Media detox - a lifestyle

In The 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris, he writes about taking a media fast. That means no watching any videos, movies, news, playing games or spending time on social networks for a few days. He also says to try this as the reader of the book and so we gave it a go. We're not gonna lie, it was really amazing. And after that first go, it seemed very hard to restart it back up again.

Then we came across Atomic Habits by James Clear and since we always thought we were spending too much time on media, we decided to take advantage of his environment design idea. We designed everything around spending exactly the amount of time we wanted on media. It was no longer a complete media detox that lasted a couple of days but a daily media (half)detox that became a lifestyle.

This is our current intentional environment design for our media detox:

1. TV: a wooden box with a timer, so the TV is on just for 4 hours
2. Phones: grayscale filter, app and website blocker, only productivity apps allowed
3. Laptop: two separate accounts for work and recreation (the latter has a time restriction)
4. Tablet: limited time for email client
5. Blocked notifications on all devices

Media is ever present in our lives and yet our brains have not yet adapted to the addictive nature of it. So if we want to coexist hand in hand, we have to develop a system or rather systems that make sure we're getting the benefits of media, while negating its negative effect. We’ve put a lot of thought into our systems and we’re constantly updating them so they evolve with our lives. We hope some of these systems might inspire you to change the way you interact with media as well.

So what steps are you going to take today to consume less media and have a fuller life?