2026-03-10 00:10:00
Four full weeks of paying more attention to phone screen time are behind us, and it’s time for some closing thoughts on this experiment. But first, a quick recap of how the final week went.
The average was slightly higher than the previous 3 weeks, and that was mainly due to what happened on Tuesday and Friday, which, as you can see from the weekly recap, saw higher-than-usual phone usage.
On Tuesday, I passed 1 hour of screen time for the first time since the start of this experiment, and that was because of a…phone call? I’m not entirely sure why screen time registers a phone call as screen time, but that's why I passed the 1-hour mark on Tuesday. I had a 30-minute phone call for something work-related, and that apparently is picked up as screen time. Go figure. Aside from that, as you can see, usage was business as usual: about half an hour of messaging and a minute here and there for a few extra things.
Friday, I passed the 1-hour mark again, and this time it was actual usage, and it was just Telegram. As you can see from the time distribution, I spent almost 40 minutes chatting with a few people late in the day and aside from Telegram, I barely picked up my phone. The rest of the week was very uneventful.
Looking back at these past 4 weeks, I feel like, for me, the way my life is structured at this moment, 4 hours of weekly phone usage is the sweet spot, and I intend to keep it that way. I’m happy I managed not to consume content on my phone. Podcasts, music and RSS are gone from the site, and I feel like my relationship with this stupid object is in a much better place.
I have deeper thoughts I want to share, but those will get their own dedicated post, likely tomorrow.
How about the others, though? I started this thing to help Kevin get off his phone, and I succeeded so well that he jumped off iOS entirely and moved to Android. Not exactly the outcome we wanted, but hey, at least it's a change. He'll be back using his phone 5 hours a day now that nobody is paying attention. Kev instead is too busy vibe-coding blog platforms to pay attention to his phone, and he abandoned us after one week. As for John, Thomas, and Alex, they all did great, I'd say, and I love that Thomas tracked time spent in front of his computer and not just the phone.
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2026-03-06 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Eric Schwarz, whose blog can be found at schwarztech.net.
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Hi! I'm Eric Schwarz and my online "home" has been SchwarzTech. I grew up in Indiana in the United States and had a knack for anything involving computers from a young age. Although my first computer was a very-old Radio Shack TRS-80, I quickly shifted to an Apple IIgs and later playing with various used Macs. I really appreciated the intentional, but flawed aspects of Apple's products in the late-1980s and early 1990s. Despite my technology background, I went to college to work in media, especially audio/video production, but between the devaluation of a lot of creative jobs and the 2008 financial crisis/recession, I stuck around for more schooling, getting a graduate degree in Information & Communication Sciences, basically a mix of information technology, telecom, and a bit of business.
From there, I ended up working in higher education, moving through different roles in an IT department at a small college, the bulk of which involved network engineering. A couple of years ago, my now-fiancée and I uprooted for her work and I'm at a different university, still doing a variety of IT things. I really enjoy working on a small team because it means you get to a little bit of everything!
I've found that it's really nice to balance the structured, break/fix things from my day job with creative pursuits and projects outside of work. Like many that have been interviewed here, I dabble in photography, have done some various audio and video projects, and seem to be my friends' go-to for graphic design-related things.
Other than those, I appreciate a good TV show or movie, maybe satisfying my college-self a little bit. I've gotten into following the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) as well as some of the minor-league sports that are in our city. I love trying new foods and visiting new places (as cliché as that sounds), just because there's so much of the world to explore and experience—I think that makes one a more well-rounded, empathetic person.
I don't quite remember the origin story for the name other than that it was going to be the name for my software "business" (remember, I was kid!) when I was writing software on the TRS-80. None of that really lasted and I reused the name when I created a personal site on GeoCities. In the late 1990s, the Internet was a weird patchwork of personal sites, academic resources, and still rough-around-the-edges corporate sites. I think we were all learning what this could be used for as we went along and I was no exception. Initially, it was a landing page of sorts when I was writing about tech elsewhere, including Low End Mac and the long-defunct MacWeekly.
Eventually, getting a new iBook G3 and wanting to expand my topics led me to turning my site into a blog. I think that second-generation of the site was my attempt to compete with some of the larger players at the time, mixing in product reviews, longform opinion articles, news stories, and even a few guest writers. At that time, my family still had a big analog C-Band satellite dish at home and I was able to tune in to the live feeds of the Macworld Expo keynotes, so I could "live blog" those from afar, too. iLounge, MacOpinion, Think Secret, and TUAW were some of the sites I looked up to. By the time I was in college, it was a lot to balance courses, a campus job, somewhat of a social life, and the site scaled back a little, but was still very much a fun hobby of mine.
Like many other bloggers, my site's third-generation morphed into more of a format similar to John Gruber's Daring Fireball: longform articles mixed with linked-out items that have a couple of paragraphs of commentary (I call them "Snippets.") I liked the format, as it allowed me to share things I found interesting or worth talking about. However, I found that in recent years so much of the tech industry has started to feel like a parody of itself. I felt like I had to cover stories because of their importance, rather than because I wanted to. After realizing that, I've started to shift my content a bit and my goal is to get back to content that celebrates my relationship with technology and even things that can be more lasting. That might be leading to a "fourth-generation" of the site.
As I touched on a little earlier, I think my creative process got a bit hijacked by so much bad news around "Big Tech"—while I've tried to avoid my site becoming a cheerleader for Apple, that's the corner of the tech world that I've lived in for the past 30+ years (if you count the Macs and Apple IIs I used in school before I had my own.) Inspiration and sources come from a variety of areas: other blogs and things in my RSS reader, links on social media, tech stories from the larger media outlets.
I think for Snippets, it's something that I feel is important to share or that I have strong feelings for. Those are often a bit more off-the-cuff and get a quick proofread before publishing. If it's something longer-form, I'll take some time, edit as I go, maybe have someone look over portions if something isn't quite working for me, and then publish. In terms of research, I try to link to outside sources that can provide additional context, older posts of my own that can add some historical context, while still maintaining and assuming that most of my readers have an above-average grasp on a lot of the topics. It's a bit of writing-for-me and I hope others will join me on the ride.
While I'd love to say that I have a certain ritualistic place that I write, the truth is that sometimes it's just wherever I am. I don't love writing from my phone, but sometimes due to travel or between things at work, I might hammer out a quick post. I do think that I've gotten my home-office to be a comfortable place to sit down and focus on writing, with cozy lighting and everything set up. When I was working at my last job, I'd often grab a laptop or iPad and work from a nearby coffee shop—I think getting out of my then-apartment and having a more intentional time for writing with fewer distractions helped. Since moving, I haven't done that as much.
If I think of some of my favorite "let's go write" moments, it's often on a moody, rainy day where there's some ambient noise from outside while I work.
I have found that taking a break and letting something sit for a day or two has been a more important thing than location. Trying to force oneself to write when your head and heart aren't in it just doesn't seem to work for me.
I set up my site on WordPress about twenty years ago when I outgrew server-side includes. It took a little while to wrestle the templates to work like my previously-carefully-crafted stylesheets. In some ways WordPress has gotten really bloated for my needs, but it works well enough and I have yet to find something to easily replace it with all the random things I've bolted onto my theme over the years.
I'm in the process of re-evaluating some of my services, but right now I'm using IONOS (formerly 1&1) for hosting, which I had originally started with when they set up shop in the United States. My domains are with Hover at the moment.
As for what I use to create my site, I'm currently using a Mac mini (M4), iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPhone 15. On the Mac, BBEdit or directly on the web are where I'll do my writing. On the iOS side, I do a lot of writing in iA Writer. I'm still using Panic's Coda an Code Editor (formerly Diet Coda) for a lot of file mananagement/coding. Considering how long both have been discontinued, finding suitable replacements for both at my desk and mobile are on my to-do list.
Other than the name being sometimes hard to spell, I don't think I'd necessarily pick something else. The beauty of it is that I'm not necessarily tied down to Apple/Mac-specific content and I can adapt it over time. I think of how many sites were Mac-something or iPod-something and then had to abruptly (and sometimes awkwardly) rename to fit the changing scope of content.
I think for a CMS, I might want something a bit "lighter," but WordPress has allowed me to adapt the site for my changing content numerous times.
I find it to be relatively inexpensive to run the site with hosting running me about US$100/year and then US$20/domain on average. I make some of that back with the single ad through the Carbon network, but I don't necessarily want to have more ads than that. Since it's a hobby for me, I'm not looking to make a lot of money, but I understand for folks who want or need to and don't begrudge that. I've toyed with the idea of letting people support the site, but I'm also not sure if it's worth the trouble.
To try to avoid repeating anyone who has already been interviewed, I went through my RSS feeds to find a few that I immediately skip to when I see a new post:
Brent Simmons is behind NetNewsWire and I started following his writing soon after I discovered NetNewsWire years ago, and got to follow the story of how that piece of software changed hands numerous times.
Stephen Hackett is someone whose content and knowledge I can really relate to, so it's interesting to see his take on a lot of tech.
Matthew Haughey covers a lot of different topics, but manages to craft a post that is always so damn fascinating.
Mike Davidson doesn't blog as much these days, but he was another person whose work I followed way back in the mid-2000s and looked up to when I was interested in the convergence of traditional media and the Web.
Jedda, Keenan, Lou Plummer, Nick Heer, Riccardo Mori, and Louie Mantia were already in the series, but I always enjoy when something new comes along from them, too.
I have a few odds and ends that I wasn't quite sure where to fit elsewhere. First, I wanted to mention my side-project, The Chaos League, a blog that followed a similar format as SchwarzTech, but focused on the NWSL. This was a fantastic distraction coming out of the pandemic as it gave me an outlet that wasn't tech. Unfortunately, in the last few years, coverage from large media outlets and the public's appetite for short-form video content have kind of killed a lot of interest in bloggers covering that space. It's currently on hiatus and I'm not sure what the next step, if any, will be.
Other than shamelessly plugging what I’ve done, I wanted to comment that this was a really fun exercise to think over my place online and what it means to me—thanks again for the opportunity!
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2026-03-01 20:00:00
Three-quarters of the way through this “challenge”, and the findings are mostly the same. Phone usage is very easy to keep in check if you decide to put your mind to it. The past seven days have been very similar to the previous seven, and that’s good, since this type of phone usage needs to become the new normal.
Contrary to the previous week, this time it was the first half of the week that saw higher usage, and that was mostly due to a few long Telegram sessions late in the day on Monday and Tuesday. 44 or the 54 minutes logged on Monday, and 32 of the 45 logged on Tuesday, were spent on Telegram. Only 26 minutes out of 46 on Wednesday, the rest of the usage was work-related since I had to do a few phone calls and test a couple of things on mobile Safari.
The second half of the week saw a lot less phone time, but I did have to spend a lot more time at my computer, taking care of client stuff, and that’s why I barely picked up the phone. Which is fine. I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
Again, very pleased with how this month-long experiment is going, and I do have some takeaways, but I’ll wait until next Sunday to share them.
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2026-02-27 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Dominik Schwind, whose blog can be found at lostfocus.de.
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My name is Dominik Schwind and I'm from Lörrach, a small town on the German side of the tri-border area with Switzerland and France. I've been a web developer for a really long time now, mostly server-side and just occasionally dabbling in what is showing up in the browser. Annoyingly that's a hobby that I turned into work, so I guess that's ruined now. (Which doesn't stop me, though: I have too many half-finished side-project websites and apps to count.)
Besides that I also really like to take photos and after a few years of being frozen in place I started to travel again, which is always nice. I do like watching motorsports of almost all types, I can easily get sucked into computer games like Factorio and I like to listen to podcasts, top of them being the Omnibus Project, Do Go On and Roderick on the Line.
I've had a website since before I had internet access - some computer game I had in the mid-90s had the manual included as HTML and I used it to learn how to make basic websites. The very first day my father came home with a modem, I signed up for GeoCities and when I found a webhost that would allow me to run CGI scripts, I installed NewsPro, an early proto-blog system before blogging was even a thing. And while these early iterations of my website(s) are long gone, I haven't stopped since.
The name came from an unease I started to feel in my final year of high school: once I finished school, I didn't know where to direct my energy and attention. That feeling hasn't really left since then.
Mostly there is none - when I think of something that I want to communicate to someone, anyone, I try to put it online. Quite often it ends up on Mastodon but I do try to put things on my blog, especially when I know it is something future me would appreciate.
A few years ago I noticed that I had neglecting my blog in favour of other ways of communicating and I started a pact with a couple of friends to write weeknotes. We're in our fourth year now, which feels like an accomplishment. I try to write those posts first thing on a Sunday morning, if possible.
I write most of my posts in Markdown in iA Writer, which is probably the most arrogant Markdown editing app in the world. But I paid for it at some point, so I better use it, too.
I basically only need a computer and a place to sit and I'm fine. I've tried to find ways to blog from my phone but in the end, I prefer a proper keyboard and a bigger screen.
While I never observed any difference in blogging creativity depending on the physical space, I actually quite enjoy writing in places other than my desk.
This one is actually pretty simple: I run WordPress, currently on a DigitalOcean VM. One of the points on my long to-do list for my web stuff is to move it to Hetzner, which probably would only take an evening. And yet, I procrastinate.
I've (more or less) jokingly said I'd replace WordPress with a CMS of my own making for years now, but at some point I've resigned, even though my database is a mess.
Probably not.
Ever since the beginning I wrote for two audiences: my friends and future me. I'm really happy when someone else finds my blog and might turn into an internet friend, but I wouldn't know how else to achieve that other than what I've been doing for all these years now.
.de domains are pretty affordable, so it is that plus the server, which is around €100 per year.
The blog doesn't generate any revenue, in many ways it's "only" a journal.
When it comes to other bloggers, I'd say: go for it if you think your writing (or your photography or whatever it might be you're sharing on your website) is something that can be turned into revenue, one way or another. In many ways I'm a bit bummed that Flattr (or something similar) never really took of, I would happily use a service like that.
Of course I need to mention my friends and fellow weeknoters: Martin (blogs in German) and Teymur. (NSFW)
Three of the people whose blogs I read have been interviewed here already: Ahn (Interview), Jeremy Keith (Interview) and Winnie Lim .(Interview)
Some other people whose blogs I read and who might be interesting people to answer your questions would be Jennifer Mills, (who has the best take on weekly blog posts I have ever seen) Nikkin, (he calls it a newsletter, but there is an RSS feed) Roy Tang and Ruben Schade.
If you don't have one yet, go start a personal website! Don't take it too seriously, try things and it can be a nice, meditative hobby and helps against the urge to doomscroll. Also you might never know, your kind of people might find it and connect with you.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
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2026-02-23 18:35:00
For some weird combination of factors, I ended up answering questions to three different people for three entirely unrelated projects, and all three interviews went live around the same time.
I answered a few questions for the Over/Under series run by Hyde. Love the concept, this was a lot of fun.
I also answered a few questions from Kai since he’s running a great series where he asks previous IndieWeb Carnival hosts to share some thoughts about the theme they chose.
And lastly, Kristoffer asked me to talk a bit more about my most recent project/newsletter, Dealgorithmed, for his Naive Weekly, another newsletter you definitely want to check out because it’s fantastic.
Click those links and check these projects; they’re all wonderful. And especially go check all the other interviews, so many wonderful people are listed on all three sites.
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2026-02-22 15:50:00
Halfway through this enjoyable life experiment, and overall, I’m very pleased with the results. As I mentioned last week, I was expecting week two usage to be a bit higher compared to week one, where I went full phone-rejection mode, but I’m still pleased with how low my usage was, even though it felt like I was using the phone a lot.
No huge spikes this week, didn’t need to use Google Maps a lot, so the time distribution is a lot more even, as you can see. The first three days of the week were pretty similar to the previous week. I moved my chats back on the phone, and that’s most of the time spent on screen since “social” is just the combination of Telegram, WhatsApp, and iMessage.
Usage went up a bit in the second part of the week, but I consider that a “healthy” use of the phone. On Thursday, I spent 20 or so minutes setting up an app, one that I’d categorise as a life utility app, like banking or insurance apps. They do have a site, but you’re required to use the phone anyway to take pictures and other crap, so it was faster to do it on the phone.
Then on Saturday, I had to use Maps as well as AllTrails to find a place out in the wild. I was trying to find a bunker that’s hidden somewhere in a forest not too far from where I live (this is a story for another time), and that’s why screen time was a bit higher than normal on that particular day.
Overall, I’m very happy with how the week went. A thing I’m particularly pleased with is the fact that I have yet to consume a single piece of media on my phone since we started this experiment. So far, I have only opened the browser a couple of times, and it was always to look up something very specific, and never to mindlessly scroll through news, videos or anything like that. My content consumption on the phone is down to essentially zero.
One fun side effect of this experiment is how infrequently I now charge my phone. I took this screenshot this morning before plugging it in, and apparently, the last time it was fully charged was Wednesday afternoon. I’m now charging it once every 3 or 4 days, which is pretty neat.
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