GTFO Your Phone February: Prep Week
Assignment 1: Curate.
Thanks to the 6,000+ of you on here, I have joyfully migrated from TikTok to Substack (also, it’s impossible for me to redownload the app I deleted during the short-lived ban…), and we are about to do round two of my chronically-online challenge: GTFO Your Phone February. What started as my own sense of heightened anxiety and displeasure with my screen time numbers (I did NOT ask to see that) became a month-long challenge to get analog and get off our phones together.
You may say to yourself, dear Reader, “Surely she can’t be serious, we still have days left of this month.” Right you are, however any good challenge starts with some gentle prep work. Think of this as your mental stretching and gulp of water before the race.
This week, I will give you 4 assignments to help prepare your digital & physical environments for a less screen-centered February. In the current world environment, it is a radical act to refuse access to your attention to those fighting vigorously to win it. We are not aiming to totally rid ourselves of our phones or screens, as for most of us that is both not sustainable and isn’t even really the habit we want in the long-run. What we are doing is finding a way to make our screens and social media consumption a side dish in our lives, rather than the appetizer, main course, dessert, and the table. We are, as always, trying to build a habit we care about, not do some rigid challenge just for the sake of challenge itself.
Today’s Assignment: Curate your digital environment.
Now HOLD ON! Before you get overwhelmed, I am actually going to give you three specific spaced to do this in, so that it can be done in about 20 minutes. We are not striving for perfection as much as we are striving to prepare your more frequently visited digital spaces. We are curating because all of us suddenly follow people after we are bored one Saturday afternoon, and reallllly liked one post of theirs, and suddenly our feed is full of people we don’t know, and there is so much that we are not even seeing the posts we most wanted to originally. Curating is a theme we will come back to, but it is part of the prep as it helps us decrease the noise on the places we are trying to be less engulfed by next month.
The three places online I did this were:
Tik Tok: I did this one a little prior to the brief ban to help me figure out who I wanted to make sure I followed on other platforms. I went from following 700+ accounts to like 300.
Youtube: I don’t watch that much Youtube, but I find myself not seeing the content I want to when I do because there are old subscriptions from college that I have scrolled past for years. I went from following about It’s okay to unfollow (on any platform. Including me! If you’ve outgrown my content, that is okay and I give you permission to unfollow) (not that you need it). I went from following 90 accounts to ~20.
I deleted Pinterest off of my phone all together. I have a will made of steel. Okay, no I don’t—Pinterest on my phone has become nearly unusable with the uptick of ads. Truly nothing pisses me off more than thinking it’s a pin and then it forces me out of app to Temu or Amazon. I can still see it on my desktop, but I no longer will impulsively find myself there.
These were mine, but yours might be any sort of digital platform. Give yourself some time, and scroll through your feed—notice what comes up that you normally would skip, scroll right past, or feel bored by, and then go unfollow that content. What we want is to curate feeds over time that are the material and creators you most care about, and then very little else. If there is nothing else, you will feel bored, and get off your phone (or suddenly search for new people to follow).
This is assignment one of prep week. I think you will be surprised how good it feels—almost like cleaning out and organizing that one junk drawer that always gets stuck when you need to find the stapler. It’s a small thing, but you’ll notice right away your feeds are not as overwhelming and endless. We will deal with the boredom at another time.
xx,
Margaret of Bad Art Every Day
Reminder: If you want to get 4x/week essays, challenges, and tips for the coming month, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I did the same sort of feed curation on TikTok right before the ban! Happy to see you in my inbox - will the rest of the GTFO challenge be available to free subscribers?
Deleting the TikTok app would have been the best thing for me, but I DID end up taking the app off of my home screen and hid it. Instead I placed my "new"/better-ish social apps like Substack and Bluesky on my Home Screen but still in a folder. Prior to TikTok ban I was wasting so much time doom scrolling but I have noticed a huge difference with just those little things. Excited to partake a little more in your February goal..
I do have a question for you.... by limiting screen time are you also limiting your time on Substack too? Or simply using it as a writing space? How are you going to navigate that?
Thanks for the challenge BTW!