10 days of no Slack, no email, no social media
It has become a reflex, something I do without blinking: whenever I am bored or just have a few seconds to spare, I pull up my phone and start filling time. My latest holiday was a perfect opportunity for a good old digital detox. 10 days without Slack, email and social media.
I am almost always at Inbox Zero. That makes it fun to deal with email: any new incoming needs to be assessed and acted upon. It is just a big game. And because my side projects are online and I have so many of them, I get quite a few emails about them. I kept the sales notifications on, so whenever I make a sale I get an email. Whenever someone wants to discuss, congratulate, buy or sell, I get an email. That gives you a dopamine rush a few times a day. But I also get an email whenever someone complains or wants a refund.
Slack
Slack is a great tool to communicate among teams. And as a remote developer, this is one of the only link I have with the team. But it also means that checking Slack during the holidays or the weekends is just like going to the office. And because it is usually pretty active, you know that you can have a new thing to read every 10 minutes or so. The first step I took was to disable the notifications. Second step was to not hesitate to just close Slack to focus. Last step was to avoid Slack entirely during evenings, weekends and holidays.
When did Facebook became so shitty anyway? The newsfeed is just 80% of useless and 20% of «that was ok but not worth scrolling through the rest». They do have great features though, with Messenger, Groups and Marketplace. But I really did not miss the newsfeed at all.
I think Twitter is great to monitor technologies or news. But my reading list, with more than 300 articles to read, became just ridiculous. When you spent 5 minutes scrolling through the feed and bookmarking 5 articles you will never read, you wrongly feel productive.
Asana
Asana is my personal task management tool. I could quit my job today, that would take me several months to do everything I have in Asana. It is an endless source of work, so it feels great to not open it for 10 days!
It takes a few days to lose the FOMO feeling (Fear Of Missing Out) and the reflex of checking the phone every 5 minutes. But experiment after experiment, I can say that it has become quite natural to not look at my phone for long stretches of time. It helps a lot to uninstall social media apps, or move them to a secondary screen. But after 10 days of digital detox, you realize that everything is fine. The world kept spinning. Anything very important will find the way to reach you…
It has been a month and I am proud to say that the detox pretty much stuck. No Slack at all during evenings and weekends. I unfollowed every one on Facebook, and cleaned up my Twitter. My reading list is staying to a minimum and I started taking notes about technical articles I read. My todo list has not been that empty in years, the feeling is weird 🙂
