advent of controlled media usage

content/post/2025-12-07-advent-of-controlled-media-usage.markdown

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+---
+categories: null
+date: "2025-12-07T20:38:00+01:00"
+title: Advent of Controlled Media Usage
+---
+
+One blogpost ago, I wrote about [Stuff I've spent entirely too much time on](/post/2025-12-05-networking-overkill/).
+That title was of course in jest, as I think I've spent a (somewhat) reasonable amount of time on VPN and DNS, given that it makes my setup quite a bit more secure and also makes certain things simpler.
+
+There are, however, things I have also spent a lot of time on, where I'd say "yes, that is actually a waste of time".
+
+![
+    Kendra (@kendrawcandraw) on Twitter
+    Me watching some high fantasy shit: I would simply not be corrupted by the magical object. If it is actively harming you why don’t you just put it down. Idiot Me receiving psychic damage 23 hours a day from my phone: Ouuughhhh oouuuwuwwwaaaaaa ooaaaghhuuuuuhhowwgahhhhh guuuuuwah
+    2:52 PM · Feb 27, 2022
+](/static/psychic-damage.jpg)
+
+If my phone stats are to be trusted[^1], I've spent 3+ hours on my phone every day of last week.
+That's 21 hours per week, or half a full time job.
+Simply looking at that, it annoyed me quite a bit, since that wasn't an atypical week - meaning I'd spend about 1000 hours on non-fulfilling, short-term content over an entire year.
+
+I decided that that's too much, and it'd probably do me good if I simply stopped doing that.
+As I believe in extreme measures, I've decided I want to reduce my phone's screentime to less than 30 minutes every day.
+
+How do I plan to achieve that?
+- Replace my phone alarm clock with a dumb one to prevent any temptation of using the phone when getting up.
+- Uninstall the apps I spent the most time on (instagram, youtube)
+- Unmute my phone - this way I know I didn't miss anything because my phone will make a noise when someone wants to reach me. quite convenient :)
+- Go through the apps that are able to send me notifications and decide if they should keep that privilege.
+- Put my phone in my backpack
+- Never look at it unless it makes a noise
+
+Yesterday I spent some time changing all the settings for this to work.
+Today, I achieved a mobile screentime of 4 minutes :)
+
+Today has been an extremely boring day.
+However, it has also been a rather productive day - I finally updated my CV, wrote a cover letter, and stopped procrastinating the application I wanted to send out since about 2 weeks.
+
+I expect the upcoming days to continue being extremely boring - but I also have hope that I'll get to do more of the things I've procrastinated for too long.
+
+[^1]: They are absolutely not, it deletes associated screentime data every time I delete or reinstall an app.