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.