The Social Hour 👁️‍🗨️

During my Digital Declutter (which is still on as I'm writing this), I've reintroduced the Social Hour to my life. The idea: Instead of picking up my phone dozens of times every single day to check my messages, I check them twice a day, half an hour at a time. This is a more deliberate approach to my digital social life.

I've been living with my phone's notifications turned off for well over two years now. When I first did this, I wondered: if I allow none of the apps on my phone to send me notifications, how will I know when my friends and family try to get in touch? Don't I need to nurse my social contacts digitally every once in a while? That's when the idea of the Social Hour was born. I've considered for a while that I could turn off all of the notifications except for messaging apps, but I realised that this approach eliminates the idea of a notificationsless life entirely. If I made this exception, I'd continue to associate my phone with a dopamine kick. At any moment of my day, when I felt frustrated, I'd reach for my phone and hope for a notification: someone might have written a message! Thanks to the Social Hour, that's taken away.

I check my messages every morning, usually around 8 or 8:30am. That's when I open up Signal and WhatsApp, and respond to my messages. I've also found that with this approach to messaging, I tend to write to friends I haven't written to in a while: after all, it's a dedicated time for friends and family. I might think of a person during my day and schedule to write to them later. After my morning Social Hour, I close my messaging apps and ignore them for the rest of the day, until the evening Social Hour, which in my case I schedule around 6 or 7pm. Whenever I don't feel social, I skip the evening session altogether.

The Social Hour has restrictions however. When my girlfriend and I met a friend of ours the other day, we said to meet in the afternoon. We arrived early and only then our friend wrote that she'll be half an hour late. I believe that whenever I meet people in person, I allow myself to check my messaging apps too, just in case I miss any updates.

Final words: I've realised my time is too precious to be checking my messages twenty to forty times a day. And I definitely want to spend less time on my phone going forward.