It’s only been two weeks, and the results are indisputable. I made a minor tweak on my phone, it led to a pretty major behavior change, and now I’m sleeping almost two hours more per night on average.

I can’t believe it worked that well and that fast.

It’s actually a little embarrassing.

Not everyone feels this way, but for me, I feel like, if I was able to sleep then I obviously needed it. Not only will I refuse to apologize to anyone for sleeping, but if another person is actively interfering with my sleep, I will put them on blast and deal with it.

You! Have you ever woken someone else up because you were annoyed that they were sleeping? And they weren’t behind the wheel of a moving vehicle? Then you should probably reconsider what the heck is wrong with you.

Sleep is free and healthy. When other people are sleeping, you are then free to read or enjoy your alone time. So make the most of it.

Anyway. I sleep a lot because I’m a COVID survivor and I also have a parasomnia disorder. Sometimes I have issues sleeping, even with various OTC sleep aids, and I can struggle for weeks or months in this way. Being chronically sleep-deprived is bad for my productivity at work. So it’s quite a pleasant surprise when I’m able to sleep a lot.

This year I started to notice that I was sleep-procrastinating, which is staying up too late even when you’re tired because you’re so desperate for downtime. It’s a way for Night-Me to “get revenge” on Daytime-Me. You know, for having a job and responsibilities and stuff.

Sleep-procrastinating is a pernicious habit because the rewards are immediate. Look at me! Reading late at night! In my pajamas in my bed where I am so cozy! This is my favorite activity of all time!

Then there is Daytime-Me, crabby and irritable and tired, oh-so-tired, until it’s bedtime again and Night-Me gets this big ear-to-ear grin and starts the whole cycle over again.

I had a solid idea of what was behind this. My news queue. I knew without having to track metrics that my default mode was skimming my news app. I also knew that I was most likely to get myself into trouble with this after I was already in bed.

I made three tweaks, all of which work together.

First, I set up a bedtime routine in my Morning Routine app. It turns out that it takes me forty minutes to get ready for bed, partly because I see a periodontist now and I may have some of the most elaborate oral hygiene practices on the planet. So whenever I start that app, add at least forty minutes before my head hits the pillow.

To me, a bedtime routine is the number one keystone habit. It determines whether the household is always on time, early, or late. It determines quite a lot of health results. And it definitely determines whether everyone is fighting or basically getting along.

My bedtime routine is elaborate because I like to sleep until 7:30 am for an 8:00 am start at work. The more I do before bed, the less I have to do in the morning. Basically throw on clothes, straighten my hair, and make my tea.

Anyway, I had been using the bedtime routine app with some success, but then when I was finished, I would flop down and start skimming the news again. This practice was indeed streamlining my morning and making sure I remembered to start the dishwasher. But it wasn’t really helping me fight the bad habits and self-destructive tomfoolery of Night-Me.

Don’t feel the mogwai after midnight

I happened to stumble across an article that indicated I could customize my access to specific apps on my phone. As soon as I knew it was possible, I knew I wanted to do it.

This sort of thing only works if you trust yourself to be your own advocate. My superego is pretty good at driving the bus around here. I am not particularly vulnerable to psychological reactance, where we get mad at ourselves for setting limits. I just shrug and say to myself, Ah yes, I remember that I decided that was the best idea. Questioner Power.

Tweak One was setting up a bedtime routine that is gamified with a timer.

Tweak Two was setting a bedtime on my phone. Almost all apps are unusable between 10pm and 7am, which is a moot point since I’m still asleep at that time. I had to go back and add in a few apps, like the Morning Routine, that I use after 10.

Tweak Three was to set a one-hour time limit on my News app.

It turns out the third tweak was the biggest deal. I am now quite aware that every minute I skim through the news queue takes away one minute from reading that app during my workout.

There are a lot of ways to cheat; for instance, I can open an article in my browser instead and read it outside of the one-hour limit. This is perfectly fine by my standards. In fact, most of the news that I consume is through my speed-reading audio app anyway.

Because I also have the 10:00 pm shutoff, most of the time that I would have idly been reading news articles would be in the time between 10 pm and, on weekends, 1:00 am. As long as I’m not browsing in that three-hour window, any amount is probably fine.

My new setup started working the very first night. I picked up my phone, saw that it was shut down for the night, shrugged, and started getting ready for bed. I’m “allowed” to read books on my phone after 10, just not the news or email, and it turned out that I was asleep before midnight.

As time has gone by, I seem to be falling asleep a few minutes earlier each night.

Part of my higher weekly average is that I take three-hour naps on the weekend, but then, I was doing that before I set up these time boundaries on my phone. Almost all the increase in my average sleep time has just been going to bed earlier and falling asleep earlier during the week.

I have the power to change what I’m doing any time. I can turn off these settings on my phone. I can also start getting ready for bed even earlier and see what happens. It is pretty interesting to be able to track my metrics at a glance.

How do I feel? I feel great. I also feel like I could easily take a second nap each day on the weekend, but I haven’t yet. Daytime-Me keeps thinking there are “things I should be doing.”

But... are there?

It was brought to my attention how much apps run my life when I found myself awoken by my alarm on a work holiday. Why, I thought, can’t there be an AI that notices when there is a holiday and reminds me to turn off my alarm?

This is something I think about a lot. When will artificial intelligence be able to take over more of my mental bandwidth, and what would it look like when it does?

Right now the focus seems to be on consumer habits and passive entertainment. Whatever algorithms are in place right now, they do a decent job. I actually like it when an ad for something I’ve bought recently, like a bedspread, follows me around the internet for months. It then displaces whatever advertisements might have filled that spot and enticed me to buy things I didn’t know existed.

The algorithms in my news reader are fantastic. It hasn’t taken me long to get all the gator news a girl could ever want. I also use this as a source for my little tech newsletter, which not only makes me look awesome at work but probably got me the job in the first place.

If there were ever one solitary thing that artificial intelligence improved in my life, it would be this. I can find an endless supply of articles about robotics and drones and other tech innovations while scarcely lifting a finger.

On the other hand, this constant access to valuable information is like drinking from a firehose. I realized some time ago that scrolling through my technology newsfeed has become my default mode, eating far more of my day than I ever intended. What did I do about it? Why, I turned to an app!

I went into the settings on my phone and set a one-hour time limit on my news app. This has been in place for one day and I already feel like I am levitating against a glass ceiling. I also expanded the quiet hours on my phone, so not only will it not ring or show me text messages, but I can’t open most apps after 10:00 pm.

It is helping but also it is really not helping

What I’d really like is for AI to help with more of my day-to-day. I lost an hour of sleep because I set up an automated alarm clock and neither I nor my electronic backup brain realized that I should temporarily turn it off. In how many other areas could I be living a more optimal existence with a little artificial assistance?

One of the biggest and most obvious ones, to me, is the gathering of the stuff. Is there an app yet that reminds people to put certain objects in a pile and make sure they are carried out the door? This would be one of the greatest memory aids of all time.

I think I’ve actually figured out a way to do this, although if it works the way I think it will, it’ll take a bit of setup.

I went to a grocery store in person the day I wrote this. Trader Joe’s! Why do you not work with delivery services! Because you don’t have to, okay, I get that! But still! Anyway, I was quaking in my shoes but I figured, with careful planning, I could do a “smash and grab” speed run and spend fewer than 15 minutes in the store.

(I was right, because I am a logistics master and an experienced trail runner and also because I felt the hounds of hell breathing down my neck the whole time).

I used a paid app called Morning Routine. Normally I use it in the morning and at bedtime, so I remember all the dumb things I normally forget, like locking the door and turning on the dishwasher. You can add items to a list and give each a time limit, and then the app runs the timer for each task and switches to the next task when the time runs out. If you’re skillful about your time estimates, this timer will keep you on track. The key feature is that you can set it to read each new item aloud.

I made my shopping list, with each item listing the item I wanted followed by the next item, so the app would read both. For most people this might look like: “front door to bread, bread to eggs, eggs to milk, milk to cereal, cereal to toothpaste.” Since I knew the layout of the store, I was able to do this in the most streamlined path between items, and I had everything on my list in six minutes. The list is still in the app if I find myself having to go in again.

(In two masks and a plastic face shield)

I think the Morning Routine method would work for getting ready for work, loading kids’ backpacks, packing for a trip, and generally getting out the door. If you take the time to keep tweaking it, and actually listen to it, it will keep you from flitting back and forth between rooms. You can keep adding items as you remember them, from sunblock to permission slips to bridge toll. The app then becomes like a butler or personal assistant.

It’s a short jump from that to an actual robot that tootles around the house, loading your suitcase for you and carrying it to the car.

Eventually it will happen. Within our lifetimes, I bet it will. The potential payout is so, so high, and once one person has one, it’ll be like smartphones all over again. Everyone will want one to the point that people will camp out overnight in a tent in order to be first in life.

Until, that is, our robots can go out and do that for us.

The question, whenever we welcome new tech into our lives, is whether we’ll allow it to be a boon or a curse. Will we use it to free up our time and mental bandwidth, giving ourselves an overall lifestyle upgrade? Or will it just be a monkey on our backs?

This is why I pause every now and then to ask, if apps run my life - which obviously they do - which ones are in charge this week? Is this what I would have wanted? Can I make adjustments so that I am impressed with the results?

We got a new robot. It washes windows.

It is very hard for me to believe that this is a readily available consumer appliance that is cheaper than many a vacuum cleaner.

I remember reading a “visionary tech” type article just a few years ago, saying that one of these was in development. Obviously as soon as I knew there was a robot that could climb vertical surfaces, I had to have one - but at the time, it only existed as a prototype.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just file this away with all the other incredible prototypes that never come to market, like the laundry-folding robot. By “never” I mean we’ll have to wait anywhere from 10-25 years.

This time, though, I was caught wrong-footed. I went to check on this supposed window-washing robot, as part of a discussion about the innovation curve - and discovered that there are actually several different styles put out by multiple robotics companies. They sell in the $200-500 range.

The one I bought, based on reading a bunch of reviews, turns out to be the least expensive one on the market.

I’m going to pause for a moment here and say that the main reason we can afford to buy robots like this is that we have chosen not to own a car for the past four years. What I spent on this robot is significantly less than our car payment used to be, and not much more than what we paid for car insurance per month. A lot of families could drop a vehicle without too much inconvenience and suddenly discover a distinct lessening of pressure in the finance area.

Okay, so what does it do?

I decided to find out. It can clean glass windows. Can it clean other stuff, too?

There are other types, one based on magnets, but the style we got works on vacuum suction. You hold it in place and turn it on, it revs up and makes a whirring sound like a vacuum cleaner (which technically it is), and then you can let go of it. It stays sucked onto the glass and then it can drive around.

I didn’t figure out until the second time I used it that if you push the button twice, it will scoot around by itself, find the edges of the frame, and clean the whole window itself.

It also comes with a remote control. If you are very careful, you can use it on glass without an edge, like a shower door. If you are not careful, it will start to go off the edge, lose suction, and fall off.

The window-washing robot has two tethers. One, the power cord must be attached for it to work. At this stage of development I don’t think there’s a way to make them rechargeable and also lightweight enough to do the job. Two, there is a cord with a carabiner on one end. It can be knotted through an aperture on either end of the robot.

What did I do when I found that I was supposed to belay the bot to keep it from crashing to the floor?

Why, I asked my Eagle Scout husband, of course!

He worked out a complicated rigging system on the curtain rod. It took a bit of finagling to make sure that the cord was short enough for it not to hit the floor - but then this made it impossible for the bot to reach the bottom of the window.

I did the exteriors on the balcony the next day. There was no curtain rod outside, of course, and in fact I couldn’t figure out where else I would tie the safety cord. I decided to wing it and just watch carefully.

It was fine.

Then I did the same thing on the bathroom mirror, and when it reached the bottom right corner, it managed to hit the frame, unsuck itself, and fall off. Fortunately it was only about a one-foot drop to the counter, and it survived intact.

The test with the glass shower doors was tricky. I did have to watch carefully while I used the remote. It is not advised to use the window-washing robot on any glass with no edge. I always read the instructions carefully, but that doesn’t mean I always wind up following them!

Our robots have names, because now we have three of them and there are reasons to disambiguate. This one is now Squeeg-Bot, since I also have several squeegees and don’t want to confuse things.

Unlike the other robots, Sucky and Swiffy, Squeeg-Bot can’t be trusted to work alone. On the other hand, he works quickly. The sliding glass doors only took about 15 minutes, which is, believe it or not, faster than I do it with a squeegee and a bottle of glass cleaner.

I have lived in apartments and houses where I doubt I washed the windows once the entire time I lived there, or at least not until the day I moved out. I am a bit obsessive about always getting my cleaning deposit back.

In this apartment, though, we only have two windows, one in the bedroom and then the slider in the living room. That slider is essentially our only source of natural daylight. In addition to this window we have a small gray parrot who loves to pulp fruit and throw it everywhere.

This is why I feel the need to clean the window so often - because my beloved, spoiled little parrot is a filth machine and because this window is visible on-camera all day while I’m at work.

I still have some games to play with this new device. I haven’t tried it out on the inside of the shower yet, because it needs a dry surface and that means a bit of prep work. I haven’t tried it on the fridge, although I will because it gets smudgy. I also haven’t tried it on a plain old painted wall, and again, I will eventually because it is fun to play with robots.

I told my husband, This is like driving an RC car! When I was a kid, I never got to play with remote-controlled cars because they were evidently not for girls. So I went out and bought my own remote-controlled robot, and now I can play with it as much as I like.

We went for a walk and vacuumed at the same time. This isn’t all that interesting in itself; we’ve had a robot vacuum for over a decade now, and we almost always run it while we’re off doing something else so we don’t have to listen to it.

What was different this time was that I realized I had forgotten to move something out of its way. I was able to whip out my phone, pause it from a quarter mile away, and mark off the area as off-limits.

(It turned out not to work, but that’s a story for a different time).

This is a feature that I used to joke about, and now it’s real. (Kinda?) I also used to joke about it emptying itself, and now that’s a real feature, too.

Yet another robot joke I used to make was about getting a robot lawnmower. We don’t have a lawn anymore, because we live on the 5th floor, but that is indeed a robot that somebody can buy now.

What I’ve learned is that I am really, really good at predicting consumer tech that will be available in the 5-10 year range.

(Now if I can just learn to design and sell it, we’re all set...)

The obvious question is raised. What else could a home robot do if we let it?

The case for robot vacuum cleaners is very strong, from my perspective, which is why it is a total mystery to me that so many people resist the very idea. Well what if someone gave you one?? Would you totally refuse to use it?

They’re cost-competitive with other vacuums, they go under the bed and the couch, and if something like a Lego or an earring accidentally gets picked up, you can get it out with much less mess than a traditional vacuum. The only real issue is that you have to go around and arrange your cords and cables in advance.

The robot mop is a little higher maintenance, in that it can’t drive itself on and off the charger, but it is much faster and quieter and doesn’t try to eat the bath mat, so that tends to make up for it.

Talking about chores in terms of robots was good for our marriage. We could play a game - “We live on a space station with robots” - rather than argue about housework. Because of this, we refer to dishwashers and washing machines and dryers as robots, too. Dishbot! Washbot! Drybot!

We would stroll out the door on the way to the movie theater, chortling about how All the Robots were Doing All the Chores. Laundry, dishes, and floor all at the same time.

There’s a natural transition from this concept to the question of what else a robot could do to help.

For us, the next natural transition was, how many of these features could be built into a home’s infrastructure?

My dearest wish has been to have a robot that can fold the laundry. I didn’t even care whether it put the laundry away somewhere, I just wanted the socks all matched up. It turns out that this is on the very far end of difficulty for an AI. Something that a preschooler can do - match socks - can defeat the same robot that can play chess and solve differential equations.

By the time a home robot can fold and put away laundry, it will basically be capable of doing everything.

Not just everything around the house, but basically everything a person can do.

It’s obvious why robots should do certain things instead of people, like sanitizing public restrooms or washing adult diapers. What isn’t so obvious yet is all the things that will be automated, say, fifty years in the future.

Dude! Did you know the dishwasher was first patented in 1850???

And it took 120 years before they were common in the suburbs?

The microwave oven was invented in 1946, but wasn’t all that common until the 1980s. At that time, they cost an average of $425, which is like $1300 now.

The reason all this matters is that anything a machine can do frees up a person to do something else.

You can go ahead and mock me for my foo-foo robot mop, but it is one of the reasons that I will be able to go back to school for my doctorate.

Other people will unblushingly share that they have a maid/housekeeper/cleaning service come in. But hey! That is also a person who could be doing something else! I cleaned houses once upon a time, too, and I’m a Mensan, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Coming back around to the problem of the missing laundry-folding robot, there are actually a bunch of different ways to get around this problem. 1. Reintroduce the lovely and flattering toga. 2. Do everything virtually with an elegantly dressed avatar, and just walk around nude. 3. Buy only wrinkle-free fabrics and some extra laundry baskets, and just shake everything into them. 4. Have only one outfit, like a space unitard, and have it sanitized while you sleep. 5. Print outfits on demand, then drop them back into the unit to be melted down into something fresh for the next day. 6. Spray-on body paint.

Probably more also. In the meantime, folding laundry takes 15 minutes per load, and when else would we listen to podcasts?

Something I learned when I was working with hoarders is that a lot of people are conceptually married to the idea that you do chores the 1920s way. Grimly, no music, no modern cleansers or tools, for your sins. It astonishes me to this day how resistant people are to changing up their routines. Rather than gratefully accept modern improvements, it’s more likely that people will quit doing it entirely.

Is some of this financial? Sure, of course. At the same time, the robots that I’m talking about are in the same price range as the gaming consoles and stand mixers that I often see. They’re also far cheaper than automobiles, a modern convenience that we have chosen not to own for four years now.

The question behind the question “Could a robot do this?” is, Is there a better way to do this? The question behind *that* is, If this didn’t have to be done personally by me, what else would I be doing with my time?

I’m taking another futurism class at work, and I wanted to share a bit of what we’re learning. One of the great call-outs is the idea that “there are no future facts.”

What this means is that since nothing in the future has actually happened yet, whatever we think of as “the future” doesn’t technically exist. What we imagine, may never happen at all.

The contrary of that is that many possible alternatives may happen, and we never thought of them, and we didn’t see them coming, and we are caught unawares.

One of the examples from our class was that commercial advertisements can be a good source of fringe signals. Another student questioned this and didn’t see why commercials would matter. I shared that around 1980, I remembered an AT&T ad showing a video call. We have that technology now, but at the time the commercial aired, my family was still using a rotary phone.

(I can’t find it, so I’m probably wrong about either the company or the year... or maybe I just dreamed the whole thing... or maybe we’re in the wrong wormhole again...)

I find it relatively easy to think in futuristic terms, because I’ve seen so much technological and cultural change in my lifetime. It was also easy for me to imagine what things were like when my grandparents and older relatives told stories about their own childhoods. Imagine growing up in a house with no electricity or running water, and then living to see a person land on the Moon... and *that* moment was half a century ago.

I think most people aren’t really paying attention to how rapidly “the future” is forming all around us.

It’s different for those of us who work in the space industry. It takes a long time to build stuff that is space-rated, but it does get built eventually. What we’re seeing are preliminary designs of things that will be Up There fifteen years from now.

I love thinking about the future because it makes all my present-day problems seem small and dumb. Which they are.

For instance, I’m almost out of curry mustard. (#astronautproblems) That is something that matters to my daily life, but it’s also a pretty dumb thing to be worrying about in the midst of a global pandemic. The pandemic itself is a whole lotta nuthin’ compared to the vast chasm of science denial that has appeared beneath our feet.

I’m not even worried about the pandemic anymore - I’m worried about all the otherwise rational-appearing people who are spending their spare time attempting to discredit any and all mainstream sources of information, on general principle.

“If I didn’t tell you it myself, ignore it!”

“Nobody who is smarter than me is worth listening to!”

“Only believe random bloggers or people who know how to make videos on their phone!”

This is what’s happening right now. Or actually it’s been happening since the 1990s and we weren’t really picking up on it. What is happening is that sources of information are fragmenting more and more and more. Individual people are starting to have their own completely personalized versions of current events.

Which is fine to an extent - don’t get between me and my gator news - but also, it means we aren’t even going to be aware of other people’s personal news bubbles. They’ll be thinking about, planning around, and acting on stuff we don’t even know exists.

The nice part about that for someone like me, someone who has special access to reports and diagrams and designs for future things, is that I can make plans for myself and my personal household that will help me to be resilient. I can avoid threats and I can create opportunities for myself.

Giant bummer for everyone else, though.

It’s easy to imagine... hmm... take the 1984 movie “Ghostbusters,” for example. If you haven’t seen it yet, then it’s your own fault if you keep reading before downloading it and watching it, because spoilers. Okay, remember in the movie that that one big apartment building was a sort of portal for Zuul? And all sorts of things disrupted Manhattan? “Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!”

Okay, now imagine that a few people somewhere out there in Alterna-News-World have some kind of conspiracy swami telling them that my apartment building is going to have a Zuul visitation on a specific date.

That would suck for me, because I live here, and I don’t really need rando’s camping out on our steps.

On the other hand, this sort of thing can only really touch me if these speculative people conspire to do things to my building - and only if I’m still living here. I have the resources to simply go elsewhere. For a day or an hour, or for permanently.

What “the future” is always about is the ability to handle whatever happens. That’s resilience.

In my life, and I think this would work for anyone, there are only a few absolute must-haves for someone to be versatile enough to handle “the future.” Those are a flexible mindset, the ability to think strategically, having a portable lifestyle, practical skills, physical fitness, and money.

Unfortunately, what most people want when they think about “the future” are comfort items. We can’t bear the stress of living in the place of uncertainty. So instead of preparing ourselves to have fun with all the cool things that are coming, we cling to memorabilia, buy large heavy liabilities like houses and cars, and dig ourselves into debt through recreational purchases, entertainment, and calories.

Not to say that I don’t also indulge in recreational calories, entertainment, etc. It’s just that in between, my husband and I will hit pause, turn to each other, and start discussing the fringe signals we have just seen. Or why whatever was in that movie is so unlikely and what we think would happen instead.

I’m thinking about putting together a ‘bad sci-fi’ club at work to have watch parties and either try to invent real versions of those props, or laugh ourselves sideways at what people of earlier decades thought our 20’s would be like.

Newsflash: It’s The Twenties again, time to party. But not like it’s 1999.

Though we’ve been referring to it with the acronym WFH, telecommuting is not the same thing as working from home. Technically I’ve been working from home for over a decade. This telecommuting thing is entirely different.

I did a variety of things in my past work life, often switching between different projects and different styles in the same day. I booked client calls, wrote on freelance and on spec, traveled, worked on planes and in my lap and in coffee shops and on a hotel bathroom floor in the middle of the night.

In all those ways, my freelance life was (is?) both more versatile and less comfortable than what I’m doing now.

Telecommuting is like being in an ordinary office, only at home instead of inside a cubicle.

During my first week, I’ve spent more than half my time in meetings and webinars. Not only do we start on time, it’s necessary to start a bit early to make sure there is time for both the hardware and the software to connect.

Unlike normal meetings in conference rooms, most people are on mute for most of the call, so it’s common for someone to be talking to themselves in an empty room for several seconds before everyone realizes their mic isn’t on. Picture this happening with people sitting around a table and it’s actually quite funny.

Everyone is using different equipment, some company-issued and some more ad hoc. Most people have worked for the company for years - or decades - and others were actually hired after the shutdown. Like me, there are people who don’t have a physical desk, chair, computer, phone, or anything else. Our physical existence is hypothetical.

I have the good fortune to have visited the building several times. I’ve met a few of my new colleagues in person, some through my husband and others through Toastmasters. I know where I will probably sit, if we start going back to the corporate campus soon. A few of the new hires can only look at pictures of the building and guess.

One of the odd things about telecommuting is getting used to VPN. It’s like the movie Inception, a computer within a computer, or sometimes more. A desktop within a desktop, with its own wallpaper and its own software. “I’m opening a browser from inside a browser!” This is really important for security reasons, of course. It works well enough once you’re over the “nesting Russian doll” feeling.

This process has been fun. The days are going by so fast, and there are so many things to learn and so many people to meet.

It’s also been weird, because the interruptions are so different from the kind that are typical in an office. I joined a call with my boss first thing in the morning, and there happened to be an entire flock of crows freaking out for several minutes on the roof across from us. (“Us” meaning my household, not me and the person to whom I was speaking). Today it was a dog barking frantically in the alley on my end; last time, it was someone else’s neighbor’s dog barking in the yard next door. So many dogs.

Cats are another one. Someone will be talking, chatter chatter chatter, and then suddenly a plaintive MEOW. Must be cat lunchtime.

My parrot has her good days and her bad days. Sometimes she will play quietly in her box fort for hours. Other times she wants to be on the call and has a way of letting out a shrill whistle the moment I turn off mute. It’s like she knows. (She might).

We’ve been joking about making her a little headset of her own. She is a biped who speaks English, and at 21 she’s certainly old enough to start contributing to the household. Maybe they’re hiring a paper shredder, who knows.

Telecommuting has changed a lot in our household. My hubby and I sit at our own desks, together but apart, on opposite ends of our couch. We’re often on calls at the same time. We have the same schedule and the same days off. We work in the same department. This is how we met, fifteen years ago, though of course in those days we couldn’t have guessed we would marry and share a whiteboard together.

This style of working from home is much more interesting, now that the world has shut down for who knows how long. The time passes very quickly. I like to imagine what I’ll be working on three years from now, and how much of what is new to me today will be routine then. What will a regular workday look like in 2023?

It all started when I set out to clean the oven at our rental house. I had a joke from one of my clients: “Oven’s dirty, time to move!” I was starting to learn about “ask, don’t task” and realizing that it can be very useful to have an engineer around. I thought out how to reframe my problem of DIRTY OVEN.

1. I could ignore it - not hardly. This was basically like the inside of Hell’s Elevator.
2. I could spray it with toxic chemicals that might kill my little gray parrot.
3. I could kneel in front of it for three hours, chipping at it with eco-friendly cleanser.
4. I could trade the task off to my husband and do something else for him instead.
5. I could hire someone to do it.
6. I could ask my husband if there was an easier way to do it.

That’s what I did. I outlined the problem. I reminded him that when he helped me move out of my apartment after two years of dating, it had taken me three hours to clean the oven. I estimated how much it would probably cost to hire a cleaning service, many of which will not clean ovens just as they won’t wash windows. I believed there had to be a better way. Take off the oven door, maybe?

“Hold on,” he said.

He went out to the garage, a promising sign.

He came back out with... the cordless drill. He attached a scouring pad to it, an abrasive tool that was designed for shop use. He got some cleanser out from under the sink.

He pulled out the oven racks.

He pulled up the wooden step stool that I use to reach high kitchen shelves and he sat on it. He turned on the drill and started scouring the black volcanic mess that was our oven.

Fourteen minutes later, that oven was showroom clean.

“That should do it,” he said, and he took the drill back out to the garage.

I was still standing there with my jaw hanging open when he came back.

(Then I found a silicon oven liner for $20 and we’ve never looked back).

We’ve spent a considerable amount of time since then (2010), talking about how engineering could solve so many scutwork problems, if only someone were to bring them to the attention of an engineer. In the years since, we’ve seen various solutions hit the market, and I own some of them.

Drill attachments specifically for tough housework jobs

Power scrubbers with extension poles for jobs like scrubbing bathtubs

Window-cleaning robots in two types, suction and magnetic

A robot vacuum that picks up pet hair (but not feathers, hint hint)

A robot mop

Robot lawnmower? A joke that I made in 2010, it’s now a reality

I’m still holding out for a toilet-cleaning robot ($500, nowhere to store it) and a laundry-folding robot, once they become efficient enough to be worth the effort.

We have a joke about “starting the robots” when we leave our apartment. We spend about five minutes crating our pets, picking up the dog dishes, and checking for charger cables on the floor. Then we turn on the countertop dishwasher and the Roomba. We also used to have a washer and dryer. We would go to the movies, laughing about how robots were doing our housework and speculating on what we could delegate next.

There’s another thing that we do, something that feels like a total impossibility for most households. That is to live in a deliberately small space and own few material objects.

Sing HEY! for minimalism!

It doesn’t take us long to clean because there isn’t much to clean. You can almost reach every surface of our kitchen or bathroom by standing in one spot. We can’t keep a lot of stuff out on countertops because we don’t have much counter space. We can either preserve one square foot of countertop for cooking meals, or we could put one thing on it.

Which one thing is more valuable than the ability to prepare meals? A stand mixer? A cookie jar? A pile of junk mail?

I’ve found in my work with clutter clients that the more they wish for old-fashioned home cookin’, the more stuff they have in their kitchens, and the less they actually cook. Any professional chef would tell you that you can do it all with one good knife, a cutting board, a large bowl, a spatula, and a pan.

My people keep more than that stacked up in their sink, much less the entire room.

What crushes me about all of this is that almost all my people have a functional dishwasher. I grew up without one. In point of fact, my husband had to teach me how to load a dishwasher because I made it into my thirties without really knowing how they work. It takes four minutes to unload a clean dishwasher. Unload it once a day and spend 10 seconds put dirty dishes directly into it after each meal. It’s like a miracle! Yet you’re all out there weeping bitter tears about how much work it is. Are you kidding me with this???

The truth is that it’s entirely possible to cook nutritious, balanced meals in a microwave in under ten minutes and then spend about 90 seconds cleaning up afterward. I cannot cognitively fathom why there is so much angst over kitchen work. But then microwaves and dishwashers feel like the Star Trek future to me, and garbage disposals do, too.

So much of this is about how we internalize what we perceive as social expectations, and how we react emotionally to those expectations.

Breaking down these tasks as engineering problems is a way to distance them from the emotional landscape. Would I feel resentful and burdened about this if a robot was doing it? If it never even became a problem? The first time I shook off some blackened spilled pie filling from our $20 oven liner, I also shook off some mid-20th-century expectations. I’m ready for my 21st-century kitchen and wondering what else I can pawn off on household robots.

Cal Newport is back to help us think clearly. It’s no surprise that the author of the incredible and essential Deep Work would bring us a thoughtful, well-researched book like Digital Minimalism. Let’s pause a moment and consider whether our use of electronic devices and social media is intentional.

Newport makes a compelling case that our digital lives have become pervasive without our really realizing it. We never planned to be checking our phones so often; it just happened. Further, this unintentional creeping was deliberately designed by tech companies. They manipulate our attention, using intermittent rewards to keep us hooked and using their products as many minutes a day as possible.

What should we do? We should protect how we spend our time. We should make those decisions based on our deepest personal values and the activities we enjoy the most. Digital minimalism is making sure that our social media use, streaming content, gaming, and other uses of our time provide massive value. It’s also making sure that our digital lives aren’t completely crowding out delights like playing music or visiting friends face-to-face.

There’s a “new economics” that shifts the unit of measure of value from money to time. Many of us feel that we don’t have enough time, no matter how much money we have. Minimalism is a way of reclaiming our time from cultural default activities and rededicating it to people and activities that are truly important to us. Newport cites the financial independence community and Mr. Money Mustache as examples.

Intention over convenience is the goal. Are we actually choosing how we spend our time, and are we respecting our own priorities? Hacks are insufficient for reining in digital consumption, though people have tried. Newport advises a detox, a thirty-day digital declutter, during which we can rediscover all the things we love to do but forgot about, because we always have our phones in our hands. We can then gradually reintroduce digital content, remembering that permanent transformation is what we need to get our lives back.

Other people have done it and we can use their example. Digital Minimalism has many examples of digital minimalists who started painting and reading again, among other things. We can use the internet in service of a “leisure renaissance,” learning to do new things, connect with people who share our interests, and find out about events and activities.

Digital Minimalism offers a Seasonal Leisure Plan, which can be built either around the academic calendar, quarterly business cycles, or anything else that the individual prefers. Newport also has a plan for Slow Media, a good idea for news junkies like me. We can continue to engage in social media, though most people can get their needs met in 20-40 minutes of use per week!

This is a provocative and interesting book. I read it after realizing that I had been filling far too much time reading news articles, and making the resolution to be more aware of my news consumption. I decided that the easiest way to deal with this was to focus on reading full-length books instead, like I’ve done most of my life, and using my devices to support that. It has been wonderful! Why read a bunch of clickbait instead of novels and fascinating books like Digital Minimalism? Now that warm weather is coming, I’m going to sit myself down and think about all the fun things there are to do outdoors, with my phone zipped into my pocket.

Favorite quotes:

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

As I’ve learned by interacting with my readers, many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives.

After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the more someone used social media, the more likely they were to be lonely.

Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure.