Selina and I have been talking for a while about the role of technology in our lives and in our family habits. Whereas the world as a whole (this seems to be one thing the majority of cultures and nations can agree on!) is embracing technology in more and more settings, we have felt a growing discomfort with this. We have tried to be intentional with our family’s use of technology and in particular have tried to put significant limitations on the amount of time our kids have in front of a screen, especially at such young ages. Before leaving the States, we even bought a “phone jail”, much to the chagrin of our extended family, to be used at family gatherings. Despite these efforts, we have felt like screens, in particular our smartphones, have still grown to occupy a position in our lives that we don’t think is warranted or desired. So in January we decided to start a digital fast.
I first heard of this particular version of a digital fast while walking home from the English center and listening to a podcast. Perhaps if Alanis Morissette ever does a sequel to her song “Ironic” she can use this as an example 😀 The basic tenants of the fast come from a book written by Darren Whitehead titled, The Digital Fast. Here are the steps we’ve taken to limit the amount of time we spend in front of screens:
- The first step is to take your smartphone and turn it into a “dumbphone”. This means that we went through all of ours apps to determine if each app is something useful that helps us be more productive or something that distracts us from being productive. Anything determined to be a distraction was deleted. Examples for us included Youtube, all social media apps, ESPN, LinkedIn, Facebook messenger (for me), and streaming services apps.
- The next step was to look through our remaining apps and identify any that while useful, help us to do something that we could do on our laptop instead. We admit that we modified this slightly from what Dr. Whitehood suggested which includes deleting your web browser. I also still have some banking and credit card apps on my phone that I wanted to be able to access while on the go. But the big one (at least for me) was deleting email off of my phone.
- After dumbing down our phones, we also made some further restrictions on our smart phones such as:
- As much as possible, place our phones on a shelf in our living room rather than being kept on or near us, thus creating a temptation and a desire to check them.
- For me I moved my phone charger away from my bedside table and instead placed it across the room on our dresser. The goal is to “put my phone to bed” prior to putting myself to bed and encourage more reading (of a physical book!) before going to sleep.
- Limiting the times we might listen to a podcast or audiobook in order to create more quiet time and natural space to reflect or pray.
- We also committed to no TV or movies, including family movie night. The kids were surprisingly on board with this! Instead on Friday nights we are trying to do a special family activity together like playing a game, reading books or being outside together.
- While using our laptop, no “entertainment” sites are allowed. Again this includes things like Youtube, Yahoo News (this is mostly junk news so I’ve turned to Aljazeera for staying up-to-date during this fast) and of course social media.
We put a few other limitations in place as well but this is the bulk of them. We’ve committed to this fast for 40 days, ending 3/14/25. Some of these things we know we are limiting just for the 40 days (e.g. family movie night) while others, especially pertaining to our phones, we hope will lead to permanent changes in our habits and technology usage.
We are writing this post both for accountability (please ask us how it is going!) and in case any of you are interested in doing something similar. Selina plans to write another post at the end of the fast to share some of the things we learned from it.
To finish, I want to share a few resources we’ve used that have helped us think more about technology in our lives:
- Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Earley
- The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction by Justin Whitmel Earley
- The Techwise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place by Andy Crouch
- The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media – This is a TEDx talk by Dino Ambrosi that I used as the basis for a conversation class at the English Center. He shares some very interesting and sobering statistics!
– Adam