Lessons from Get Off Your Phone February
and what I'll be taking from it into March Sisters March
Admittedly, I did not really get off of my phone for the month of February, at least not in any way that I could advertise to you here while maintaining my honesty. I did, however, change the way the time was spent on my screens and deepen my understanding of what that time looked like.
As some of you know, I somewhat impulsively deleted TikTok from my phone during the ban, and even though the ban was a mere 20-something hours, the ban from the app store in the US was around a month. For that month, which happened to coincide with my second year of challenging myself and you all to go low-phone, I was only able to login to TikTok via the desktop app. As someone who is presently around 90k followers on TikTok, and mostly posted via writing and photo slides, this was a real issue—you cannot post photos from the desktop app.
It was a real issue, and at the same time, it was freeing. I was confused to find myself a bit disappointed when the app was not banned. For many reasons, I think it’s important for many that it was allowed to stay, and I like following some of my favorite creators there still. For me, it has been some months during which I felt stagnant on the app in the form of creation. I still enjoy taking daily photos (as you know here on my Notes), but I wanted to be pushed to write longer form, and to figure out a way to make the time I spent creating, after 3 years of doing it mostly for free, into a more regular part of my work.
Tik Tok became available in the app store in the US again about 2 weeks ago. For a day or two, I redownloaded it, and posted a few things. I was surprised to find that a month off of the mobile version of the app and the reward circuit of posting made the mobile experience much less compulsively habit forming. I could feel, suddenly, what it felt like to be stuck scrolling on the app, and it didn’t feel particularly good. I could sense how the habit could slowly reinstate itself in me, and both the hedonic and logical parts of myself didn’t like it. Since then, I’ve mostly kept it just on desktop, and will save some longer form talking videos to watch while I do the dishes or fold laundry.
Similar to individual decisions related to taking care of one’s health, it is clear to me that the structured digital environment is what made this month impactful on me, much more than prior decisions or rules I might try to implement on myself. We will get into the parts I did implement next, but I would be a very dishonest reporter on my own experience if I didn’t notice how simply not having the app available did so much for me, and with so much less struggle, than trying to regulate it myself. I don’t have a concrete recommendation from this observation, but it is something I noticed, nonetheless.
Finding what you truly take pleasure in is possibly more important than delineating what you don’t like about your time online.
I’ve been reading a lot of food writing and food-centered novels lately for a WIP draft novel, and what I love now and have always loved about writing and living alongside the daily invitation of food is the grain of the detail. Similarly, in this challenge over the past month, it has been more change-generating for me to get very curious about what I delight in on the internet than in abstracted parts I want to avoid.
Sure, I don’t like seeing my screen time number, and if I see one more person tell me that I’m spending xyz days of your life online!!! without context I am going to lose it. Avoiding something bad is so much less motivating than aiming at something good, and for the past month what this has looked like for me is doing a week of tracking the time I spent online and how it overall made me feel, and curating from there. Listening to a few creators while I do otherwise unmotivating chores? Excellent. Scrolling endlessly on any app (including Substack) seeking the sensation of new new new? Not so good feeling.
No one can tell you what your relationship with screens should look like, which is why I don’t bother. The difficulty and the joy is in getting in the detail, the sensation, and emotion of why your relationship to social media or distraction bothers you, in some way. You may find your screen time is high because you’ve been reading lots of books this month. You may find your screen time is higher some days because that’s when you have a commute on a train, and you really love texting your college friends while you wait for your stop. There’s a lot of discovery to be had in the noticing, and you may feel less stuck in this habit of screen time when you allow yourself to slow down and discover what is working and what is not working for you—not someone who has written a self-help book about productivity and the internet.
Don’t expect a one-and-done.
I truly hate to tell you (and myself) this, but what GTFO Your Phone February taught me last year and this year is that the process is the point. Social media and attention economy gimmicks change year to year, and your own emotional salience and attention span shift seismically as well. Because of this, having a rigid set of rules often won’t work, because the next time there is a great sea-change in the behavior of the internet, the rules won’t apply.
The internet economy utilizes your attention to keep you places, and profit off of your time. Your attention and your interior emotional state are constantly in conversation, and just like your emotions, there unfortunately isn’t a concrete set of rules that will let you opt out of the conversation after 30 days of a challenge. What this month reminds me of is the need to practice going back and forth, keeping my mind open to notice when things stop working, and to slow down enough to see if I might gently draw connections as to why that is. I use this process in every other part of my life, and it is just as needed in a digital life, too.
I WISH there was a single set of rules guys, truly. It would make my life a whole lot easier (but possibly much less interesting and meaningful…).
Practicing will remain important.
Instead of waiting another year until I actively remind myself to take a look at my online consumption habits, I am starting to think on how to apply this in a more week-week way. I’ve been reading more on the religious idea of the Sabbath (which, as a former theology major in college, I’ve read on before, but that was a decade ago), and what a day of rest from the online world might look and feel like. I’ve also been enjoying the series 10 Offline Things I Did This Week by Lee Tilghman as a way of thinking about small doses daily or dotted through the week to stay connected to the feeling of being disconnected.
A specific way of applying this I’m thinking on is a recurring GTFO Your Phone Fridays, in which I do something related to holding onto these practices of remaining mindful with screen and consumption use. I think this will be more important than ever over the coming 4 years in the US to maintain a balance of engagement with politics while also remaining on balance, and carving out a sustainable way of knowing and not needing to know all the time.
March Sisters March, aka what I am bringing from a low phone February into the beginnings of spring.
Writing about themes each month for the past 3 years has given me an unexpected gift, which is that I agree with past me on what may be useful to explore at different points in the seasons of the year. In the spring, especially in the weeks when it is emerging, rumbling at the dirt and through the bark but not yet present, I feel drawn back to novels from the 1800s and early 1900s that spend time noticing or being with the land. Some of this returning comes from comfort and familiarity, and I try to add other ways of reading and exploring this outside of the very white, very male, very western writings of the historical literary canon. If you have recommendations on books to read in spring that are from a different time period, let us know in the comments so we can deepen our TBRs.
Young literature from the 1800s has always resonated with me, mainly for the simplicity of the values and relationship with nature it often espouses. March Sisters March is about returning again this year to the way this sort of writing changes how I myself notice the season’s changing. These novels are pre-phone, pre-screen as well, and sometimes simply entering into a world without phones changes how we interact and dream of day-to-day life in our world with them.
Of course, I love returning to Austen in the spring. I distinctly remember hating the meandering through parks and landscape chapters of Pride and Prejudice when I was first reading it as a 16 year old. It is the hilarity of aging that those parts are now my favorites. I am hoping to read Frederica by Georgette Heyer for the first time this spring, a novel I’ve had on my TBR for 3 years that I am pretty certain will become a favorite. This time last year, I read Middlemarch and Howard’s End, both of which have stayed with my imagination in the interval 12 months.
I will be writing more on this in coming days and weeks, but wanted to note that one of the reasons I am returning to this theme for spring after this phone challenge is that these novels are difficult for my attention span. Older novels require my attention to continue working at slower paced events, to read the next chapter without the same dose of zing! that the internet induces in me to keep scrolling. Beyond loving these books, I love that they stay with me. There is something about the work of reading them that impacts my imagination, and is a robust investment. Moving from a month of reducing mindless consumption online to a month of purposefully consuming deeper stories offline feels like the right move this spring, just as it did for me last year.
As always, your attention is a limited thing, and I appreciate your time here in my little online abode. Take care, and talk soon.
xx, Margaret of Bad Art Every Day