105 Hours – My Digital Minimalism

I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours – the number of waking hours we have each week.

I do many things with my use of digital technology to take good care of my attention and time.

Like most things, our choice and needs for digital technology are quite personal. We have different needs and interests.

Let's get tactical – here's what I do.

Controlling your phone

For most intents and purposes, I don't have a personal phone. Technically, I have one, but I just keep it stored in a drawer, turned off, for most of the time. We'll talk about it in a bit.

I'm currently in a role that requires me to be on-call, VP of Engineering for an SRE and Platform team. So I do have a work phone I carry while on-call, so I can be paged.

I strongly recommend that you buy a separate work phone. The draw of your phone is doubled if you have personal and work temptations on the same device.

On my phone, I only keep the apps I need to respond to an on-call page, or to check on work after-hours for urgent pings (Slack).

I deliberately don't have other work apps on my work phone: email, task tracking, documents, etc. I can always sit on my desk to check on work – adding friction.

I also have Google Calendar but I probably don't need it – though it helps when I'm out during on-call shifts. I'll test deleting it.

I also disable Safari on my work phone to prevent any web browsing. I can always enable it if I need it for work purposes, but that hasn't happened yet.

That's pretty much it as far as my work phone is concerned. I carry it around when I'm on-call, use it to triage incidents and to check on urgent work messages in the evenings, and it's set up to do only that – and nothing else.

So let's talk about my personal phone – or my lack thereof.

I don't carry my personal phone around with me and leave it turned off when I'm home. When it comes to my non-work contacts, I'm typically unreachable.

A few caveats: One that's worked pretty well is that I keep an iPad on my desk, and my family can FaceTime me by using my personal phone number (but not my email). It's rare, but my wife sometimes calls me when she's out and I'm home.

In practice, my personal iPad works as a modern landline phone.

I have Google Home on my personal phone because it's the only way to manage our Wi-fi.

I keep Signals on my phone because it's how I keep in touch with my personal friends. Typically, I'll just use it on my computer since my phone is turned off, and I can just open and close the app when I want instead of being reachable anytime.

I usually carry an AirTag so my wife can check my location if needed since I don't carry my phone.

When traveling for work, I use my work phone for personal calls and temporarily install Uber and Google Maps.

I think that's pretty much it. My work phone is something I carry to check on urgent work needs. I don't carry my personal phone at all and have the basics of being reached through my iPad at home and of others knowing where I am through my AirTag.

No social media. No apps. No distractions.

So let's talk about social media.

Controlling your social media

I still don't think social media is good for me – and many other people. Some recent ones seem promising, like Bluesky, but I'm disconnected enough that it didn't warrant me checking it out yet.

An important thing I learned about social media, though, is that although it feels egalitarian, there's a marked difference between producers and consumers.

A few individuals receive the vast majority of attention on social media. Social media is like attention capitalism.

I don't use TikTok, Instagram, X, or Bluesky, but I do use LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn, I focus on sharing my writing, not consuming content. I cross-post blog articles and occasionally add a comment, but I don't follow anyone or read their posts (sorry).

As you can see, even though I don't follow anybody and have no news feed, there's still a bunch of adverts when logged in – companies to follow, games to play. No thanks. Aside from logging in once to schedule my article and sometimes with one or two exceptions for a quick post (or for work reasons, like checking a candidate's profile before an interview), there's no need for me to log in to LinkedIn. I also don't have LinkedIn on any of my phones, of course.

On Saturdays (typically), I will log in and see if there are any comments to my posts or any messages from my network. Sometimes, I'll check it sooner if I am around LinkedIn, but honestly, I could be more disciplined about doing it only on Saturdays.

That's pretty much it. I limit social media usage to spread the reach of my writing, and if I expand it in the future, I'll do my best to keep a focus on being a producer instead of consumer.

So let's talk about other ways I use my personal computer.

Controlling your computer

Always have a separate work and personal computer. Always.

On my personal computer, the hardest part to control is the internet. The typical suspects for me are Hacker News, Reddit, and YouTube.

I decided to permanently block Reddit and Hacker News – not because they aren't valuable, but because the distraction outweighs their benefit for me. I also blocked YouTube on my computer by adding all three to my hosts file.

I do watch YouTube once in a while, though, honestly. What I decided to do is to only watch YouTube on my TV. This creates enough friction while not completely shutting me out. I have my history turned off on YouTube, and I don't follow anybody.

In the past, I'd just have my computer disconnected from the internet by having Wi-Fi turned off and using an ethernet cable – but ChatGPT completely changed how I use the computer, so I don't do that anymore.

I do use Firefox and have it set up with an allow-list of websites I can use: my blog, O'Reilly books, opening Zoom meetings, and AWS. This way, I can only access these websites, and if I remove the allow-list for an exception, I'll still have Reddit, Hacker News, and YouTube blocked. I think Firefox is the only browser that supports this.

Typically, I'll remove this allow-list on Saturday mornings. Then I'll check my emails and reply to anything. I'll check it more often if I'm closely following a mentee or advisory.

Disable the allow list, check emails or post on LinkedIn, and re-enable. That's enough to keep me out of the internet.

Final thoughts

There isn't much else to my use of digital devices, really. Some other minor things I haven't talked about for brevity:

• I always keep a book in my car so I can read when I'm out.
• I carry a Kindle when traveling, and often books. I keep the Kindle on airplane mode to avoid checking the bookstore. This means minimal distractions compared to a phone, iPad, or computer.
• I call or message my friends on Saturday mornings or when I'm on the computer on Signals. My wife helps keep our social life scheduled.
• I use a lot of email. I have a personal email that I keep only for emails with real people, so I get no email from machines. I check and reply on Saturdays.

In summary, these are the approaches I use to control my phone, social media, and computer usage:

For phone, I keep a separate work phone. I only have the tools necessary to answer on-call and urgent requests. My personal phone stays turned off, and I get calls on my iPad, and get tracked by family through my AirTag.

For social media, I didn't join any social networks except for LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I keep an empty news feed, and use it for posting my articles and sporadically small comments.

For computer, I block the websites I find most distracting like YouTube, Hacker News, and Reddit, and use Firefox with an allow-list for my daily internet usage, so I'm typically shut-off from the internet.

There are many downsides to this approach of using technology, but today, I just wanted to get tactical and describe what I do, without discussing it's trade-offs.

But I will say that this approach frees up an enormous amount of time and attention, allowing me to focus on what matters most to me.

I hope this rundown helps you focus and spend time on the areas that matter most to you too.