Going analog
I've been cutting way back on my off-hours screen time for the last five days or so:
- Most days I've been analog-only, except perhaps for reading on an e-ink Kindle, until I start work around 7:45a. (That's a two-hour block of time.)
- I've been putting my phone away circa 7:30p, though my wife and I usually watch some television after that.
- I've been putting my phone away (or turning it off) while I'm at work, so that quick walks, bathroom trips, and so on are screen-free.
This feels very, very good. Some notes:
- I'm doing this because it feels good and seems healthy. None of it is requiring willpower: it just feels like pursuing what is working and what is feeling pleasant and healthy.
- The proximate cause of this was not any kind of crisis, but just a routine Comcast failure. One morning, I woke up before my kids and found I had no Internet access, so I read for a while and noticed that it felt great.
- Posts and essays on this theme tend to emphasize human-to-human time, which is obviously very important, but I'm most struck by the experiential difference in, e.g., household chores. And here, it's not so much that I enjoy a Zen-like focus on the activity itself, but more that the day's personal-life stuff, programming projects, and books are staying at the top of my mind for longer stretches. There's a lot less churn in the "top-of-mind stack."
- This is not a recommendation, in part because my circumstances are unusual. My job is almost entirely screen time, and intense AI work at that. I don't think it's a coincidence that stretches of analog-only time have started to feel much better as I've gotten more and more immersed in AI at work. (And it's probably relevant that "immersed in AI" means, largely, using chatbot-adjacent coding tools.)
- I'm hesitant to draw broad conclusions even for myself about this, because (i) there are sample-size issues (maybe how I'm feeling is highly specific to this week's circumstances) and (ii) the experience of a lifestyle change has so much to do with the fact of having changed something, not the specific change itself.
- I had hoped to justify this with a screenshot of my iPhone's Screen Time app, but the app's information seems inaccurate. At the very least, it doesn't track what I think of as screen time. I used my phone for approximately one minute yesterday (just turning it on and off, and making sure the volume and focus mode were correct). It says I "used Reminders" for 24 minutes (out of 28 total minutes of screen time). I most certainly did not use Reminders for even one minute. The phone, however, seems to take a grandiose view of its having displayed notifications for a while (out of everyone's sight).
I have many finer-grained thoughts about this, but I'll save them for possible future posts. For now, what I want to think about most seriously is that working with AI all day is a very new kind of work environment. Surely it's plausible that hours and hours of chatbot time has psychological, intellectual, and emotional effects that call for adjustments elsewhere in life. We should be open-minded about what these effects might be, and how we should best configure our work and non-work lives if we use AI heavily on the job.
So far, this is a pure win for me, insofar as I both feel better outside of work and also seem to have more stamina and sharpness on the job, but (again!) all my conclusions are speculative until I have more and better information about the process, or at least until I get past the short run.