Hi All,
I recently wrote up a post on Reddit about my experience with the Cal Newport’s 30-Day Digital Declutter challenge.
Here is the link
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/envf8d/my_experience_30_day_digital_declutter/
If you think I should copy and paste the Reddit post directly into a MPU forum thread then let me know.
Wow, where do I even start. This is incredibly detailed and useful. I found this particularly rang true for me:
The Void - I underestimated how much time I had to fill once the mindless digital usage was culled.
I went after Digital Minimalism hard after the book came out. Like you, I was compelled by Deep Work and was starting a new job, so it made sense to cut it out as much of the digital B.S. as possible. I was NOT prepared for the amount of extra time I had to fill with other activities. Even when putting a full day’s work in the lab, reading for an hour in the evenings, I still had so much bloody time on my hands that I almost had a sense of remorse over the amount of my conscious time I was giving away to meaningless scrolling and game-playing.
I’m far from perfect about my digital use at this point, but I really have to thank Cal and his books for pulling me back from the brink of automated consumerism.
Thank you.
I spent 6-8 hrs trying to refine that post to make it as detailed as possible, however, not many people seemed to enjoyed it judging by the amount of likes/comments. I think the size of the post was off putting 
The void is the biggest issue I found with the challenge, especially on the weekends. 16 hrs each day on Sat and Sun to fill with only an hour spent each day on optional digital technologies was overwhelming, there is only so much time I could spend being productive.
I relaxed on the digital minimalism these past 3 days and BIG mistake. I’ve basically binged on YouTube and video games the ‘entire’ time.
Best thing about the binge was realizing 1) this ‘binge’ used to be the norm and 2) it reconfirms the reason why was digital minimalism was important.
As Cal says in his book, if you’re going to keep low quality leisure activities then they need to be scheduled in. I’d try that if I was you.
It’s definitely easy to “fall off the wagon”, ha ha, I still do it occasionally as well. Whenever I find big globe of time suddenly missing from my day, I can simply look at my device history and see where it’s going now.