Put Down Your Phone: The Millions Interviews Sammy Nickalls
“I look forward to the day that I don’t have to be on Twitter anymore,” I told a friend recently. I imagined a future in which I had achieved some level of professional success at which I no longer needed to monitor social media for opportunities to seize and connections to make. Any young literary aspirant knows what I mean. Many emerging writers and editors feel they have little say in the matter of time spent on social media—on top of actually putting pen to paper, combing through Twitter is just another part of the job.
Sammy Nickalls is experienced in the occupational hazards of social media. She’s written for outlets including Vulture, Teen Vogue, and Vice and previously worked in New York as an editor at Esquire and Adweek. After spending most of her 20s behind a screen, Nickalls decided to shut down all of her social media accounts for six months and emerged from the reset with a new perspective. Now, she proselytizes digital minimalism, a philosophy developed by Georgetown professor of computer science Cal Newport, to the tech-weary masses.
In her new book, , out May 10, Nickalls offers practical advice for those who want to limit their screen time but for whom logging off completely just isn’t an option. Taking cues from , , and , Nickalls provides a road map to a more deliberate, literary Twitter, self-discipline, and much more.
