Detox from tech for a better parenthood

After going through my screen time stats I found something that genuinely surprised me. Turns out I'm losing a couple of months every year to social media. Those short reels are fun in the moment, sure — but after a few hours of scrolling you just feel... hollow.

I split my screen time into two buckets:

• →CS stuff
• →Entertainment

CS stuff

This one doesn't bother me much. I'm a Software Engineer — IDEs, coding blogs, dev communities, that's just the job. LinkedIn too, 20–30 minutes a day. But honestly? It doesn't make me a better engineer. The people I follow there all have newsletters, so I'm not even sure why I keep opening the app.

The answer is obvious: it's just doomscrolling with a professional coat on. I'm keeping my profile but the app is gone from my phone. Safari only, or from the Mac.

Entertainment

This is where it hurts. Social networks, YouTube Reels, TikTok — the whole slot machine parade. I was spending roughly an hour a day on this stuff. An hour I could have been with my family. That needed to change.

What I actually want

The goal is simple: I want to be in charge of the technology, not the other way around. I want to play sports again. Read actual books. Be present with my family without half my brain on the phone. Right now my phone is the first thing I reach for in the morning — even before my glasses, most days. So here's the plan.

The plan

Turning my phone into a dumbphone

If there's one part of this experiment I absolutely cannot fail at, it's this one. My relationship with my phone needed a full teardown. Here's exactly what I did:

1. The social media purge Deleted every single social media app. If I want Instagram or Twitter, I have to open Safari and log in manually. That extra friction is surprisingly effective at killing the automatic, mindless tap-tap-scroll loop before it even starts.

2. Stripping the home screen Cleared everything out. What's left:

• →Utility: Camera, Photos, Safari
• →Communication: Phone, Messages, WhatsApp
• →Mindset: Spotify (music and podcasts)

That's it. Clean canvas.

3. Killing the noise Turned off all non-essential notifications. If the phone isn't buzzing and flashing constantly, I'm far less likely to pick it up for no reason.

4. Hard limits Set a Screen Time lock on social networks — 10 minutes total per day, then I'm out.

What had to change from the original plan

Two things broke down pretty quickly:

1. →I needed to add YouTube to the "allowed in moderation" list. I use it the same way I use Spotify — background music, long-form stuff — so blanket-blocking it wasn't the right call. The fix was removing Reels/Shorts specifically rather than the whole platform.
2. →The Screen Time limit was easy to override the moment I felt like bending the rules. Still working on this one.

Next steps

Buy an alarm clock. This is the big one. If the phone isn't my alarm, it doesn't need to be in the bedroom. I can leave it somewhere in the house overnight, and it becomes what it should be — a device for calls and WhatsApp, nothing more.

Books near the bed and bathroom. Five or six pages in the bathroom, twenty before sleep. That adds up fast and it's way better for my brain than whatever the algorithm has queued up.

The Apple Watch question. My wife got me one for Christmas 2024. Felt incredible at first, now it just feels like more noise on my wrist — an endless loop of notifications I never asked for. With some tweaks I can quiet it down, but I keep wondering: would a 25€ Casio do the same job with zero downsides? I've been eyeing a few better options too, but that's a question for another post.