I Just Dropped a Few Calories in my Digital Diet by Deleting my Facebook Account

NOTE: The opinions expressed here are mine alone. As Ian MacKaye said, “This is no set of rules, I’m not telling you what to do…” I’m just sharing my own thoughts on a topic I find myself struggling with, thinking about, and discussing a lot at the moment. I hope it helps with your own personal reflection.

Like you, I’m struggling to balance how I use my phone for good without letting it distract me from family, friends and productivity. As Tony Fadell put it, we need a “Digital Diet” where we eat mostly vegetables and save sugar for special occasions. Let’s face it, some of us aren’t just eating a proverbial bag of Oreos before bed, it’s more akin to waking up and doing lines of coke before brushing our teeth, sneaking into the bathroom at work to shoot up, and freebasing after dinner, wandering the streets face-to-phone, screaming out for a month at the Digital Betty Ford Clinic.

A few months ago I realized I was looking at Facebook out of habit but not really enjoying what I was finding there. I moved it off my home screen. I didn’t miss it. So I deleted it from my phone. Then, after reading this article I downloaded all my data from Facebook and deactivated my account, thought about it for a little longer, then requested my account be deleted. I felt a mental weight lifted. One less distraction in my life. Ahhhhhhh…

I started spending my attention on computers before I was ten years old, doing BASIC programming and playing games on an Apple II. There were no local BBS in Goshen, Indiana, so apart from the one time my step-dad let me make a brief long distance call to San Francisco to try out the Thrasher BBS, I missed all the online communities of the 1980s.

My Internet obsession started in 1991, in a closet in our Indiana University Family Housing apartment, with Usenet on an amber-screened 8088 clone. It’s not an exaggeration to say Usenet changed my life. On Usenet I met people who were interested in the same things as me for the first time: a combination of music, skateboarding, and computers. Among other things like being one of the main transcribers of David Bowie lyrics online, I was the keeper of the Beastie Boys FAQ, which is what led me to make the first Beastie Boys Web Site and started an unexpected path for the rest of my life.

At work at home in Topanga Canyon circa 1999

Since Usenet I’ve used Gopher, The World Wide Web, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, Friendster, MySpace, Y! 360, Google+, Ello, LinkedIn, Facebook and Vero. I’ve stored my photos and videos on Flickr, iCloud, Google Photos, Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Instagram. I’ve chatted via IRC, ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Y! Messenger, Skype, BBM, SMS, MMS, Facebook Messenger, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, HipChat, Slack, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kakao Talk, Line, WeChat, Facebook Workplace and Telegram. Yikes. It makes my head hurt just trying to imagine all those login boxes. Remind me which ones I’m forgetting in the comments.

There are so many things my phone does that I am thankful for. Waze and Citymapper ensure I know the fastest way to get anywhere in almost any city. I find cars with Uber, Taxify, G7, and (even in China using) Didi. As a lifelong music fanatic I’m constantly listening to music with Apple Music, Sonos, Devialet, QoBuz and Gimme Radio. As an American living in Paris I keep up on America via the NYT podcast The Daily. I read the articles I’ve saved for later, even offline, with Pocket. I have a running coach who lives in Costa Rica and posts workouts in my Google calendar every day, chats with me over Hangouts, and sees the results of my runs on Garmin Connect. Before I run I check the air quality in Plume and weather in YR. I use Google Docs daily to collaborate on texts, spreadsheets and presentations. There are many times I couldn’t communicate in my home city without Google Translate. I’m trying to learn French using Pimsleur and News In Slow French. I chat with my daughters with FaceTime and send them postcards with Ink Cards. I shop from the Amazon, Mr Porter, and 24 Sèvres apps. I order lunch and dinner via Frichti and Deliveroo. I book travel with Skyscanner. That’s a lot of utility in my pocket. And none of these apps are particularly addictive. These are the more nutritious meals in my Digital Diet, the bottom of the Digital Food Pyramid.

The sugar and nicotine are the communication apps, the ones that invite us to scroll endlessly and report their success to advertisers and shareholders based on “time spent”. Just like TV attempts to capture our attention and sell it to advertisers when I was a kid, these apps are aggregating as much attention from as many people as possible, and selling it to the highest bidders. Remember: “If the product is free, you are the product.”

So I’m actively trying to figure out how to manage these. Taking stock:

• Texts and iMessages are generally from close friends and family. This channel is net positive, especially given I moved continents two years ago.
• Two email accounts, work and personal. Work is, well, work, and necessary unless I change professions. I use SaneBox to keep my personal inbox free of spam and marketing emails, which I highly recommend. It’s amazing how your inbox changes when all the marketing is taken out of sight.
• Slack. The primary channel during work hours. I find it very helpful to have a chat channel dedicated to work. This is much better than your work messages coming in to iMessages and WhatsApp IMHO. It also means less email, since much of what is discussed in Slack could have been piled on the work email dumpster fire.
• WhatsApp. For me, WhatsApp is gaining utility as a primary channel for both personal and work contacts. Unlike Facebook Messenger, only people who know my phone number can contact me here, so there’s not a lot of noise.
• Facebook Workplace. I check in a couple times per week. We haven’t deployed it broadly, just across a few communities within LVMH, but generally speaking it’s a great way to share news and links broadly across interest groups within the company. In my experience it’s more efficient than Slack for cross-team communities, where Slack is more useful inter-team.
• WeChat, Line, Kakao Talk. WeChat gets a fair amount of use with my China team. Line and Kakao Talk I keep on because I’ve made contacts on each during trips to Japan and China. But generally speaking, not a lot of noise from these apps.
• Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn — They can stay on my phone with the notifications off — I’m never the slightest bit tempted to open them, to be honest.

Which brings me to Instagram… this is my true addiction, it seems. I really enjoy it and genuinely missed it when I was in China for a week recently. It’s a visual, creative medium and I have my list fairly curated (I try to unfollow at least as many accounts as I follow new). But I open it more than I’d like to. I just moved it off my home screen and turned off all notifications in an attempt to open it less. Twice per day would be fine, but I’m opening it far more often than that…

And what about Vero? I love the idea of a subscription-based service with no algorithmic feed and no advertiser-driven time-spent metric of success. I also like the way the data is structured to be more of a recommendation engine for music, books, etc. But it would need to have all the content I have come to love on Instagram, the skate videos and great photographers. And the stories from friends which are entertaining snippets answering the “hey what’s up today?” question, often creatively, always visually. But the idea of a subscription-driven HBO instead of ad-supported network TV model is attractive to me.

So how to adjust my diet from here? What else can I do?

Here’s what I wish my phone helped me do:

• Limit my use of email, text and WhatsApp to ten minutes every two hours. If I need more focused email time, I’ll open my laptop.
• Limit my use of Instagram and other feed-based apps to five minutes every two hours.
• Perhaps there’s a “meet-up” mode that gives you access to text or WhatsApp in case there is a real time conversation you must have right now.
• Allow unfettered access to the other, more utilitarian apps.
• Show me a weekly report of how I’ve spent my time on my phone.

That limits me to 15 minutes staring at these apps every two hours. Overall, it would be good for us to have “right now I’m on my phone” and “right now I’m not” moments instead of this in between we are living now.

In lieu of these features to help me manage my digital diet, I’m trying to trim the fat:

• I deleted my Facebook account. Which means no Messenger, either. It also means I have lost login access to anything I logged in to with Facebook. I expect this to be a hassle in the coming weeks. We shall see.
• I moved Instagram off my home screen. I endeavor to ask myself what’s “important” any time I go looking for it.
• I turned off notifications for anything unwanted. I keep looking at my home screen for unwelcome notifications. Any time some random app pops its notifying head up I take the three seconds to go in to Settings and turn off notifications for that app.
• I try to leave my phone at my desk when I go to meetings. I leave it in the car, the coat pocket, the backpack, etc whenever possible. New mindset: “It’s a luxury to be without my phone.”
• No texting and driving, of course, but no texting and walking, either.
• I don’t sleep with my phone next to my bed anymore at home (it’s still an alarm clock while traveling, though). I use a real alarm clock and leave the phone in the kitchen.

As I think about it, I think the only other thing I could do to be on my phone less would be to delete Instagram, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet. I feel it coming, though…

Any other tips? Leave a comment and let me know where you’re at with this.

Thanks for reading.

ian