For the past 31 days, the moment I stepped over the threshold of my apartment door, I was entering a screen-free zone. No TV. No computer. No phone. Gulp.
It was an idea my partner and I came up with late last year as a kind of digital equivalent to "dry January"—a month when lots of drinkers choose to forgo alcohol. We had fallen into some habits that felt unhealthy and uncomfortable, like eating dinner in front of the TV every night. We wanted to force ourselves to take a break.
But we're both journalists and, like many workers these days, our jobs mean we can't abandon screens outright. We both stare at computers and smartphones all day to work and to keep in contact. But at home, on our own time, we could set our own rules. So we did.
It was simple, but severe: no tv, no computers, no phones.
There were a few small exceptions: We could grab one of our phones to pull up a recipe, or launch a playlist to stream over our speakers. If we had job-related work we needed to complete—a deadline on a story, for example—that was a free pass, too. Otherwise, we had to keep it shut down in the evenings and on weekends, all month long.
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