This past week was, for me, a small experiment in using the internet as little as possible. My goal was not to be totally offline - which would have caused some real problems for people I have to communicate with, and also I know it wouldn’t be something I could really stick to in general. Rather, the idea was to see if I can start building healthier habits about the amount of time and attention that I devote to online stuff.

This was not meant to be governed by a very rigid set of rules, but more by somewhat flexible guidelines:

  1. Open my email once a day, unless I know I’m expecting a specific message that requires somewhat fast attention
  2. Same for Telegram
  3. Refresh and go over my RSS feeds once a day; save anything I find interesting for offline reading/viewing
  4. No news sites, shopping sites, or other mainstream websites
  5. No search engines unless I really need to find information about a specific topic which is important enough to justify an exception; in those cases, save the results for offline reading

Since I don’t use social media, this more or less covers my most likely scenarios.

So, how did it go?

  1. Email: No problem, mostly. I did have two occasions in which a work email made it clear I should expect a follow-up that shouldn’t wait until the next day, and on those cases I checked again a few hours later - reminding myself that I’m not looking at any other messages.
  2. Telegram: The same.
  3. RSS: Perfect; I really think RSS is the key to getting this kind of system right. Things to read went to Readwise Reader, to be read later on my Boox device. Youtube videos - downloaded using yt-dlp for offline viewing. That gave me plenty of ‘fresh’ materials that I won’t feel too disconnected or bored, while avoiding the temptation to dive into an endless sea of content. The list of new items on my RSS feed is always a finite, bounded set; when I get to the end, that’s it. This is an extremely important aspect of using RSS (in addition, of course, to the fact that I get a personally curated set of high-quality content).
  4. News: No problem at all (I do get the daily headlines from 2 newspapers, one local and one international, in my RSS reader, and that’s more than enough; I rarely bother opening the actual article). Shopping sites: I did visit these twice, but I kept this very short and focused on answering questions like ‘how expensive is…?’ and ‘does such a product exist?’.
  5. Search: Here I made a conscious decision to allow myself to search for study materials on ‘healthy’ topics I focused on as learning projects this week: building a blog with hugo and org-mode; and using FreeBSD jails. In general I tried to follow a similar workflow to what I do with RSS feeds: Find relevant materials and save them for reading/viewing offline.

Overall I’m quite happy with how this week turned out. I think there are three aspects here that I should constantly keep in mind beyond this week:

  • Boundedness
  • Offline consumption
  • Offline projects

Boundedness means that there’s a clear limit to any online activity; there’s no room for infinite scrolling. You don’t go to an ‘all you can eat’ buffet with as many refills as you want, you go to a place where you decide in advance what you’re going to eat.

Offline consumption means that by making a clear separation between the collection stage and the consumption stage you can set up an environment where reading is just reading, and watching a video is just watching a video. No notifications, no temptation to look for more, no other distractions.

And offline projects are the other side of the coin - not what you don’t do but what you do do: By placing an upper limit on what you do online you also place a lower limit on what you do offline, and vice versa. Having something meaningful to do offline reduces the urge to go online again; whereas if you don’t have a clear purpose for your offline time you end up asking yourself what’s the point of not at least using your time for doing something online. Interesting and challenging projects offline are the real thing, and no ‘detox’ is going to succeed without this aspect.

It’s perhaps a bit ironic that a major project over this offline-oriented week has been this blog - which is not exactly an offline creature. Yet working on the blog is mostly offline; isn’t it beautiful that I’m now sitting and typing this in Emacs on a laptop bought in 2012, which might as well be totally offline at the moment, and the words I’m typing will eventually find their way online without me having to even open a web browser? That’s what call a healthy balance.