I have begun to refine my methodology for time-tracking in this project. I’ve whitelisted a number of sites so they don’t record usage. Chalmers intranet websites, funding portals, etc – all those things that are strictly work related. After all with this project I’m not looking to reduce how much I work, but rather the unproductive and idle clicking around that has characterized a lot of my online time. If a student sends me a file in Google Docs as opposed to Microsoft Word, it seems weird to track commenting on one as ‘internet time’ and not the other. This means that my frame of comparison from last month is not actually like for like, but it should be next month. I did though some work to try and convert January’s figures into something useful, but bear in mind it’s just approximate.

Last month it was a touch over two hours a day which was split between ‘stuff for work’ and ‘stuff during work’. Remove the ‘stuff for work’ sites, and it’s about 84 minutes a day on non-work related activities. So that’ll be the calculation I use for a month by month comparison. January gets an asterisk on it, but aside from that it feels like a fair basis of comparison. Removing the work sites from the ‘top fourteen’ list that Time Tracker gave me in 2021 brings it down to about 6.2 hours a day. Let’s be generous with myself and assume that there’s a similar divide between work and leisure in the missing sites. Let’s say it turns out to be an optimistic five hours a day on non-work stuff during 2021. Man, even that feels like an awful lot.

In February I am down to less than twenty-five minutes a day of ‘non work activities’, but even that is an over-estimate. If I leave a website open without being at the computer it still counts as ‘usage’ for my time-tracker. But here’s where it is now:

Facebook remains, by far, the biggest time sink but you’ll see my total usage has plummeted. The BBC is next, and that represents an hour I wouldn’t mind getting back. The situation in Ukraine though is one I want to track – the arguments used by Putin for Ukraine could easily be co-opted into equivalent warmongering nonsense for Finland, and Finland is right next to Sweden. It’s not like I’m worried or anything – I suspect and hope Putin will find he’s bitten off more than he can chew with Ukraine. But there is for once a real reason for me to be checking the news. It’s distantly relevant. The Gothenburg Post (gp.se) falls into a similar kind of bracket – it’s useful to get the broad headlines from my city, but it’s not actually all that useful.

My Youtube time has mostly been clicking through subscriptions to see which videos I want to download offline, but there haven’t been many of those. It turns out my excessive Youtube usage from last year (almost two hours a day) was like many things – habit. There are plenty of videos I would definitely have idly clicked upon if I wasn’t rationing my time, but hardly any that seem like I’d value the time spent. Willys is where we order groceries from so that might even benefit from being removed from the stats. When I do the end of project audit I’ll be sure to make sure everything is counted similarly across all the months.

Everything else represents fractional time investments that aren’t worth worrying about. Less than half a minute a day on Amazon.co.uk (which is in itself a major over-estimate). The time spent ‘on’ Foodora is mostly watching the timer for the infrequent occasions we use it. Less than nine minutes in a month checking Corona statistics is great. I’m happy with almost all of this. If I was using the internet optimally I think at best I’d go from 24.2 minutes a day down to less than twenty. That’s a feasible goal for March.

It’s been kind of weird though – I thought Project Unplug would be rejuvenating and I’d say in January it was. I thought it would wash the digital toxins from my head like Depth Year 2019 did for my consumerism. But I think I’ve done this all wrong. I think I got all the good stuff of Project Unplug as part of my preparation for the experiment. I’m not struggling with it – not a bit really. I’m doing absolutely fine… but it doesn’t feel much better than before I started.

And I think that’s because I’ve been pulling away from the Internet during most of 2021.

This outline will be familiar to most of you by now, but I began by hard-blocking certain sites at the hosts level on my computer. I need to make a special effort to check Twitter now – I need to go get a tablet and laboriously log in via the website past all the ‘PLEASE INSTALL OUR APP’ panhandling. And that’s not a reflexive reaction. I simply don’t see Twitter unless I chose to, and it’s not often something that appeals.

I have said this to many people, but abandoning Twitter is the best thing you will ever do for your mental health. Even if you think you enjoy it, I think you’ll be surprised how much better you’d feel about your life without it. I suspect it’s probably the same thing for TikTok and Instagram but I never use those. But all of these platforms share the feature of awarding virality to those best able to make you feel bad about yourself. Whether it’s because their tweets are tweetier or their carefully angled selfies are more glamorous – these are engines for comparison and as Roosevelt once said ‘comparison is the thief of joy’.

And the other benefit is you won’t find yourself randomly cancelled for quoting Teddy Roosevelt.

I did the same thing for Reddit. Then I blocked all Youtube comments. Used a plugin to strip Facebook back to the core. Did more blocking of websites. Hid search results I didn’t want to see. I did a lot to prep myself for Project Unplug and in the process I think I got to the point where I was already receiving 90% of the benefits from the project before it started.

That remaining 10% isn’t nothing – it’ll translate into hours of time I’d usually spend idly clicking around Youtube videos. But that doesn’t feel quite as invigorating as I expected. Sure, I’m spending my time more mindfully on recreation but… I don’t know. I don’t know that I’m getting much more back than I’m losing in auditing it. I mentioned above that I feel like I could save myself another five minutes per day by optimising this further, but realistically are those five minutes genuinely a cost? If they got refunded to me at the end of March it would be ‘Here’s 150 minutes you can do something with’, and yeah – I can do something with two and a half hours. I can’t do anything meaningful in 150 minutes spread over thirty instalments.

I’m not saying the experiment has failed or I’m planning to stop it just yet. As I say, I don’t feel I’ve lost anything. I‘m just not gaining what I hoped to gain. The project, at least for now, feels ‘value neutral’.

It’s still early days though. I went through a lot of ups and downs with my first depth year so I’m prepared to give this time to properly bed in. But also I won’t feel bad to abandon it early. Maybe even very early. Not because I can’t do it, because I can… but rather because I think I may have already found the maximum ‘area under the curve’ and it was before any of this began. Perhaps a gradual stripping away of identified time-sinks is a more appropriate way to engage productively with the online world.

Depth Year 2022

I guess one place that I can see Project Unplug is really having an impact is in Depth Year 2022. I am tempted to buy almost nothing because I never see anyone hawking anything my way. On the one hand that makes for some dull updates. On the other… it sort of feels like my relationship to consumerism is no longer outwith my control. Depth Year 2019 broke it, and now I can switch it on and off as I like.

However…

Maybe it’s also due to the fact that there’s not really much out there that’s compelling. We’re sort of experiencing a Covid Drought as a consequence of delayed development cycles, suspended movies shootings, developer furloughs and such. There’s just not a lot coming out and what is coming out hardly sets the heather ablaze. Certainly within board-gaming what we’re seeing is an expansion of exploitation – titles that are known successes are now pumping out expansions and remixes and reimaginations at a staggering rate. On one hand – great for their fans. On the other – I was into this hobby for the innovation it was showing. That doesn’t really feel like it’s part of the hobby any more.

The hobby is now identifiable by an almost nauseating focus on excess. I wandered into our local game shop because the café had reopened for the first time since Corona hit. And I saw the new Hero Quest reissue on the shelves. 1400kr, which is around £120. I mean, well done on maximising the economic return on weaponised nostalgia I guess. Still – that is a ludicrous amount of money to charge (and pay) for a game. I find myself thinking about owning it and feeling a wave of disgust at myself for being part of the larger problem. Plus, Hero Quest was never actually a good game.

Don’t worry, I’m not setting fire to my cardboard collection just yet. But I do feel that we’ve gone from a release calendar with a couple of corkers per month. It’s now down to a couple of corkers per year supplemented by a wave of overproduced Kickstarters that do little more than move the hobby out of financial feasibility for the average family. And even then, ‘corker’ is likely to be a game that we already know released in a slightly different format. But what’s mostly happening is that the average quality of games has gone up over the past five or so years… but the standard deviation has basically converged to zero while the price has sky-rocketed. So while games are generally getting better the ‘price per minute of fun’ has cratered.

The hobby was a lot more fun when you had to dig through a pile of stinkers before you found an unexpected diamond, and when that metaphorical diamond didn’t cost the same as an actual diamond.

And yeah, I know inflation is running rampant and production costs are up everywhere… but the solution to that is not hiked prices on over-produced miniatures. It’s proportionate production.

It’s kind of like that old episode of the Twilight Zone where the guy dies and finds himself in a world where his every whim is met. He grows bored, depressed, and asks his host ‘What kind of heaven is this?’, only to get the response ‘Why would you ever have believed that you ended up in heaven?’.

We’re all in the Medium Place, and there’s no end to the cavalcade of games that are ‘basically okay except for the price-tag’.

I guess what I’m saying is… there isn’t anything new really that I wanted this month that I can add to the list. There’s an Expanse video game coming from Deck Nine and I am Totally Into It, but I don’t even know if that’s coming out this year. However, there are a couple of older things that currently appeal.

One is that I completed the 2015 video game Torment: Tides of Numenara and it got me interested in the Numenara setting. That almost certainly won’t last, but for now ‘some Numenera books’ are on the list. And the movie Trumbo got me interested in watching the movie Spartacus, and reading Bruce Cook’s biography of Dalton Trumbo. I suspect neither of those will last long on the list. That seems likely because Manifold Gardens has come off already because honestly I haven’t thought about it since I added it. Everything else remains, at least for now. So here’s the list:

• Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentleman Bastard book 2)
• The Republic of Thieves (Gentleman Bastard book 3)
• Don’t Look Up (movie)
• Numenara (RPG books)
• Spartacus (movie)
• Dalton Trumbo (book)

Perhaps this isn’t reflective of the world but more about the fact I have cut myself off from most of the sources of consumer guidance I’d otherwise have seen. I did find that during Depth Year 2019 that still being on Twitter gave me a constant wave of things that people said were worth attention. Now people need to go out of their way to tell me stuff, and it actually makes it more valuable. The movie Don’t Look Up for example remains in the list not because I particularly care about it but because it was recommended to me by someone whose opinions I value. For everything else it’s something where I’ve been intrigued by the interconnection of these entries and other media I have enjoyed.

In an ideal world, that’s how it would work all the time. Surely, yeah?

It’s weird to complain about not having enough things on which I’d spend money if I wasn’t explicitly avoiding spending money on new things. So probably I should stop.

As in, stop complaining. Or maybe just stop buying things.