Do you remember the 30-day digital declutter I did in 2020, inspired by Cal Newport? I wrote about it in my self-experiment in digital minimalism, and a year later I went one step further and deleted my social media accounts completely. People still ask me about it, and they always ask the same question: did it last? Five years feel like enough distance to answer that honestly.
What survived
The phone still sleeps in the kitchen. In 2021 I bought an actual alarm clock, a hideous yellow one, and it still wakes me every morning. There are still no social media apps on my phone. And the first thing I do after waking up is not scrolling. Most mornings I read. Not every morning, I want to be honest here, but often enough that I read noticeably more books per year than I did before 2020. If the whole experiment had given me nothing but this one habit, it would have been worth it.
I also kept my suspicion of the word “just”. Just checking, just five minutes, just this one video. When I catch myself thinking it, I try to put the phone down. Emphasis on try.
What crept back
YouTube. In the evenings. Disguised as documentaries. I also somehow ended up in eleven group chats that together behave exactly like the feed I thought I had left behind. And at some point I discovered that endless online window shopping scratches the same itch that Instagram used to scratch: new things, always more of them, with a little reward feeling on top. So no, I am not cured.
What I do differently today
The biggest change is that I stopped treating all this as a project with an end date. The declutter had 30 days, real life does not. What remains are a few default settings instead of rules: no feeds on the phone, one screen-free evening a week (we treat it like an appointment and it has survived birthdays, deadlines and a house move), news once a day. And when a new app wants a place on my phone, it first has to answer a simple question: what are you for? If the honest answer is “nothing, really”, it stays off.
I break my own rules about once a month, by the way. I have decided that this is fine.
Would I do the declutter again? Yes, tomorrow. Not because it turned me into a disciplined person, see above, but because it showed me what I want my mornings to look like. If you have been thinking about trying it yourself: a new month starts in a few days. That is all the starting line you need.
