My Quick and Dirty Guide to Digital Sanity

Phone

  • Remove all vibrations

Email

  • Unless you’re traveling and/or away from your computer for a long period of time, email only gets checked and responded to on a computer, not the phone. Remove email from your phone.
  • If you need to respond to email quickly for a good reason, create an email address that only gets shared with certain people. For example, I have an email address that I give to people wanting to book me to play music gigs. It’s advantageous for me to get back to them fast, so that email pings my phone.

Facebook

  • Unfollow all friends, groups, pages. Your news feed should be completely blank. This may take 1-3 hours but completely worth it. All means ALL.
  • Bookmark any friend’s feeds you want to see, then visit them through a URL, not the news feed.
  • Change notification settings to absolute minimum
    • Visit https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=notifications
      • No push, email or SMS notifications for anything
      • Go through each item and turn everything off where you can
      • At bottom (“How You Get Notifications”) turn off everything in Browser and make sure “Email” is set to “only about your account”