Cal Newport on Surviving Screens in isolation

https://www.gq.com/story/cal-newport-screen-time-coronavirus Interesting article on how to deal with screen time during isolation. [S]olitude is absolutely crucial. Time alone with your thoughts is how you structure your experience, and on those structures you can understand where you are in your life and where you want to go. Without that you're just adrift. You're basically just being pushed around by winds and attention economy contraptions. Where you are, what you are, what you aren't and what you want to be—that just takes thought. Now we're forced to do a lot of thought, because there's only so much we can, in our apartment, look at the same screen before our eyes bleed. One question is: what are you trying to efficiently do? What is it you're trying to speed up? What's the benefit function here that makes your life better? Efficiency devoid of a particular objective is a metric adrift. A computer scientist would care about the efficiency of an algorithm because you have a lot of things to want to use the processor, and you don't want to spend more time than you need using a processor. There's something you're trying to gain there. It allows more to happen on the machine. [...] If I took the two hours I spent incredibly efficiently yelling at public figures and I spent them doing something else that was maybe a little bit slower but felt more rewarding, I might be building towards a solution that's going to be more beneficial. I like the optimization mindset because once you're thinking about and trying to make this the best day possible, trying to optimize this goal, it just makes you much more critical about your individual behaviors.