Death to Doom Scrolling
Death to Doom Scrolling
We've all been there. It's late, the room is dark, and the only light comes from the phone in your hand. Your thumb moves with a mind of its own, flicking upwards, feeding your brain a constant, unsatisfying stream of memes, outrage, and bite-sized videos. For me, the main culprits were Reddit, Youtube Short and a collection of mobile games that were expertly designed to consume small pockets of free time.
A few weeks ago, I had enough. In a moment of unholy clarity, I decided to perform a digital cleanse. I held my finger down on the icons and uninstalled them all… Except Reddit, that plug I pulled today. The void they left on my home screen felt… liberating. But a void is meant to be filled, and I knew if I wasn't deliberate, something equally distracting would take their place. Yes, that last sentence was what the AI gave me, felt too cringe to be taken away.
My replacement of choice? Anki, the spaced repetition flashcard software. Instead of consuming brain dead content, I decided I would actively learn something. My first project: mastering world geography. I want to be able to look at a map and know not just the countries, but their capitals and locations.
Of course, the digital cleanse wasn't absolute. I did a quick audit of my remaining apps. Tinder is still installed, but let's be realistic…. I'm still single, and a man has needs (still unfulfilled tho). And the app still soul-sucking tho…
The Grand Plan: Engineering a Better Habit
Simply installing a "good" app isn't enough. The old apps were successful because they were frictionless and always had something new to offer. I needed to configure Anki to serve the same purpose: to be an endless, productive time-filler.
My goal is simple: I should never run out of cards to review.
My free time isn't a scheduled 30-minute block. It's the two minutes waiting for the kettle to boil, the five minutes in line at the store, the whatever minutes on the toilet. To make Anki my new default, it has to be ready whenever I am. This led me to a specific setup plan:
- No Daily Limits: I've removed the daily limits on both new cards and reviews.
- Dynamic New Cards: My ideal workflow is that when my queue of "due" and "learning" cards starts to run low, the app should automatically introduce a few new cards. This ensures there's always something to do, preventing me from hitting a "Congratulations, you're done for today!" screen and reflexively opening a web browser.
If you have used Anki before you probably guessed it. My plan failed.
The Reality: Where Theory Meets Practice
So, how is it going? It's an ongoing experiment, and nothing works perfectly just yet.
Anki isn't really designed for short breaks here and there with dynamic pull of new cards. And fiddling with a settings I haven't found a good solution yet either. I tried putting no limit on my card and then only pulling cards at the end. This resulted in too big of an inflow in a short duration of time to get the information into my brain. I then tried to have it randomly insert new cards mixed the reviews, and that was even more of a disaster. Since I had more new cards than due cards the ratio between new and due was off the charts.
So the current solution is that I have 10 new cards inserted every day and if I'm done with those 10 new cards and all the due cards then I can add 10-20 new cards. If I still have run out of cards then I will do a cards on my new deck about Swedish regents that I plan to do when I have no new cards in the geography deck.
I'm currently going strong with 31 days replacing doom scrolling with Anki. We can also see that I already have some history with Anki from when I was studying Japanese. I plan to continue studying Japanese after the Geography and Regents decks. I nuked the Japanese deck so I will start over from scratch with those since I didn't look forward for almost 2000 cards in due.
For how long do you think I will be able to keep this up? Place your bets below!
(Please don't, hosting betting without a license is illegal in Sweden)