The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Probably the wrong place to ask this, as this is an Internet forum, but have any of you implemented any kind of Cal Newport style Digital Minimalism? I just reread his book and am finding it frustratingly vague.
I'm your man!
So I've turned my phone into a pseudo-dumb phone. I've replaced the stock launcher with a minimalist black and white one, deleted any fun or distracting apps and installed an app which blocks the browser (but which allows me to access it for 30 seconds every five minutes for logins etc).
If you want to lock down your phone even more (assuming it's an Android), the Universal Android Debloater lets you uninstall anything, even stock apps like the browser or the app store. ChatGPT helped me set this up despite my lack of technical ability.
All my browsers on my personal and work PCs have site-blockers, blocking mostly news sites. The best ones let you set a password which you can make as a string of numbers which you save somewhere else. Typically you can also add sites without entering the password, but you need the password to remove sites.
My tablet has a whitelist of sites I'm allowed on, with the parental control PIN set to the aforementioned password. Previously I let my wife set the PIN number which also worked.
Finally, if I want a complete digital break (say, to read a book), I'll activate SelfControl which completely disables the browser on my laptop.
Now of course, all of these things can be reversed if I want to (except SelfControl while a block is active). What seems to work for me is that the pain of setting everything up makes me less willing to e.g. simply uninstall the browser extension.
I still slack off at work more than I should, but this makes it much easier to get back to what I should be doing. Also having books easily accessible for when I want to proactively rest is helpful.
I'm an apple chud unfortunately. I have cold turkey on my computer which works great, but phone is another issue. I seem to always be able to get around the controls.
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