Budget and schedule your internet time
One for the new year?
This is a long one but, if you can give it fifteen quiet minutes of your time, it may change your life. If you’d like me to read it to you, scroll up (or find Great Work in all the usual podcast places).
Budget and Schedule your Internet Time
You’re n years old. You get to live this nth year of your life only once. How much of it do you want to have spent using the internet? (I’m using ‘the internet’ as shorthand for things like social media, checking and rechecking the news, blogs, email. It might also apply to distracting word- or number-games on your phone, things like that.)
So, weigh the undeniable wonders of the internet against the other things you want to be doing with your life. How much of your nth year do you want to have spent using the internet? Half an hour a day? An hour a day? An hour a week?
Thirty minutes a day, for those working forty-hour weeks, is the same amount of time as a month’s work each year.1 Think about that.
My own answer’s more than zero. It’s astonishing to live in an era where I carry a library, live newspapers, shops and weather radar in my pocket; can enjoy impromptu video calls with those on the other side of the world whom I care about; and am able to have a conversation with someone whose language I don’t speak, to switch on my home’s heating before I get home, to send my partner, when we’re apart, a picture of a beautiful sunrise, a funny sign, or a puppy. The internet emerged while I was a nerdy student and, before the non-nerds had heard of it, I spent countless fascinated hours in poky university computer rooms exploring it: I knew it would transform the world, but I had no idea how or how much. Then the world was transformed again by the internet plus portable devices. And as I write this, it looks as though it’ll be transformed a third time by those two things plus artificial intelligence. It’s an exciting time to be alive. And let’s acknowledge, too, that there are those who don’t find it easy to interact with others face-to-face, whom social media allows social connections they wouldn’t otherwise have, and that it’s not clear that, overall, social media have made our lives worse.2 The best job I’ve ever had, I came across on social media.
But I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I have a serious internet addiction that’s only partly under control. Cardinal features of addiction: a habitual behavior that, despite my wish to avoid it, is compulsive, and with harmful consequences that I downplay. I disappear down internet rabbit-holes when what I need is a nap, a walk, a run, a book, or a chat with my partner. I can struggle to enjoy a quiet cup of tea, stand in a queue, sit on the toilet, walk along a street, or even read a book without pulling out my phone and taking myself away from the moment. The same may happen when I should be enjoying good company over a meal—and, if a significant-feeling email arrives, I may be left unable, for some time, to remain present. (Email’s my internet foible, perhaps because it’s where many good things in my life, and a few bad ones, have happened.) When stressed, I may soothe myself by checking messages every few minutes, hoping for the fleeting pleasure of something good or interesting, the reassurance that there’s nothing bad there. It has hampered how much I get done, my perspective, my creativity, my enjoyment. I pay the costs of frequent task-switching. I struggle to allow my mind to wander, to daydream. My screen use is, like much problematic substance use, a kind of soothing or distraction, an escape from the world around me, avoidance of worries or guilt or restlessness inside—though it worsens those things. (Like drug addictions, therefore, it seems to me that internet addiction isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom of some other trouble. Unlike many drugs, however, much of the internet is deliberately and skillfully designed to suck you in.) The internet has swallowed hours of my days and years of my life. And, truly, most of it’s been a colossal waste of time.
So, if you’re averaging, let’s say, two hours a day on the internet—the equivalent of four months’ work a year, without holidays—it’s not a bad idea to ask how close that is to the amount of time you’d like to be giving it. Consider again what you want to occupy your time. An hour a day? More? Less? You have only so many hours in your nth year. The consequence of a lot of internet time may be that you’re not spending it on things you value more, such as rest, doing things you truly enjoy, meaningful work, or beautiful sleep. At the time of writing, we are, around the world, averaging just over two and a half hours a day on social media (and over six and a half hours a day on the internet more widely). The question isn’t, “Are there any benefits from this?” Of course there are. The question is: “How much time do I want to give it?”
The internet expands to fill the time we make available to it. And here’s the thing: attractive, absorbing, important-feeling, urgent-seeming, distracting, soothing though it may be, much what most of us spend most of our time doing on the internet is meaningless. Little will matter even a day later. There are diamonds to be mined, and we’ll consider them in a moment. There’s wonderful stuff on social media (some of it created by people who read these emails). But it comes with a huge serving of bland, ephemeral, exaggerated, self-absorbed crap. You could, as some interesting news story unfolds, refresh constantly, getting little else done while you passively absorb others’ breathless commentary on it. Or you could read a few news sources once a day, or even less often, allowing you—and those reporting it to you—a clearer, more considered perspective. Social media may help keep in touch with friends, but nowhere near as well, or as meaningfully, as phone calls, a thoughtful email, an audio message, or meeting up in person. Imagine if, instead of spending h hours a week scrolling social media (if you do), commenting on your friends’ posts, you instead spent h hours a week—or even ⅓h hours a week—having conversations with people who are important to you. Most of these internet hours make your life worse, by diverting you from things that would make your life better—things that, paradoxically, you would rather be doing. (How much better a blues pianist I might be had I sorted this out sooner.) And the checking, the endless checking, seeking short-term soothing or distraction: in the long run, it won’t lessen worries.
It doesn’t have to be like this
As is the way with addicted minds, even as I write this my mind offers me counterarguments, inflating the benefits, marginalizing the harms. I’d miss out on things I need to know about. But this isn’t about eliminating internet use: it’s about containing it. Do it right, improving the signal-to-noise ratio, and you should see more of the good stuff. And missing out on even a big thing isn’t an inconceivable horror: it’s preferable to frittering away much of your life to social media. It shouldn’t be fear of missing out (‘FOMO’) that governs our internet use, but fear of falling in (FOFI?). I’d forego having heard about the best job I’ve ever had in exchange for the return of years of my life and fathoms of headspace. (And I’d probably have heard about the job sooner or later anyway.) It’s only when you cut back that you realize how unimportant was almost everything you’ve pruned, how ridiculous are the protestations that you need it for work or to be socially-adjusted. But people expect me to be available. Possibly because you’ve trained them so. If it’s the norm where you work, be (if you can be) part of the solution, not part of the problem. You may need to recalibrate some people’s expectations, and become known as someone for whom email doesn’t work when hours or minutes matter. But you can easily be available for urgent things (by phone call, say, or text message) without checking your email every few minutes or being distracted by a notification every time an email lands. Miss some information that you’d once have classed as urgent and important and you’ll soon learn, liberatingly, that it’s rare for anything bad to happen as a result, that most things are less important and urgent than they once seemed. Don’t begrudge me a bit of fun and relaxation. If you’re spending the global average of two and a half hours a day on social media, it’s not a bit; it probably isn’t truly fun or relaxing; and there’s no begrudging going on. This is sympathy and concern.
Nothing that really matters is likely to go wrong if you radically reduce your use of the internet. But your life (and the quality of your work) will improve radically.
Another way
So: budget and schedule your internet time. Decide how much you want, when you want it, and what you want to do with it; and then make it so. Half an hour a day, when you get home from work? Half an hour at work, for work-related stuff, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and an hour a week on Sunday mornings for personal stuff? Start incrementally if that’ll be easier. But be precise about the rules: which activities count and which don’t; when, exactly, you will do it; what you’ll do when something comes up that derails that plan, as it will, repeatedly. (Answer: keep heading in the right direction.) Let people close to you know what you’re doing, and why, and ask for their support.
Decide what your rules are for checking. Checking (and notifications) are what macerate our concentration. Will you check email, say, only on the schedule above? Do you really need to check email more often? If so, decide when you need to, and then make that the rule. Switch off all the notifications and alerts you can. The writer Cal Newport considers the extreme case of someone who has a job that genuinely requires checking email every fifteen minutes, taking, on average, five minutes each time. This person could, then, schedule five minutes every fifteen minutes, but not check for the next ten minutes. That would leave, every two hours, an hour and twenty minutes free from distraction—broken, but truly clear.3
If you like to keep your inbox empty (the ‘inbox zero’ approach), regulate when you empty it. Otherwise it becomes continuous and all-consuming. I empty mine once a day (and am working on reducing that to two or three times a week): not allowing myself to do so at other times has saved me much time and focus. When I do it, it takes me at least an hour, which I resent. But that’s so much less time, and so much less mentally burdensome task-switching, than dealing with it continuously, throughout each day. And when doing so, either respond to emails when others aren’t working, to reduce the risk of a real-time email dialogue, or set your replies to be sent later. Most email apps and web-based email providers have this ‘delayed’ or ‘scheduled send’ feature.
If checking is a problem for you, as it is for most of us, you’ll have to be disciplined at first. But practice makes habits. Deleting social media apps can create useful (if minor) friction: using a browser’s a little harder. I’ll say it again: switch off notifications. Keep a notebook by your bed and in your pocket or bag: when something occurs to you to look up or do on the internet, make a note. (Remember, you’re using the internet only at scheduled times.) Consider a dumb phone (a mobile that does calls and texts but no internet). If you can’t do that, separate yourself from your devices as much as you can: the mere presence of a smartphone, even without using it, significantly impairs your mental abilities (and those who are most dependent on our smartphones are more cognitively impaired by having our phones nearby). Leave it in another room at least when you’re eating, listening to music, reading, watching TV (you don’t need a screen to distract you from a screen). Keep a great book with you, so you have something more interesting to do.4
If you use your phone as a clock, get a watch. But not a smart watch (unless you really need one because of a disability): the last thing you need is to allow the internet even more intimacy. The phone in your pocket’s already too close. No need for an email signature telling people about your new email-checking habits: if you’re important enough for anyone to care, you’re not answering your own emails. Read printed books: we take in significantly more that way.5 (Would it be better if you’d printed this out?)
The rewards are almost instant.
Of course, this isn’t straightforward. It took me three attempts over five years, and continuing attention, to get my internet addiction under control. And I’m not all the way there. But, oh my goodness, is it better than it was—and so, as a result, is my life.
Handling all this new time you have
If your internet use has been in a bad way and you start budgeting and scheduling it, the experience is momentous. Suddenly, you have vast expanses of time. This can be a problem at first, especially if you’ve lost the ability to unwind without the internet. The cadence of your day may be unsettled. You may, at first, have to learn to embrace the early-morning peace of not checking your phone the moment you wake. Plan for this: think about and plan what else you’re going to do during the day: these need to be things that rest and invigorate you, not chores, or you will relapse. You’ll relearn how to relax without a screen and establish new, more settled rhythms to your days. You’ll find yourself with the time to get on with projects that have been waiting forever for your time—things that until now have always taken second place to the internet and its tendency to expand into all available time.
The next experience may be that your scheduled checking becomes not a temptation but a bit of a grind. This is great. Being a chore, you whip through it much faster, doing something you weren’t doing before: looking for things that actually matter, and being appropriately exacting about what does matter. Approaching it this way, you should quickly find the diamonds and pass over the rubble. You start to see the triviality of so much of it. You have time to call people you care about, and the serenity to have great conversations with them.
You’ll feel more in control of your life. Your focus, thinking, perspective, and sleep may improve. The prior inconceivability of having a day a week when you don’t use the internet at all becomes appealing and easy. You will feel your mind unfurling.
Further reading: there’s been much written about this. My top recommendation would be Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019).
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½ hour/day x 365 days/year ÷ 40 hours in a week ÷ 4½ weeks in a month = one month (182½ hours).
See, for example, Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski, “Estimating the Association between Facebook Adoption and Well-Being in 72 Countries,” Royal Society Open Science 10, no. 8 (August 9, 2023): 221451; Matti Vuorre and Andrew K. Przybylski, “Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age,” Clinical Psychological Science, November 27, 2023; but see also Philipp Lorenz-Spreen et al., “Accelerating Dynamics of Collective Attention,” Nature Communications 10, no. 1 (April 15, 2019): 1759; and the arguments advanced in Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (New York: Crown, 2022).
Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (London: Piatkus, 2016), 163. Newport doesn’t get the calculation quite right, but the point’s a great one.
Some of these suggestions are from Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, First Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 233–36.
Pablo Delgado et al., “Don’t Throw Away Your Printed Books: A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Reading Media on Reading Comprehension,” Educational Research Review 25 (November 1, 2018): 23–38; Anne Mangen, Gérard Olivier, and Jean-Luc Velay, “Comparing Comprehension of a Long Text Read in Print Book and on Kindle: Where in the Text and When in the Story?,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019).