I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how much I use my phone, spurred on in no small part by this video by Eddy Burback . Although I can’t do what he did (I need my phone to do my job!), I still think about how much time I’m spending on “the damn telephone.”
It’s so much!
We’ve recently been trying something new where we delay how quickly we grab our phone first thing in the morning – obviously on days where we rush to work it has to be almost right away – there are overdue emails to attend to, after all! But on days where we can stay in… maybe we eat breakfast first. Have some tea. It’s nice.
It’s hard! I am not at all good at being bored. I find myself reaching for it more often than I care to admit, but sometimes I’ll try to break or delay the habit when I notice it. Obviously we can’t do this all the time: scrollingon our phone is one of the main ways we deal with feeling over or under-stimulated, especially in public. But at home, where we have the option of what to do… we feel so much better when we haven’t checked our phone for the day. Like a weight we’re used to carrying around all day isn’t present anymore.
Anyways, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about. I don’t think I could ever go full “no smartphone, landline only” mode, but sometimes it is nice to think about a life where I can eat breakfast before I have to deal with all the fires in my personal and professional lives.