The Social Hour

During my Digital Declutter (which is still on as I'm writing this), I've reintroduced the Social Hour to my life. The idea: Instead of picking up my phone dozens of times every single day to check my messages, I check them twice a day, half an hour at a time. This is a more deliberate approach to my digital social life. I've been living with my phone's notifications turned off for well over two years now. When I first did this, I wondered: if I allow none of the apps on my phone to send me notifications, how will I know when my friends and family try to get in touch? Don't I need to nurse my social contacts digitally every once in a while? That's when the idea of the Social Hour was born. I've considered for a while that I could turn off all of the notifications except for messaging apps, but I realised that this approach eliminates the idea of a notificationsless life entirely. If I made this exception, I'd continue to associate my phone with a dopamine kick. At any moment of my…