Taking Back Your Screen Time feat. Dino Ambrosi – an Interview

Hello friends! Welcome or welcome back to The Daydreamer! Today’s post covers a topic I care about a lot, which is tech addiction. I got the opportunity to interview Dino Ambrosi, founder of Project Reboot, a digital detox program that now includes an online version with a community. I first saw Dino in a TEDx talk on YouTube, where he spoke about the trajectory of our time in the future and how screen time was hacking our brains. I immediately emailed him because I related deeply, and from that email conversation, I joined the first cohort of his online community digital detox program. He had a lot to share with us, so let’s dive in!

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Please tell us a little bit about yourself! Who are you?

Well, I’m from Half Moon Bay, California, just south of San Francisco. It’s a small coastal town that’s famous for having really big pumpkins and really big waves, so we have an annual pumpkin festival here where every year they do the pumpkin weigh-off, and usually the world record is broken. I think last year they had a 2700-pound pumpkin. So that’s exciting, and then we also have some of the biggest waves in the world at Mavericks [Beach]. They get up to like 68 feet or something like that. I do not surf those waves, but I think it’s cool that they’re nearby. So yeah, I’m from here.

I grew up going to Lake Tahoe a lot because I was a competitive mogul skier and that was a big part of my childhood. I went to school at Berkeley and got addicted to my phone, as you are aware. I ended up mostly resolving that for myself while taking a break from school to do an internship in New York and then coming back and running a course at Berkeley and then launching Project Reboot and now basically what I do is I spread the contents of that class I made at Berkeley to as many people as I can and am trying to bring this to people all over the world. That’s the goal of bringing Project Reboot online and it’s most of what I think about on a daily basis. There’s not much more to me than that, to be honest, at this point in my life. I travel and I work. 

That leads right to my next question, so what’s your personal screen time journey, and what’s that looked like for you? When did you realize you had a problem with technology, and how did you first deal with that?

I definitely went through periods when I was a kid of maybe having more screen time than is advisable, like I played a lot of Mario Kart when that game came out on the Wii. When I got my first iPhone I did play a bunch of Doodle Jump. When I was in high school, I would binge-watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Like there were periods where I went through I would say excessive use, but I don’t think I ever really thought of it as a problem or beat myself up for it. To me, it just felt like my use of my free time and I didn’t think about it too much.

Then I got to college and that’s when it became a problem because it was my escape from academic stress. [But it’s like a] digital pacifier, and the more that you turn to it, the lower your tolerance for all discomfort becomes, so then I couldn’t cope with boredom or anxiousness or social awkwardness or even falling asleep at night. It was definitely at its worst when I was in college and I’d say it kind of stunted my growth and prevented me from making the most of that experience.

And then it got much better, first when I went to New York to do that internship but especially when I was back teaching a [screen time] class at Berkeley, because [in my class] I was actually walking the walk on what I was preaching. I was sharing my screen time report with my students every week and was doing a lot of other things outside of school. I was kind of firing on all cylinders during that senior year. I got straight A’s for the first time, I taught that class, and I ran a marathon. It felt like a real peak for me.

Then I got out of school and I went to start Project Reboot as a business and a new set of challenges cropped up. For one, I didn’t have that accountability anymore because I wasn’t meeting with the same students every week, so I wasn’t sharing my screen time with anyone. I definitely had stress, because starting a business is stressful, and my first attempt at the business completely failed. I was trying to start a summer camp and I got like no sign-ups. For the first six months of Project Reboot, I made almost no money; I was just doing consulting. Then I finally found the school angle [of Project Reboot] and started to grow that and a new problem arose which was that now, I was hyperresponsive to notifications because I would occasionally get an email that I’d been hired by a school and was going to make thousands of dollars to come speak. All of a sudden my phone’s like a slot machine [like in Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter], right, because, that notification, you don’t know what it is. It’s the slot machine turning and every once in a while you open it up and ding ding ding! You’ve been hired by like, Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco and it’s the best feeling ever. So that’s been a challenge that I’ve had to figure out how to navigate, is not becoming overly sensitive and attached to my phone even though it is this continuous source of great news that comes in at random intervals. It’s the scarcity loop from Scarcity Brain. It’s the perfect example of that.

I’ve also had to navigate not having any structure. I’ve gotten the business and schools now to the point where honestly, I can work for about two hours a week outside of the speaking at schools and I can run the whole business, like sending the emails, sending the contracts, and doing the sales calls. I’ve had weeks before where I just haven’t worked, and I haven’t had to work, and nobody’s known I wasn’t working because it’s just me. So I had an extreme lack of accountability because I was completely solo and there were a lot of periods last year where, from an outside perspective, everything looked great. I mean, I had complete control over my time, I had no obligations, I was financially stable, I had a career where I was doing something I was really passionate about. But when I wasn’t speaking at schools I was actually miserable because I was being completely unintentional [with my screen time] and I wasn’t making any progress on things I didn’t have to do, and that was really hard.

Living in San Francisco for the last year was kind of a mini low point again and that wasn’t resolved until I went to New Zealand and that was my kind of new environment shift. That’s when I recorded the online course video series and that’s when I started planning out and mapping out the whole program and community platform and all of that stuff. Then having people come into the community has been one of the best things for my intentionality. I still haven’t been perfect, but I’d say that I’ve been on average probably 25% better than I was previously and I’m actually getting work done that I don’t have to do, now that I have people that know that there are things that I’m trying to do and that I’m saying I’m going to do, so I feel like I have to do that now. That was a long answer, but that’s kind of been the trajectory that it’s taken with lots of mini ups and downs along that journey. 

So you have a TEDx talk about how social media is filling many people’s time, especially teenagers. In my own research, I’ve learned a lot about the damaging effects this has. Are there any specific things you think teenagers should know on the topic of screen time and how this affects them? 

Yes. I would say the first thing is to understand the value of your time. That is, at the end of the day, the most important resource that you have control over. Money is renewable and you can always make more of it. You cannot make more time. You have a finite amount of it left and the decisions you make about how to spend it are going to influence the quality of your life and the impact you have on the world. Treat it as gold, because it is. So that’s the first thing.

Also, I think there are a lot of teens that don’t have a super unhealthy relationship with technology in the sense that their screen time [reports] show they’re only on their phones for two or three hours per day. There are kids out there where that’s the case but it’s almost always because they have such a busy and packed schedule that they just don’t have the time to spend more than that on their phone, and I think what can happen is that kids can have an existing draw to digital distraction, a proclivity to escape things on their devices, but that digital pacifier habit loop can be interrupted by a busy schedule and hide that problem until they get to college. Often that’s a turning point for a lot of people where things get worse. So I think recognizing the role of your schedule on your screen time is huge. If it’s a problem already, try to pack out your schedule with stuff that you have to be going to. If it’s not a problem, be aware of the fact that that doesn’t mean you are immune to it. It might just mean at this point in time, it is not able to grow into a huge problem because of how busy you are. There’s a lot that I think teens need to know, that’s why I have a whole hour-long assembly that I tell them about, but to me, that’s the biggest thing to take away: nobody’s immune to this. 

What exactly is Project Reboot, how does it work, and how would someone participate if they were interested in doing so?

Project Reboot is a few things. In schools, it’s for the most part just an assembly and parent presentation. The idea is that I come in and address the entire community and I start new conversations about how everybody’s using technology in an effort to create kind of a cultural shift on campus. For me now, with my friends, if we’re hanging out together and someone is just on their phone, it’s rude. That’s not a culturally accepted thing to be distracted when you’re in the presence of your friends. But it wasn’t always that way for us. That would’ve been fine in high school. So I’ve had a culture shift with the people around me and I think we need to start having that happen in schools. I want to basically drive those conversations and break down the barriers to people opening up about their screen time, because a lot of times people have shame around their current level of screen time that prevents them from talking about it, so getting everyone to understand that it’s not your fault if you’re struggling with this, everybody’s struggling with it to a certain extent. We’re all being hacked, and it’s helpful for us to open up about it, and there’s stuff that we can do together to resolve this problem. That’s the goal of bringing Project Reboot into schools, and I do have in-class follow-up activities that complement the assembly but it’s mostly a conversation starter and something that gets kids to think for themselves and do things like download Clearspace and some of the easy steps.

What Project Reboot is becoming increasingly is this guided week-long digital detox program. That’s my vision for it as like kind of the ultimate intervention for a problem that already exists. So for people who think their relationship with their devices is unhealthy, Project Reboot is my formula for resolving that problem. It’s something that I’ve been working on for the last four years, for myself and then through the class at Berkeley and then working with schools and now bringing it online and my goal is to take that guided digital detox and make it so that anybody that’s struggling with this can participate in it and then can continue to be a part of the Project Reboot community. To me, the guided digital detox program is really just the onboarding into the community. I don’t think it should stop [with the guided detox]. You can’t just in one week resolve [the problem] forever. I think having the continued engagement is important, so that’s a big part of it too. It’s a program, and it’s a community.

Right now, [to participate in the online detox program], the first step is to go to projectreboot.school and go to the online course section of the website and join the waitlist. Then I’ll reach out to those emails when we have a new cohort coming around and people can book a 15-minute screening call with me. Eventually, we’re going to get to the point where that’s no longer feasible. I’ll probably do the one-on-one calls for the first hundred or hundred and fifty people in the community and then we’ll have kind of more of an automated application process, but right now, go to the website, join the waitlist, and I’ll get in touch. 

You’ve also discussed on your YouTube channel how technology can not only be a weight belt but a jet pack. What are some of the amazing opportunities and tools technology has provided you in your experience?

I’d say it falls into a few categories. It can be a second brain. If you think about it, our devices are an extension of our brain that doesn’t have all the issues our first brain has. Our memories are really flawed and computers have perfect memory so we can lean on that to augment ourselves. And having good systems, like “Oh, there’s a thing I need to be at, I’m immediately putting that in my calendar. Oh, there’s a thing I need to get done, that’s immediately going in my to-do list.” Then it can also help keep track of and prioritize the big important things we want to get done and see those all in one place. For me, that’s what Notion is. It’s my means of tracking, prioritizing, and executing my most important work and that is extremely helpful to me. So there’s the extension of your brain piece.

There’s also the access to information, which I think is amazing and generally, I feel like we underutilize the internet just being all the information that humans have ever recorded, available all the time. It’s amazing. It’s like condensed time because people spend years or decades pulling together content we can consume in a couple hours. It’s almost like a form of extending your life, by consuming these bite-sized nuggets of knowledge, these books or podcasts or online courses or whatever that can really help you develop skills and just grow in general. And as a rule of thumb, if you have a pretty good understanding of where you want to be in five years, I can almost guarantee you that there’s someone already there or who is in a similar place and they’ve documented that journey and have lessons that you can just immediately listen to on a podcast. Like [if you want to] build an online course, there are people who have already built online courses that have documented how to do it. Tap into that. It’s like humanity’s collective intelligence. That’s a huge aspect of it.

And then there’s also connecting with people from all over the world. That’s super cool too. I mean, if I were to try to start a Project Reboot community in Half Moon Bay, there’d maybe be five people who’d show up that are like “Yup, I have this problem and I’m passionate enough about it to carve out time and meet up in person.” The internet enables communities that could never exist in real life because people who are passionate about a specific thing, even if it’s only 0.00001% of humanity, [which is] still a ton of people, can all meet in one place without the barriers of geography. To me, those are like the three main things. And it can also make you laugh a lot. There’s all sorts of funny stuff online too, which is good. 

Where are you personally on this journey to limit unintentional tech use? Where would you like to be?

I’d say I’m like 90% of the way there, for the most part. I still have periods, especially when I’ve got low energy or when I’m traveling, where I’m not perfect. I’m still relying on the environment design piece and that makes things [easier]. When I’m home, I’m almost perfect with it at this point, especially with the community and everything too. But that’s not the case when I’m traveling, because I lose the control over my environment. I think I need to keep working on becoming the kind of person that has the discipline and resilience to avoid the temptation of getting sucked into rabbit holes and I mostly have that when I’m in a stable environment, but when my environment gets disrupted and I’m jet lagged, I’m far from perfect. 

The last question is a fun one. Since most of my followers are young writers and readers, what are your top three favorite books?

Oh, man. Ok, I love Ready Player One as a fiction book. I think that book is phenomenal. I love Atomic Habits as a self-improvement book and…. I’m torn between Man’s Search for Meaning and When Breath Becomes Air. I can’t pick between those two.

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Thank you so much, Dino, for doing this interview with me! Make sure to check out his TEDx talk here and to follow him on YouTube here.

What does your screen time look like? How have you used your screens productively and beneficially? What’s one aspect of technology that holds you back? Let us know in the comments, and I hope to see you on Project Reboot! Have a wonderful week!