--
title: "New Year Digital Detox: A Realistic Plan"
description: "A new year digital detox usually fails by the third week of January, and it fails for a boring reason: the plan was written for somebody with no job and no existing habits."
tags: ["year", "digital", "detox", "realistic"]
canonical_url: https://pause-paw.shop/blog/post74.html
A new year digital detox usually fails by the third week of January, and it fails for a boring reason: the plan was written for somebody with no job and no existing habits. Delete every app on 1 January, hold out nine days, reinstall on the tenth with a sense of failure.
Why all-or-nothing dies in week two. A ban removes the thing and leaves the gap it was filling. By Tuesday of week two the gap has been filled by something else, usually the same app on a different device or a browser tab nobody wrote a rule for.
The four weeks. - Week one: close one window. 22:30 to 07:30 on every device you control. Nothing else changes.
What the numbers usually show. | Week | What moves | What does not |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sleep, within about four days | Total daily screen time |
| 2 | Morning phone use | Evening use on the phone |
| 3 | Time on the four listed sites | Everything not on the list |
| 4 | Whether the window held without being enforced | Weekend totals |
Sleep moving first is the reason to keep going. It is the only change people report noticing before the habit exists, and it arrives well before the totals do anything.
The part worth keeping: | Week | What moves | What does not |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sleep, within about four days | Total daily screen time |
| 2 | Morning phone use | Evening use on the phone |
| 3 | Time on the four listed sites | Everything not on the list |
| 4 | Whether the window held without being enforced | Weekend totals |
Sleep moving first is the reason to keep going. Full write-up is on the source blog.
Top comments (0)