2026 Yearly Theme: Digital Detox

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they’ve consumed too much of something, and they find the very notion of consuming more sickening.

This could be the college student who drank too much vodka and can’t have it anymore. Or the person who ate far too much sushi, got sick, and is now repulsed by it.

Someone who’s seen a movie or TV show so many times they just pick it apart now. Or someone who realized their favorite author just regurgitates the same ideas over and over again.
Beyond overconsumption, sometimes our priorities/tastes/desires shift. I used to play video games daily. Now that ritual is basically reserved for long breaks¹.

My brother used to drink Coke almost exclusively. While he still enjoys it, he opts to drink water most of the time now because he’s prioritized his health.

I’m a Little Sick of Technology

I consider myself a technologist; I’ve always been an early adopter. I had one of the first “digital” notebooks², where the pen was massive because it had a small camera in it. I had a foldable laptop/tablet in 2005, 5 years before the iPad came out.

I was on Facebook as soon as I could be and Twitter less than a year after it launched — back when you had to text it to tweet from your phone because there was no iPhone, let alone an app.

All of this is to say that I’m not anti-technology…not even close. But I am getting a little sick of the constant connection. I have other priorities. And as I’ve learned from my Year of Being Present, I’m ready to do something about it.

So this year is the Year of Digital Detox. I want to reduce my reliance on connected technology, do more in the real world, and focus on actually doing (not having AI do for me) and connecting (with real relationships, not transactional ones).

This is definitely the sequel to my last year’s theme, so let’s grade that first.

Grading The Year of Being Present

After coming off the utter failure that was (or really, was not) the Year of Control, I was extra motivated to make 2025’s yearly theme work.

How did I do overall? Since moving away from the Craft app 2 years ago, I stopped with the Good — OK — Bad rubric. And 2024 was so bad I didn’t need to actually track my goals know I failed.

But I did want to bring some sort of grading back this year, so I decided to weight my goals and grade each one, then assign myself an overall grade. But first, let’s give a quick assessment.

There were a few things I said I’d do that I didn’t end up doing:

• I abandoned the weekly, monthly, and quarterly prompts, as they felt forced.
• I didn’t call my parents every other day. We did visit them more though.
• I also can’t say I did more friend trips.

As for the overarching goals:

• Reduce screen time: I think I did this pretty well. I got rid of most social media, and all social media apps from my phone. But I did find myself at times mindlessly checking email. I was also inconsistent about Bricking my phone. On balance, I used both my phone and my computer less, though.
• Create stronger boundaries: Overall, I feel like this was where I advanced my yearly theme the most. I didn’t bring my laptop on family vacation, and didn’t work when I said I wouldn’t. We also implemented a timer “trick” that Amanda Goetz recommended to me: tell the kids to set a timer, and no matter what, I’d be done working when it went off.
• Stop doing other stuff on calls: I didn’t do great at this. I did better than the previous year, but I didn’t really form a long-term habit, or implement a process to ensure I’d be more present on calls. That said, I was definitely more mindful when my attention wandered, and snapped back to attention because of it.
• Stop deferring to the future: This one is hard to quantify because the guidance was vague. The biggest win here is getting my Type 2 Diabetes back under control. I will say I did more “justice” type stuff — not letting bigger institutions take advantage, calling my representatives more, and pushing big societal issues at school.
• Always have cash: This one was mostly a failure. One problem I never ended up solving was that I got a new card and forgot my ATM pin³, So I was hindered every time I went to the ATM. It’s a problem I will solve after I finish writing this.
• Manage assumptions: The consummate struggle for me, I feel like at times I was more combative, assuming the worst in people. In general, I think these assumptions help me discern bad behavior and threats. However, I don’t just apply them to fear or situations directly affecting me; they’ve made me cynical. Over the course of the year I think I got better at letting stuff go and not always assuming people were doing things out of selfishness.

Grade: B+

Overall, I’d give myself a B+. Over the course of the year, I formed long-term habits that made a positive impact on my life. I also made several changes for the betterment of my physical and mental health.

But I wasn’t perfect, and the grade reflects that there are places for me to improve. Here’s how it breaks down:

My best grade since the 2022 Year of Retreat, and a huge bounce-back from the failure of The Year of Control.

Part of what made it so successful is learned a few crucial lessons that lead to my 2026 yearly theme.

What I Learned from The Year of Being Present

The first, biggest lesson is that I don’t need social media…for anything. I don’t need it to grow my business, I don’t need it for the news. I don’t need it to stay connected to the people who matter most to me.

After leaving Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads, I’m left with just LinkedIn and Bluesky. The only thing I really miss is baseball Twitter, and Bluesky is doing an OK job of filling that void.

The next is that you can and should log off of work for an extended period of time. Very few things in my work life constitute an emergency. By communicating clearly with my clients, people I work with, and other folks in my professional life, I could reasonably shut down without worry.

In fact, there were 4 weeks in 2025 where I was pretty much completely offline:

1. Disney World, which was a great success.
2. The week of Thanksgiving, where we visited my parents upstate.
3. The last 2 weeks of the year (Christmas/New Years), where I created a single sponsor video at terms I deemed very much worth it.

It’s no exaggeration to say that this did wonders for my mental health. And it definitely helped me be more present with my kids.

One great rule I implemented was no phone at the gym. I download playlists onto my Apple Watch and connect my AirPods directly to that, then leave my phone in my car or a locker (I wish Planet Fitness still offered keychain barcodes).

That coupled with my “Fitness” focus mode means I only get the most crucial notifications.
This brings me to my final lesson: I don’t need my phone as much as I thought I did. I’ve spent a lot of time this year optimizing my phone for its most crucial functions: communication, idea capture, and memory-assisting. While I still use it for reading articles and watching YouTube, I consume much, much less content on it, and I’m better off for it.

I only get breaking news notifications 3 times per day. Very few apps at all can notify me. This is the way.

And these lessons are why I decided to parlay my Year of Being Present into my 2026 yearly theme: The Year of Digital Detox.

The Year of Digital Detox

If you couldn’t tell, far and away my favorite result of The Year of Being Present is that I finally cut off most social media. I have an article coming out on my new publication, Paper and Smoke where I spent 2,000+ words talking about it.

But over the summer I also mused that I was losing my critical thinking skills through the overuse of LLMs. I’ve been using them basically since ChatGPT launched in December 2022, but I fell into the trap of letting it do too much for me.

I even let it plan my yearly theme last year. While I thought it did a good job of surfacing some aspects I didn’t think of, I don’t feel I was as committed to those aspects.

Thankfully I realized it, and my already healthy skepticism of AI took over.

What kicked all of this off for me was The Anxious Generation, which I read in April. It had such a profound effect on me that it set everything else in motion.

As a result, I want to do as much as a digital detox as possible in 2026. Here’s the gist:

Continue the trend of less social media. Do more with physical world.

A pretty simple charge, but with big ramifications. The goals are more concrete and instructive. There are two big themes.

Use Devices Less

I have a lot of devices. One of them, my CGM, is life changing. But I’ve come to rely on them in a worrying way. Much like when I was using ChatGPT for everything, I worry that I’m losing real, tangible skills.

In my AI Manifesto, I wrote that we risk becoming tourists in our own lives. That Wall-E is becoming a cautionary tale. This part of my digital detox is crucial for preventing that. Here’s how I’ll do it:

Leave my phone in car more: I don’t want to be tethered to my phone, or even the outside world, as much. I already leave it in the car for church and the gym. I basically turned it into a Camera and Walkie-Talkie in Disney World. I want to leave it behind more often.

I have my Apple Watch Ultra 3 for communication. I can get texts, take phone calls, and listen to music on it. The battery life is great.

I purchased the DJI Osmo Action 6, which is a great, portable video camera that also takes photos. When I feel like I want to take photos, I will have that on me.

The only hiccup is that my CGM relies on my phone; but I also don’t need a constant read out of my blood sugar the same way Type 1 Diabetics do. And leaving my phone in the car more doesn’t mean never have it on me. It means I don’t have it on me when it will be too much of a distraction.

Use more E Ink devices: On top of that, I want to use more E Ink devices. I love the idea of E Ink. A digital way to have an analog experience. My phone, and my iPad, and my laptop, are all distraction devices. I can access anything, which makes it hard to do focused work.

There’s something great about having a device that is focused on one task; that doesn’t refresh as often. That can’t get push notifications⁴.

Rely on GPS less: Something I feel a little ashamed of is the fact that rely on GPS far too much. Like, for simply driving around town.

I tell myself that it gives me real time traffic data, which is why I use it. But the truth is I don’t know how to get around the place I live as well as a 9-year resident should.

When I was a kid we moved, and my dad would take us out and just drive around to get to know the area. No maps, no devices; just the road and a waypoint to eventually get back home. Sometimes we’d get lost, and that’s OK. We were never truly lost, after all.

Part of the reason I use the GPS so much is “efficiency.” I don’t want to get lost. I want to get where I need to get as quickly as possible. No minutes wasted.

But it’s OK to waste some minutes. I don’t want to live a life of no margin.

Turn off Symptoms Radar: I love my Oura ring. It’s had a net positive effect on me. It has helped me sleep better, and much like my CGM, it gives me insights into how food affects me.

But I also noticed that if it said I was getting sick, I was more likely to believe I was sick…even if I felt fine. The Symptoms Radar takes a number of signals from biometric sensors in the ring, and then guesses if something is “straining” your body — which is most associated (in my opinion, at least) with getting sick. Sometimes this can be a canary in the coal mine; but more often, I would let it dictate how I felt.

So I’ve turned it off. I like having the Readiness Score and understanding how I slept…but I think doing a check-in with myself to see how I feel is better than having a computer on my finger tell me.

Reducing my use and reliance on technology is only one aspect of the yearly theme though; the other has to do with actually living in the analog world.

Learn About the Real World

I often joke that without computers, I’d have no marketable skills. This is (hopefully) obviously not true, but it feels like that sometimes. The first time I realized I didn’t know a whole lot outside of my area of expertise was around 2011. All of my friends knew other things.

Worse, we all went to The University of Scranton, a liberal arts school that emphasized this sort of learning so much that we were forced to take at least one philosophy class per year. I had clearly squandered that side of my education.

Since then, I made a concerted effort to learn more outside of Computer Science. Today, 15 years later, I think I’m a much more rounded individual. But I still don’t know how a lot of stuff works, or how it came to be.

Something else I’ve been doing more in the last two years is reading fewer business books. Since my 2023 moratorium on business books, I’ve been making an effort to read a less homogeneous group of books. Of the 30 I logged reading, 8 were business books, and 5 were deeply disappointing. One is the worst I’ve read in recent history.

This will be a core tenet of my Year of Digital Detox.

Read different books: More specifically, I want to read older books. More philosophy and biographical books. Last year I listened to a podcast where Ryan Holiday said this:

If I think back, I can’t remember a single news article I read 10 years ago, but my life was profoundly changed by books I read 10 years ago. And so I think people are just consuming way too much contemporary information and not enough information that’s designed, first and foremost, to be worth paying for now, but to have continued to hold its value over a long period of time.

It was in response to a question about how to deal with all the bad news of the day. And it really resonated with me.

He went onto say that there are so many books that are hundreds or thousands of years old, that can have a profound effect on us. They were written for long-term impact, not short-term clicks.

I want to read more of those books.

Read books about doing things in the real world: On top of that, I want to learn more about how my favorite things are actually made. How is coffee roasted? What’s the process for blending tobacco into a cigar? How do you mix the perfect cocktail? What makes Jazz music different from Rock music?

Maybe this is an overcorrection from a year where AI took a massive leap in usage. It has become ubiquitous in our society. And I fear it has many negative ramifications for understanding and appreciating the craft of actually doing the work.

With that in mind, I’ve also decided to start a new publication, which I’ve alluded to, called Paper and Smoke. Its charge…in fact, its inception…has come out of my yearly theme: write about doing real-world craft.

The name comes from my love of analog hobbies: writing with pen and paper, smoking cigars, drinking coffee. Real, tangible things, that require time and patience to craft.

No AI Generated Roadmap this Year

I didn’t use AI to generate a roadmap for my yearly theme this year. In the long-run, I didn’t use last year’s. I didn’t like it as much as I initially thought. And it didn’t feel right to rely on AI for my Year of Digital Detox.

Instead, Paper and Smoke will be my accountability. I have a loose idea of how I’ll implement my weekly writing schedule:

• Week 1: Accountability update on digital detox
• Week 2: History Lesson
• Week 3: How something is made
• Week 4: helpful non-tech, analog, or E Ink tool

I don’t think I need to follow this format exactly. Consistency will be better than rigidity here. But it’s a starting point, and I’m excited to see how it evolves.

Like last year, I’m full of optimism, and highly motivated. I’m excited to see where my Year of Digital Detox takes me, and even more excited to share the journey with you.

1. I played a classic, Call of Duty II, over Christmas break. ?
2. It was called the Logitech IO. ?
3. On principle, I don’t feel I should have to go to the bank to reset it. ?
4. One thing I struggle with here is I love the idea of an E Ink writing device, but I tend to reference a lot of other things. I think I’m going to do more writing on my iPad, which for me is easier to focus with than my laptop. ?