Month 1, Schedule Decluttering. Step 1: Obvious Waste

For Lent, I banished Netflix and Hulu, permitting myself to watch only when others are present. I’ve done this for a few years and always appreciate how it transforms boredom-induced solitary binge-watching into a community activity. Entertainment is selected more carefully, less frequently, and brings a sense of shared experience. I learn more about the tastes of others, and others, in turn, learn about my own impeccable tastes.

The withdrawal symptoms are manageable… just a persistent eye twitch.

While television was exorcised from my life, YouTube remained my sanctioned digital demon. I didn’t have any other social media on my phone, this was okay, right?

The more I contemplated deleting the app, the more desperate my excuses to keep it became - clear evidence of a perfectly healthy relationship with technology. Finding trends in data is fun, and seeing progress in no uncertain terms is satisfying, but this time rather than confronting how many hours of my finite existence I've sacrificed to useless videos, I simply deleted the app. Knowledge of my actual usage would only lead to an existential crisis, and good therapists are hard to come by.

Pinterest and Prime Video followed YouTube into the digital abyss (though Prime was already gathering electronic cobwebs anyway). The only ‘fun’ apps remaining on my phone are for music and audiobooks… Because apparently, I need to convince myself that entertainment isn't entertainment when it's educational.

Then, I turned my phone display to gray scale. I turned off lock-screen banners as well as any settings to ‘wake up’ due to a notification. I could turn the phone’s audible chime on if I wanted, but no more unnecessary oh-my-gosh-I-have-a-text dopamine releases. I realize that for some people, this luddism is not realistic. But for me it is. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.

For a brief and glorious set of days, the newfound time was invigorating... Suddenly I had several more hours each week and think of all the work and hobbies and volunteering and socializing I could do! I used this time efficiently, but by the third day I was more exhausted than when I started to declutter my schedule.

I was now at a cross-roads; what had seemed like a straight-forward ‘win’ was a curse if I couldn’t find a better way to transition that time. Every day I was more tired yet lacked any of my carefully curated reality escape hatches.

I was in desperate need of rest, while also being restless. Reintroducing screen time wasn’t an actual solution, so I established three valid activities for restless moments:

1.     Reading (including Scripture, which, unlike YouTube, doesn’t start with an inspirational verse and end with a deep dive into conspiracy theories).

2.     Journaling (including my prayer notebook, which, as a context-less list of names and dates looks more like something out of a horror film than a church pew).

3.     Going outside without any technology (not that there’s anything interesting on my phone anymore, but you might be surprised at how tempting email-checking becomes once YouTube is banished).

I told a friend this list, and she quickly pointed out that exercise was also great for combatting restlessness, so I suppose,

4.     Actually moving my body when it doesn’t want to sit still.

Let’s see how this one goes over…