I’ve been on this digital minimalism journey for a while, and have had months of success turned to months of struggling with phone addiction and repeat. I’ve been really trying to analyze the root of my issues and behavior and it’s finally occurred to me it’s not the screen so much as what it represents. I’ve found it easy to delete and stay away from apps like Instagram, that offer nothing to me at first glance, but Reddit, YouTube, etc. it has sooo much information. How-to’s, reviews, tips. I just can’t get enough. I want to know things even when I don’t know what I want to know, and I’m constantly on the search for more, constantly feeling like there’s some info I’m missing out on. I don’t know what to do with this realization, but would love some advice.

I have probably spent like 6 or 7 hours on here and it is like this every weekend. I spend most of that time on my laptop. During the week, I try to put blockers on my phone to limit time spent on reddit but it doesn't work. Every day I delete and reinstall the app. My addiction is so bad that I try to scroll reddit while driving. I often say I will read a book on my 40 minute lunch break and only scroll reddit for like 10 of those minutes but instead I scroll reddit the whole time. I often stay up until 3 or 4am scrolling reddit (it's a good thing that I don't have to work until the afternoon).

I don't want to completely quit reddit. Some advices and posts are useful, but I struggle to limit usage. I tried making my computer and phone greyscale but that didn't stop me.

I will say, on the other hand, there is a lot of garbage on reddit and it affects my mental health. Like sometimes I will ask a question that I think is legit and it will get downvoted to hell or the answers will be really snarky. I totally rely on reddit for validation and to feel good.

I don't know how to stop these behaviors. I feel I must post a new thread like 4 or 5 times every single day.

I recently started a new job after not having worked for a few years. The job has a few different elements to it, meaning there are days that I am away from my desk. However, there is a lot of computer time, filling out forms, emails, etc. This though has broke me from wanting to get on my phone. I'm so tired on looking at a screen all day, that when I get home I want to look at something different or hang out with my husband. It has been so nice.

For the Last few weeks I've used the Olauncher. I am pretty happy with it, the only problem i face is not having my calender as a widget. Now the new Semester starts and i need to track my appointments more. Do any of you know a minimalist Launcher for me to get rid of the flashy icons etc. for abdroid with which I will still be able to at access my google cakendar?

Hi all

I’ve been trying to read/learn as much as I can about digital minimalism, but feel like I've somewhat ran out of recommendations? (Context: I want to understand not just HOW to cut screen time — but also the science, psychology, and design behind compulsive tech habits.)

I’ve already read some of the well-known books on the topic, so looking for new recommendations. 

Anything that you’re or aware of or has helped you on your journey. I’m all ears.

Here’s what I’ve read so far:

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
• Deep Work by Cal Newport
• How to break up with your phone by Catherine price
• Attention Span by Gloria Mark
• Dopamine nation by Anna Lembke
• The Phone Fix by Faye Begeti
• Hooked by Nir Eyal
• Irresistible by Adam Alter

If you’ve got any other books or resources you found valuable (especially if they might not be widely known or obvious) would appreciate any recommendations!

There is an app called Calibre. Its main use-case is ebook management (fixing metadata, changing covers etc). The interface is horrible, but it's free, open source, available on every platform and very flexible. I can recommend this app if you have a large digital library. But this post is not about library management.

Many people don't know that Calibre can fetch news as well. It has a lot of built-in "recipes" for different media (e.g. New Yorker, NYTimes, Harper's Magazine or New York Review of Books). Each recipe is basically an instruction for a computer to go the website, get list of articles, get content and images for each article, etc.

These recipes are created by the app developer or volunteers, and are generally very good — they leave out ads, fix weird formatting that you can get using RSS readers or just printing an article. In some cases, Calibre even fetches covers for e.g. for weekly edition of New Yorker, or the cover the monthly edition of Harper's Magazine. Some sites require subscriptions, and in these cases you can add credentials in the recipe settings.

How to do it?

In the top bar (with large icons), there are Fetch news button. There you can search over all sources, and configure settings (e.g. you can just use "Download now" button, or automate it to fetch every day (e.g. for New York Times), or weekly (e.g. for New Yorker). The main culprit is that you have to leave app open for it to fetch news automatically.

_____

Now, I know that some people choose to not to read news at all, either as an act of protest, or out of desperation. While I understand these people, I don't think that ignoring news is sustainable long-term, because politics affects every facet of our lives. Having a political science degree, I can't afford myself the ignorance that not reading news can give me.

So, for me there are two ways to approach "slow news": RSS, or Calibre.

While RSS is more flexible and you can subscribe to blogs as well as news, I find that subscribing to a typical newspaper using RSS leaves me with 200+ unread articles in my RSS reader just over a couple days. It's very hard to keep up.

Using Calibre allows me to add a sort of cadence to my news consumption, imitate the schedule of a printed media. Also, you can skip some days by just not fetching news. In an RSS reader, it would leave you with 100+ unread articles, and here you just don't fetch the news and that's it :)

Plus, you can highlight quotes and easily export them in any format you want.

I still use RSS for blogs, especially tech blogs and other stuff I want to keep track for work, but for actual reading routine I try to stick to Kindle.

But Kindle specifically is not required! Calibre creates .epub files, which you can read in many apps, including Apple Books, Google Books, Readwise Reader, Kindle, Kobo, etc.

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Hope this post can inspire other people maintain a healthy diet of "some but not too much news".

Increase the text and icons on your smartphone. Make everything very big. Hear me out.

I know this might sound like a stupid suggestion, but when texts and icons are smaller, you tend to lean in and focus harder, getting more "immersed." By making everything bigger, you won’t have to dissociate from the world around you just to see your screen clearly.

When texts and icons are tiny, you're forced to lean in and focus harder, which pulls your attention deeper into the screen. By increasing their size, things become easier to see at a glance, so you don’t get sucked in as much. You can scroll less, tap more accurately, and reduce eye strain, too. It’s like creating a little buffer between you and the screen world, so you stay more aware of your surroundings.

I used to be one of those people who made everything on their phone tiny to 'fit as much as possible on the screen.' But I realise now that it was a bad idea.

However, on my computer, where I study, I still use small fonts. The smallest possible.

I bought a dumb phone on 1st August and now it's 13th October and honestly I've used my flip phone for two weeks in total. I always have had to go back, insert the sim in my smartphone again and again. Family needed an online shopping item or I needed to watch something on YouTube and now I've decided I'll use smartphone less and only pick it up if much needed. It's been three days and I'm controlling it okayish. One day when I'll be at home for a long time I'll do this experiment again but rn it was hard and people so close to me, i.e., my family has problems with me using a feature phone so I've kept that thought aside.

So I'm trying to level my digital minimialist game, and was wondering if anyone had a good GPS set up for their car?

My two worries were music and using GPS is the main one. But as I'm discovering I don't need music as much as I used to until I get a mp3. But for GPS I'm not sure what to use? Should I just give in and use my phone for the GPS in my car? or does anyone have a GPS set up connected or not connected to their phone?

before, when I had social media, there wasn't a dull moment in life. No boredom, no sitting and thinking.

Today is a holiday on my country. Before, I'd spend all day on Netflix, or YouTube, or social media. I deleted my YouTube and didn't feel like watching anything. So I grabbed a book, went to my balcony, got my dog's blanket and two chairs. I got my dog some food and water, too.

After a while, I didn't feel like reading anymore. I didn't feel like doing much of anything. So I just... stayed there. The birds singing, the wind, my dog running around (it's quite a big balcony). There wasn't any sun, it's a cloudy day, but not a cold or windy one. Everything was perfect. Had some piano music on the background. And I just... existed.

Back when I had so many apps and games on my phone, that would've never happened. I hate boredom, but now I realized it's not boredom I hate, it's being alone with my thoughts. My thoughts are peaceful now.

Life's been good.

• shitty LP laptop
  • poor thing is so slow you could die, but need it for school. I think having something slower probably helps me be more patient anyway. damned thing is about 12 anyway. he's huge, and I used to have a smaller one, but i ate shit on the stairs and smashed it.. still use it ice
  • messaging: I use beeper to talk to all my mates cross-platforms. occasionally I log into instagram to make a post, but I'm pretty good about it
  • productivity, note-taking, etc: word for essays, microsoft to-do, and notion for everything else. I'm working on a sync with make for microsoft to do and notion using make (integromat) in my free time. My notion database is HUGE, i mean this thing has all my life and then some on it
    • notion: severely massive, as i said. I have a pomodoro timer; a r/structuredapp embed for the holidays when i have no semblance of a schedule; a great grade page, which gives me a notification & shite whenever something is due, alongside a cute little piece of code to tell me how far off it is. i'm still figuring out repeating templates, which are such a struggle, but ideally i'll have one for each lecture for relative notes, etc. Set everything up manually this trimester, which was a Pain
    • notion+MTD: Also working on a bidirectional sync with microsoft to-do, since i'm not willing to abandon either. I've gotten as far as importing tasks and updating their status on both platforms. Right now, I'm having an issue with an infinite loop glitch when creating tasks in notion. Each task has, and is checked for, a unique id, but then infinite instances of that id are created afterwards. I was trying to use a deduplicate() boolean, but there was a whole other issue with the data formatting of array vs. text vs. collection which was driving me mad.
  • tv: ok this is probably my major pitfall. whenever I'm depressed, I watch so much tv god shakes. I once watched All of game of thrones in a week.
  • web: I use firefox, and a combination of extenstions which I'll list below.
    • new tab homepage: sets all my new tabs to google scholar. surprisingly this has cut down on any scrolling I might do a lot more effectively than web-blockers. highly recommend
    • auto tab discard: bloody brilliant. keeps my computer from having a spaz
    • simple tab groups: this would be pretty unusable for me if i didn't use it in conjunction with auto tab discard. the two of them together are perfect
• supernote A6X
  • had this since december 2022, bloody LOVE it. We've had our ups and downs, but I use it for almost all my class notes, I have a massive digital library, and the annotation features are all I need in my life.
• ancient nikon
  • favourite of my friends at parties. only complaint is that it's maybe a bit clunky, thinking of getting a smaller digital for everyday use. Absolutely decent for 50 bucks used.
• opel touch flip
  • christ i love this thing! I sideloaded spotify, soundwire (to listen to tv while I smoke, bc i'm honestly a bit of an icon like that), and plan to download beeper soon too. The hinge got a bit funky after a while, but that's probably my bad for throwing the thing around like it's a nokia, when it's not.
  • whatsapp. Biggest issue with the opel flip. Whenever whatsapp releases an update, the built-in version Refuses, to accept the date and time are correct, and the only fix I've found is to hardcore reset, and manually re-import all my data... It's bloody lucky I stopped working at my old job, or it could've been a much bigger issue
• sennheiser 400S
  • got these in like july? about to try collect the warrenty on them when I get the time. Initally fantastic headphones, but the microphone stopped working after a while, and i've noticed a substantial drop in audio quality. hopefully i can get a working replacement? so do not want to change anything right now

happy to extend on anything if anyone has questions!

Guys I think I'm obsessed with the topic of digital minimalism. I have two books about it which I keep reading again and again and I watch videos about it and read on reddit about dumb phones and digital minimalism and that made me buy a dumb phone but I just keep watching videos and repeating the steps and I don't really live my life, I'm so unproductive. I'm 26 and a lawyer in 2024. Yes, it's possible for anything to happen but I'm gonna give this topic a break for a week and then decide. My brain is fried

So, I'm not on Instagram and facebook anymore but I've started to like reddit and YouTube so I'm still there. When I was using my feature phone, my mind was always on planning and I was always craving internet and now when I'm on smartphone my mind is still not controlled, it's like I'm intentionally not living slow, not doing tasks which I'm supposed to do, i know mind illnesses can make me a sloth but I'm hard on myself because everyone else is hard on me too. I wish I was not into any profession so I could just use my dumb phone. I wish I never got my personal smart phone. If this one gets old and damaged, this will be my last, promise. Let's not overthink and just live, randomly

I'm trying to get my screen time across different devices low.

I want to check if there are other people here who are doing the same, so we could be accountability partners to each other and/or even compete in a having a lower screen time. One such app is digital detox that has some compete with feature in it.

For the screen time monitoring we could agree later on what to use. Lmk if you're interested. I'd prefer people who are from India or closer home to where I live as there's a chance of offline interaction and work together to get lower screen times.

2022

I had a hacked windows laptop, a battery-fried LG phone, a messy chrome browser and email. la creme de la creme were the draining people in my life- no one person was able to "fill my cup" and make my quality of life better. I was literally better off alone.

2024

It was what it was. Pixelbook (1 year) and Mobiscribe (4 months) I finally have a setup that works for me. (I have had macbook, ibook, netbooks, windows, linux, chromeos, iphone, ipods, samsungs, kindle, nook, etc). Now, it could be that I was the problem. Even so, I'm finally moving forward.

Rating list:

Apple: Expensive. 7/10

Windows: Draining. 6/10

ChromeOs: Programmatic. 5/10

E-journal: Limited. 4/10

ChromeOs+E-journal= 9/10

:)

If I delete my instagram app is my last active still going to show or do i hv to manuelly unable it. Thks

i am in my senior year of college and know for a fact that i am obsessed with my phone. i have autism/adhd pit brain and that shit just sucks me in. i just need some outside advice on whether or not/HOW to make the switch to an older/flip/slide style phone

i would love if it could still use spotify and be able to handle group texts. any recommendations? how do i beat my brain??

https://youtu.be/QE0q7Gm06U4?feature=shared

I saw this cbs video a couple of days ago. Very nice to see young adults (teens) free themselves of the smartphone way of life.

Anybody knows where to buy refurbished vintage phones? I have such nostalgy for the early 2000s ones.

I’ve just literally stopped spending hours on YouTube and twitch, I just get here and I’m not attracted by it the same way I was before because it feels less appealing. And there is another benefit to it : I was always trying to match colors on my main page with apps and widgets and now it’s just matching because the minimalism is quite satisfying. I will update after a month of use.

I've recently found myself watching more and more short form content, that being Instagram Reels and Snapchat Spotlight but I know I shouldn't. That said, I still want to keep the apps for the social aspects like chats. I know there are some apps that block those features on Android, but are there any for ios?

I'm ditching the internet and all my streaming services for a month to live on a shelf of retro games, VHS tapes, and even cassette tapes! Will I survive? Will I go insane? Let's find out!
https://youtu.be/YsoAPtxS9wg

YouTube has without a doubt been the hardest online platform for me to quit. It seems like such a useful platform with all the tutorials and other educational content, which is one of the reasons I've spent countless hours there since when it was launched back in the mid 00's. At some point i stopped watching movies/TV and went all in on YouTube instead. So much of my pop culture knowledge and even my worldview has been shaped by the stuff I've watched there. For a while I bought into the hustle bro culture because that was the general vibe there. After that came the kind of minimalist aesthetic boom and I started yearning to be like those people with their perfect lives in their tiny houses. And now half of all the YouTubers are trying to diagnose me with ADHD/Autism/OCD because that's the new aesthetic.

And I've finally had enough. If I zoom out a bit it's plain obvious that it's all a big pile of dung. All the videos are just advertisements trying to sell me stuff, and all the narratives are just as fabricated as they are on instagram. Even when a video seems useful it always ends up being an ad with clickbait. Heck, look at the video titles and thumbnail pictures. It's all just a big pile of quirky facial expressions paired with titles about The TRUTH about X or You're doing Y wrong! And we've become so used to it that we fail to see how ridiculous it all is.

I'm done with YouTube. I'm not sure how I will go about quitting it, but I've started by deleting my account. There are a few quality channels I will genuinely miss (looking at you, Kurzgesagt) but I just can't stand how time and time again I am fooled into wasting my time watching crap to the point of feeling brainwashed.

It may sounds a little weird but let me explain. So hi everyone! I’m a 19 (soon to be 20) years old university student and with that I recently started to realise that I’m growing up and there are a few things I need to start managing in a more adult way. What I mean by that is that I know for a few years now that I have a lot of photos and videos on my phone (well, technically in iCloud) and I need to get rid of a lot of them. I always put it off, saying things like I will go through them and delete a lot of them when I’m gonna have school break, but I never actually started doing it in a serious way. Which I would really need to do, because as time moves forward I’ll only have more and more photos. Although in the past 1,5 year I started to take less and less photos and try to control myself, it doesn’t change the fact that in the first few years when I had a smartphone I took waaaay to many photos and made too many videos.

So my problem is that in general I have too much of them and it’s really overwhelming. I have an especially big problem with videos because for some reason when I was 14-15-16 I filmed a lot of ‘vlog’ with my phone (cause I loved youtube vlogs and they inspired me🤣), which were never gonna be edited and uploaded anywhere, but now they are take up soooo much storage.

In summary I have a lot of videos (in most of them I just talk about things I will or didn’t do😭), and it’s really annoying and overwhelming. I know that probably the best thing to do would be if I’d just delete all of them without any question, because let’s be honest I’ll probably never watch them back and I don’t need them. But I just don’t want to do that, because what if one day I want to watch one of them and it won’t be there? This is highly unlikely to happen tho, because it’s probably ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but still I have this weird anxiety about it. And overall the whole thing is just really overwhelming and I don’t know what to do. Because I honestly don’t want to go through them one by one, watching all of them, cause it would take a lot of time (which I don’t have) and then I’d probably think that yes I need that, even though right now I don’t even remember that that video exist. (You know what I mean?)

Anyway, I hope this makes sense and someone will be able to give me some advice, because I really don’t know what to do. I have enough iCloud storage (at least for now), but my phone storage is dying (because it’s much less than the iCloud storage), and it’s really annoying and I just don’t know what to do because I’m overwhelmed.

So I guess my question is, what is your advice? What would you do if you’d be in my position? Would you go through them one by one, or you’d just delete all of them that doesn’t seem interesting at first glance?

(I hope this made sense, if not, sorry, English is not my first language and I’m in a hurry; but thank you so much for reading it! I really appreciate those who give some advice!🫶🏻)

I moved from a smartphone that held my music, photos, games, books, messages to what feels like a fleet of devices. A flip phone, music player, kindle, tablet, camera, and gaming handheld. It felt so counter intuitive at the beginning but I have made two very important observations in this process.

Number 1. I already owned all of these other devices except the music player. Which was funny to me because when I had a smartphone these devices felt rather meaningless. But now, each of these devices has a specific purpose and value that it gives me. I cherish them much more because the accomplish what they set out to do in a better way than my phone did.

Its nice to be able to disconnect from all these other purposes in order to just read, or just talk. I am really enjoying the intentions behind my decision making and how I spend my free time now.

Also, I have become infinitely more comfortable with silence than I was before. odd.

Number 2. I can now choose which of these come with me. So now I can leave a large amount of digital "burden" at home when I do not need it. Just going to the store? no need for mp3, games and books. Going to visit family? through the camera in the bag too. It is amazing what compartmentalizing all these pursuits of value does for how I feel about them.

This may have been fairly obvious observations for some here, and I understand that, but if there is anyone on the fence about getting rid of the smartphone and engaging in these hobbies more intentionally... I promise its worth it.