I use the internet 50 hours per week; I only need to use it 11.
What am I doing with my life?
How much do we really need to use the internet?
I use the internet to accomplish my goals. I don’t use it for amusement or entertainment, except to watch a few shows or a movie at night with my wife.
Yesterday, I added how much time I actually need to use the internet to accomplish the one goal I have for each of the five major areas of my life:
- Relationships
- Money
- Impact
- Health
- Joy
I also wrote down a list of the other reasons I use the internet beyond those goals:
- Zoom calls for 1:1 coaching, company meetings, and unplanned discussions or connections
- Managing my calendar
- Shopping
- Finance and accounting work
- Decision journaling (it’s a Google Doc)
Total internet time required: 44 hours per month.
That’s 11 hours per week, or 2 hours per day (assuming I’m online 6 days a week).
The internet: Las Vegas for our minds
Las Vegas is great. Incredible hotels, great food, some of the world’s best entertainment.
It’s also terrible. Much of the city thrives on people making bad decisions. Gambling. Gluttony. Prostitution.
The internet too thrives on us making bad decisions. While we might not use it to engage in illegal activity, we are powerless against its pull to do a thousand things unrelated to our goals.
- Doomscrolling
- Catastrophizing
- Checking the news
- Checking other “news” (pulling updates within our own little comfortable online echo chambers of delusion)
- Comparing
- Pulling communication (Slack, email, iMessage, WhatsApp)
This is how we spend our lives. We sit down, log on, and use the most distracting technology ever invented to try to move our lives forward.
A life with less internet
Last year I went to Nosara, Costa Rica, with family and friends. It was a pre-40th birthday celebration because we knew we’d likely have a baby on the way for my actual 40th this year (hey Emma!).
I talked with our offshore fishing guide, a local 25-year-old with dreadlocks, bloodshot eyes, and a non-stop playlist of great reggae music.
He worked on fishing trips with his older brother since he was 11, as an unpaid “apprentice” (his only payment was tips). He later went to college, but hated it. So he quit and decided to become “a beach boy”, making a living from the ocean.
We can all become beach boys. We can turn off the internet and live mostly without it. As long as somebody else finds clients for you, you don’t need Google to find fish in the body of water you’ve been fishing since you were 11 years old.
But I don’t think that’s what most of us really want. We want the peace of mind that comes with less internet, but not lives completely devoid of its utility.
Less internet is the goal.
Less internet is also the way to achieve our goals better.
Here’s how I can better achieve my goals without logging into the casino for 8 hours a day:
Read physical material (books, printed company filings, and printed podcast and YouTube transcripts)
- Attend in-person conferences
- Meet people locally in-person
- Exercise
- Spend time with family and friends
- Travel and explore
- Think
If I shifted the unnecessary 39 hours per week I spend online to those seven activities for six months, I guarantee you I’d be happier, smarter, more content, more fulfilled, and more successful.
It won’t be easy. The house has the advantage.
—Matt