National Power Outage Day Starts Tonight
If you feel like you’re spending too much time on your phone, take a break this weekend and participate in National Disconnect Day . It is organized by the creators of the Saturday Manifesto , so it starts at sunset tonight and lasts 24 hours.
After all, using devices in the evening can ruin your sleep. And you probably know, deep down, that being a slave to social media notifications isn’t much fun. “Like” simply means that the algorithm sent your post to a friend who also viewed it for cheap pleasure of their own. Why not jump off the dull treadmill for the day?
You can tuck your phone into a cute little sleeping bag, as suggested by the organizers of Offline Day, or just take advantage of this time to redefine how you think about the time-consuming devices in your life. My personal favorite semi-shutdown method is to use the Forest app to plant trees all day long. If I really need to do something on my phone, I can kill the tree and access whatever I want. But many times I pick up my phone, look at a growing tree, and then I think: you know what, I really don’t need to do this now.
Here are some tips on how to protect and enjoy your time off devices:
- Establish an out-of-office response . In most workplaces, it’s okay to spend a full day off without checking your email. You can check your email again on Sunday if you like.
- Turn off notifications and badges for anything that doesn’t really matter. I only allow notifications that tell me that a person is deliberately trying to communicate with me in person . Text messaging, instant messenger, Twitter private messages: yes. Likes, updates, news alerts: no.
- Move your phone away from your bed . Even if you use it as an alarm clock, you can put it somewhere in your bedroom out of reach. Anyway, this way you will sleep better.
If you find it calming, feel free to continue it all weekend. We’ll check back on Monday to see how it went. Are you going to write in a notebook? Going on an outdoor adventure? Read the newspaper? Try it and let us know!