want to break my dependency on technology.”

 

“I’m going on a #digitaldiet because it’s killed my attention span. I want to be able to focus again!”

 

I am going on a digital diet because…

Why do you need a digital diet? Let us know and send us your picture – tweet it with #digitaldiet or comment with a link to your digital diet picture! Here’s a couple of ideas to get you started.

And remember to sign up to join in with the Digital Diet!

Why go on a digital diet?

On a day when it emerges that Facebook in the UK “lost 600,000 users in December”, you may well think that people clearly have their internet usage under control. And if they don’t like something, they’ll just stop using it. After all, that’s what’s so great about the internet, right?

Well, to a certain extent, yes. But what you have to consider is not which technology you’re using, which social networking site you prefer, but where the technology is intruding on your life. Do you stop half way through a sandwich to read a text? Do you tweet about a party that you’re at? Do you post photos to Facebook of you and your partner, having a romantic dinner?

There. That is what to look out for. If you start to give your digital life a higher status than your real life, that’s when you need to start thinking about going on a digital diet. Rather than looking for a like or a re-tweet, go for a conversation face-to-face with one of your oldest friends, without either of you looking at your smartphones. Not once. Not even to check the time. You’ll be surprised by how freeing you find it.

THE DIGITAL DIET by Daniel Sieberg is all about finding the balance. We all think we’ve got it worked out, but when I weave my way along the path leaving work every day, avoiding dozens of people who have their eyes glued to their phones instead of looking where they’re walking, I find that pretty hard to believe.

So join me on a digital diet, and regain the balance between your real life and your virtual life. Make technology work for you, not the other way around.

Planning my digital diet

It’s ironic, really, that I’ve turned to blogging as a way to record my digital diet. You might think that it goes against the whole concept of a digital diet – increasing my time at the computer rather than cutting down.

Daniel Sieberg’s book The Digital Diet is not about getting rid of technology, but rather making it work for you, rather than the other way around.

I have been writing this blog post for around ten minutes so far. In this time I have:

1. Started the blog post: written the title and first sentence
2. Checked Facebook (work account)
3. Checked Twitter (work account)
4. Checked Facebook again
5. Remembered I was blogging. Gone back to blog post, written the next two paragraphs.
6. Checked Amazon
7. Checked emails
8. Checked my iPhone
9. Gone back to blog post and compiled this list.

So you see: I wouldn’t consider myself to be a tech addict, but it’s obvious that over time and with an increasing amount of technology available to me, my attention span has suffered.

At the end of that sentence I paused to think, and it was only with a conscious thought that I didn’t find myself looking at Facebook/Twitter/BBC News in the brief ten-second gap where I finished one sentence and worked out how to begin another one.

So there you have it. I am going on a digital diet because I want to reclaim my brain. I want to be able to focus on one task for more than five minutes at a time without the internet intruding.

Want to join me? Sign up here.