Quiet Tech

A couple of weeks ago I read The Last Quiet Thing by Terry Godier, and it made me very conscious of what my devices were asking from me.

I keep talking about seeking calm to everyone who’ll listen, and still I hadn’t seen it like that: our devices demanding work from us.

We tend to think it’s only the big, evil, soul-shrinking companies demanding our attention, but on our side, a secondary-effect of having a tech device always communicating with the world is that it demands our intervention tens, even hundreds of times a day. And we tend to exercise very little control on what we do and how we deal with that fact.

This is the part that led me to think about what I do:

You will pick up your phone eighty, ninety, a hundred times today.

• Dismissing a notification 22%
• Intentional use 20%
• Checking something that pinged 18%
• Replying to a person 15%
• Updating, configuring, or fixing 12%
• Unlocking, forgetting why 8%
• Managing a subscription 5%

Screen time you chose: 35%
Screen time your devices chose for you: 65%

So I got into action.

I already was picky on which notifications I allow on my phone, but I went nuclear this time. I only left phone calls (with screening enabled), text messages (also with screening enabled, a thing I didn’t know existed).

There’s this unavoidable thing in Latin America, and it sucks: WhatsApp. You simply can’t communicate, order delivery or really anything without WhatsApp. Getting rid of it is impossible. I've fought that battle several times, and I've lost every time.

So I compromised:

I archived every conversation except from those with my direct family and three very close friends. Those few conversations will be the only ones that I will be notified about. Attention to the rest of them will be on my time and will.

On the watch, I turned off all notifications except from calls and messages, which already are filtered by the phone.

On the iPad I turned off everything. Absolutely everything. I don’t really need notifications of messages, calls, facetimes and emails there, much less the rest. I left the apps, in case I want to FaceTime my sons, but they’re silent unless I invoke them.

It's been a week and a half since I made the changes. A few days ago I forgot my phone in the car, and hours passed before I noticed.

That’s the way I want my tech to work.