Linux For Poets

I am trying to improve my habits around focus, distraction, and computer use. There is a lot of chaos in my daily life, with dogs, cats and small children, and I want to feel more present and able to keep my own focus and a calm mind.

I don't use my phone that much. I average 30-minutes to an hour per day on my phone, and I consider most of that use to be valid. I use texting, signal, phone and maps, primarily. I listen to podcasts, but usually use an old iPhone 5C as a dedicated podcast machine, so it doesn't come with the same potential for distraction that my phone does, and it's easier to fit in a pocket because it's tiny.

I use the Fossify Launcher or Ion Launcher on my phone (from F-Droid), which has a great feature that lets you hide icons from the app list. I have hidden a lot of icons for apps that I don't want to use habitually, but every once in a while has a valid use, like email and browsers. I don't see them, and if I need to use them, I have to go through an extra step to make them available. It helps.

My worst habits are on the computer. It's easy for me to get to clicking around on Reddit and news web sites, and to check web sites as a reflex when I feel bored.

I think the attraction of dumb phones, and deleting social media altogether, is that it isn't sitting there in the background, waiting for you all the time. Having a sense of needing to constantly resist, with effort, a bad habit feels hard. I don't want to "resist," web browsers and social media, I just want to not have it as an option that feels attractive at all. I felt that decades ago when I went vegetarian. I disliked the conflict of wanting to eat less meat, but feeling like I had to make the decision all the time. When I just said "I'm vegetarian," it was no longer a question for me and for people around me. Much simpler.

I deleted Instagram last year, and I haven't missed it. I appreciate that it isn't there in the background, giving me something to wonder about.

There is not a built in screen time app on Linux so I am using Activity Tracker to track my time. I have been gradually categorizing my activities to they can make a nice little color coded chart of my activity with my least favorite color (pink) representing the worst activity (social media) and the best colors (green and orange) representing the most noble activities (writing and study).

I listened to a Cal Newport interview with TK Coleman the other day, and they inspired me to take a more drastic approach to reducing distraction time. TK was talking about taking about 8 months off social media, as an experiment, and how positive it felt. So that's what I want to do too. I plan to run this experiment to the end of the year 2026.

Here are the rules of my digital focus experiment:

• No Reddit use, at all. I set my web browsers with Leechblock to block reddit, and added a setting to Duck Duck Go, so it won't list reddit as a search result. (You can do this by clicking the three dots next to any search result in duck duck go.)
• 20 minutes of Facebook per week. This is so that I can check in with a local moms group to see if there are any events I want to take part in.

I will report back every so often with updates.