CozyNet Blog

Reducing my time spent on screens

I haven’t ever really considered the sheer amount of time I spend on my computer, let alone it possibly being an addiction. I mean, it could, but maybe not? Honestly I haven’t ever had a reason to reduce the time I spend on my computer since it essentially became a way of life, or a life-style.

My whole job revolves around sitting at a computer for about eight hours of the day. Admittedly, I don’t actually spend all of those eight hours staring at the screen, but I do spend a considerable amount of that time on my personal laptop.

I decided to summarize my activity on the computer (personal) down to the following.

• Scroll thru my feed reader, following up on blog posts, news, etc.
• A subset of my feed reader activity includes watching or listening to videos and podcasts.
• Tinkering with configuration settings on my laptop and servers, trying out different software.
• Looking up and researching a topic (i.e. a recipe or technical guide.)
• Communicating / emailing people.
• Making music, a program, or a blog post.

Going over the list:

The amount of time that I spend in either of these items can vary too. For example, making music or a program isn’t something I do very often. Sometimes it can be months before I feel inspired enough to make a song or a program, but when I do, oh man I can spend the whole day or weekend at my computer. Sometimes I’ll be so sucked into whatever it is I’m working on that I’ll even forget to eat and drink.

Like I said, this isn’t a frequent activity and it’s very exhausting, but it’s the only way I can complete my creative work.

Communicating with people on my computer was, until recently, an activity I would pad out the day with. Fortunately today I don’t spend nearly as much time doing this since I removed myself from that habit.

Looking up and researching a topic isn’t something I spend too terribly much time on, but it can be combined with creative activities wherein I might spend a good amount of time then.

I like tinkering with my computers and servers. This one is sporadic and can range anywhere between a few minutes to even a few hours! This usually can include researching technical material on the web too.

I’ll usually put on a podcast or video in my News Reader while doing other activities, such as cooking supper, washing the dishes, or mowing the lawn.

I can spend a lot time scrolling thru my News Reader. I also like reading peoples comments to said posts.

In all, the amount of time that I spend on my personal computer rivals the amount of time I spend on even my work computer, which let’s not forget about! I would guess that I spend at least eleven hours in total when including my work computer. Excluding the work computer, I would guess that I spend seven of those hours on my personal computer. Now are those seven hours of brain-rot inducing trash? For the most part, no – however, sometimes the news can certainly become that way. This is why I intentionally keep away from short-form media of anything that can’t stay on subject.

All that time spent on the computer has me wondering what the heck am I even doing!? I looked around and found a program called “Activity Watch,” which logs window titles and time spent in each program. It even runs a local web server that you connect to thru a web browser to see an overview of your activity in a dashboard. It’s nice, but I don’t have much to share with it just yet.

What to do now:

Now the fun part begins where I try to figure out where and how to reduce my time spent on the computer. I’m not sure how far to take this, but ideally, I wouldn’t need to spend more than an hour or two out of the day on the computer.

Let’s start with scrolling thru the news reader. Instead of browsing thru it willy-nilly whenever I feel like it, I’m going to designate it to two specific points of time during the day. 1: in the afternoon on lunch break and 2: later in the evening. I think it would be really cool to just have news articles and blog posts auto-print onto a printer based off a cron job. I can then read it like a news paper without the potential of getting distracted and sucked back into my computer.

As for video and podcast content, I’ve already cut back from it quite a lot since there are fewer and fewer that interest me anymore. I mostly keep it around for news since the channels I follow condense and summarize the articles.

Tinkering with my computer is honestly not the best use of my time, but sometimes I don’t have anything else to do - It’s sort of replaced playing video games. I do this out of boredom, so I’m going to setup an anti-tinkerers desktop on my computer and see how that pans out... I think some of you know what this means too, my fellow tinker nerds. Yup, I’m going to re-install GNOME (g-yuck!) Actually Cosmic desktop which is just GNOME with extensions because default GNOME is awful. I might even set aside some time to try out one of them immutable Linux distributions since apparently you can’t really tinker with them all too much either. I did try Fedora and it was the buggiest piece of janky junk. The software store couldn’t load half the time, everything was slow to launch as if I were on an old spinning disk drive instead of an M.2 SSD, and the update process is now exactly like crusty old MS Windows where you reboot the system to stare at a slow moving “installing updates” pre-boot splash screen; it’s pretty much a complete Windows experience without the ads and spyware. Pop_OS just works though! I’ll write another blog post later on my workflow.

As for server tinkering, I don’t really mess around with the servers that much. I do so more out of noticing a bug in the system that needs to be fixed, so I’m not too worried about spending so much time there. Now I will admit that I’ve been testing out NextCloud, but it’s for a good cause. I’ll write on it in a later post too!

And as for my computer, I’m thinking about returning back to my old workstation PC and semi-retire my laptop. I’ll still need my laptop when out and about, but it won’t be the main focus of my computing. The reasoning behind this is to force myself to a particular place rather than my primary computer be with me everywhere I go. This is how I used to use my computer before that pandemic, but somehow I moved over to my laptop instead, so I’m going back to the way I used to do things here.

When it comes to looking things up or researching a topic, I’m going to try to designate a time in the day for this to hopefully curtail my habbit of sporadically jumping on to the computer whenever I feel like it. I can already tell this is going to be a difficult one to keep, but it’ll depend on whatever I’m doing. Important projects where I’ll need to look something up will have priority, but simple non-important thing I’ll write down in a notebook to lookup later.

Communicating and emailing people isn’t something I do as often anymore, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to designate some time out of the day for it so that I’m not doing it sporadically either.

Making music, a program, or a blog post is going to take me hours to accomplish no matter what. I’m not the type that can simply work on it in small bits and pieces either. If I can’t get it done all at once or at least the majority of it completed within this capacity, then it’ll never get completed. These creative moments are fleeting and random, so I can’t plan them out in some goal sheet or calendar either. Since this isn’t very common, usually taking just a few days out of the month, I’m not going to do much of anything to change this behavior because it’s how I get stuff done in the creative sense. As for blogging and writing, I can do that with pencil and paper. Don’t believe me? I’ve been writing this whole blog post literally!

Wrap up:

And that’s pretty much it. I might write more on this over time to share my progress and to note any adjustments I make along the way. There’s some preparatory work that’ll need to take place which will require more of my time on the computer initially as I re-adjust my workflow, but it’ll be toward establishing some tools and systems to automate some tasks.

By the way, if anyone knows a good printer that takes toner, connects to a LAN by ethernet, supports duplex jobs, and just works with Linux (specifically in the realms of Debian), PPD’s, and IPP, then please let me know! (USB only printers are NOT WELCOMED!)

Thanks for reading my blog!

Date: 2025-07-22