Day 25: Clean Up The Rest of Your Digital Life
Welcome to Day 25 of the Phone Breakup Challenge!
We’re getting very close to the end of our time together, and today I want to give you a chance to clean up the REST of your digital life.
Ask yourself: are there any aspects of your digital life that you’ve been meaning to deal with, but haven’t gotten around to? For example:
Unsubscribing to unwanted emails (instead of just deleting them)
Creating separate inboxes or folders to keep your email organized (perhaps even setting up filters so that messages from certain senders get automatically sorted into folders for you)
Unfollowing accounts on social media that make you feel bad
Doing a thorough review of your notification settings – not just on your phone, but also on your desktop/laptop and in individual apps (for example, adjusting your notification settings within Instagram)
Setting up schedules on your app blocker (for example, different app access for nights, weekends, and workdays)
Take 20 or 30 minutes today to finally DO some of those things – and tell us about what you did (and what solutions you came up with) in the comments.
I also highly recommend that you consider getting a “land line” or “house phone.” These are phones that look like old-fashioned landlines, but that place calls over the internet (meaning that you don’t need to pay for a phone line). My husband and I have had an Ooma for years; these days, Tin Can is also a very popular choice amongst parents (for their kids).
Why am I such a fan of house phones for grown-ups? Because then you can hide your smartphone on nights and weekends and give people your home number instead – making it MUCH easier to take a break (and to do a Digital Sabbath) without worrying about missing an important call. (It’s fine to call people during a Digital Sabbath – the point is just not to get sucked into screens!)
Pro tip: for a monthly fee (about $10) you can get call forwarding, so you can automatically have calls to your smartphone forwarded to your “house phone” without having to worry about giving people a second number.
To scrolling less, living more, and dealing with the rest of our digital lives,
PS:
As always, you can ask me and your fellow participants questions—and share observations and insights with each other— by leaving a comment.
You can also send me questions privately simply by responding to your daily email, but I encourage you to engage with the community; you may be surprised to discover that other people are struggling with the same thing!
If you leave a comment on the blog, please be sure to check back — I read through every comment, and try to respond to each one! (And other people often chime in, too.)
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Catherine will be popping in once a day to read through and respond to your comments. You may also hear from other members of the team, Maryana and Laura, who are helping with logistics.