"At a personal level, every morning, I get up at such a time that I can spend an hour in prayer, followed by an hour of reading before I let myself look at my phone."

"At a more family level, we practice Sabbath together. The whole 24-hour period, we put all of our phones away. We gather around the table with close friends. We celebrate a huge meal. We practice gratitude, rest; we sleep, we play. And that is a major part of our rule of life that we kind of anchor our weekly rhythm as a family around...."

Writes Tish Harrison Warren, in "This Year, Try Organizing Your Life Like a Monk" (NYT). 

"Do you think nonreligious people or people who are not Christians should have a rule of life? Well, I would say that all people have a rule of life. You likely have a morning routine, you have a way that you spend your free time, you probably have a job. Hopefully you have a budget. For a lot of people, the problem in their life is not that they don’t have a rule of life, it’s that they do. The problem is not that it’s not working. It’s that it is working, but it’s poorly designed. It’s giving them outcomes — emotional outcomes, relational outcomes, vocational outcomes — different than the ones they actually desire.... [C]larify in your mind and heart a vision of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live — what you most deeply value — and then work backward and very slowly. Don’t try to go hard core...."

The author is influenced by the Rule of St. Benedict, and here's the Wikipedia article:

[I]n about the year 500, Benedict became so upset by the immorality of society in Rome that he gave up his studies there, at age fourteen, and chose the life of an ascetic monk in the pursuit of personal holiness, living as a hermit in a cave.... [H]e eventually founded the monastery...where he wrote his Rule near the end of his life....

The "Rule" seems like many rules. Chapter 7 alone has 12 rules — 12 steps in a ladder to Heaven — just on the topic of humility:

(1) Fear God; (2) Subordinate one's will to the will of God; (3) Be obedient to one's superior; (4) Be patient amid hardships; (5) Confess one's sins; (6) Accept the meanest of tasks, and hold oneself as a "worthless workman"; (7) Consider oneself "inferior to all"; (8) Follow examples set by superiors; (9) Do not speak until spoken to; (10) Do not readily laugh; (11) Speak simply and modestly; and (12) Express one's inward humility through bodily posture.

It's interesting to see Step 10,  "Do not readily laugh" right after blogging about the intern at the "best restaurant in the world," who, assembling "fruit-leather beetles," was "forbidden to laugh." Forbidden! St. Benedict's humility rule was only do not readily laugh. The rule against laughing too easily was for the purpose of humility. The rule against all laughter, at the pretentious restaurant, was for the opposite purpose: hauteur. 

So, yeah, I don't think things are as bad today as they were in the year 500, but the NYT author seems to think we're in a similar predicament. Whether we are or not, it is a good idea to look at what you are doing — what rule you are following — and figure out what end you are pursuing. If that's not the end you want, maybe you could think in terms of writing a new "rule" for yourself or, like the author, for your whole family.