Christopher Butler recently published an excellent blog post which just happens to perfectly characterizes the different strategies I’ve been playing with for getting more focus and clarity into my life as regards to the flood of technology-induced options we so often blindly adopt by default. In particular, my recent attempts to reduce my online time, which by now is more than just reducing smartphone use, can all be seen as instances of what that blog post talks about.

Butler distinguishes between three types of approaches: elimination, curation and optimization:

  • Elimination means totally removing something from your life. For instance, closing an account and no longer using a service.
  • Curation is being more mindful and picky about what you let in and what you don’t. For instance, picking interesting blogs to follow while unsubscribing from newsletters I’m not really interesting in reading.
  • Optimization is working on the details of your system and workflow. One recent example: Setting up Readwise Reader on my Boox device so I can more easily read on the ‘peaceful’ e-ink device rather than open a browser on my laptop.

Now, I’ve been planning to make this a (mostly?) offline week, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it: Should I just disconnect from the internet entirely for a whole week? Should I allow myself to access a small set of ‘healthy’ things while blocking everything else - and if so, how do I make sure I’m not tempted to do other stuff online? These are exactly questions about the balance between eliminiation, curation and optimization.

Unlike a lot of what I read/see, my goal here is not simply to do a ‘dopamine detox’. What I have in mind is more a long-term, sustainable change. In this respect, an extreme no-internet experiment (=total elimination) that won’t have a lasting effect is pointless. So this shouldn’t follow a ’let’s see how long I can hold my breath’ kind of logic. Therefore, really spending the time to give this some thought is important. And, viewing it not just as an experiment but as an ongoing project where I use the outcome of experiment n to design experiment n+1.

So, what do I have so far?

A surprisingly successful start is my phone situation. A full discussion of that deserves a post of its own, but in short: My smartphone is now kept with internet connectivity off, in my bag or in a drawer, and only turned on when a specific need arises; my main phone which I carry around is a dumbphone which functions as - well, a phone. Transitioning to this setup has been surprisingly easy. This isn’t elimination (I still have a smartphone and internet connectivity), which might have caused too many problems and failed; it’s curation (choosing to have two separate devices, with as little as possible on each of them) plus optimization (having a clear system for how I use these devices, which works very well for my needs).

An additional very successful curation+optimization is my system of RSS feeds and tools for reading them, as hinted above. Again - a topic for a separate post; what’s currently important is the observation that by supplying myself with high-quality sources of fresh reading materials supported by reading tools that don’t require access to ’noisy’ systems I have plenty to read without feeling the urge to ‘just browse’. Just as eating healthy food which is also tasty and filling removes much of the craving for junk food; similarly, instead of being focused on what NOT to do you concentrate on the positive and satisfying. Both for diet and information, curation of your inputs and optimization of your process can be much more effective than elimination - which might happen ‘by itself’ as a kind of welcome side effect.

Our default mode of approaching information and the technology that bring it in is often ‘grab whatever is loudest and most popular’. A halthier and more sustainable attitude is to think about a process of designing the optimal system of living in a potentially unhealthy environment. The metaphor of a firewall seems helpful to me: You usually don’t want to pull out the cable entirely, but you do want to be very clear about what you let in and how you do the filtering.