I Hear You Knocking, But You Can’t Come In
I read a great piece yesterday morning by Priscilla Ho about disconnecting from her phone in order to get more done. The timing of her article was perfect since this is something I have been thinking about lately.

I have a total love/hate relationship with my iPhone. It’s great for keeping track of my to do list and for making notes to myself. It allows me to play Scrabble whereever and whenever I want (Scrabble is a more-than-minor addiction of mine). There are long stretches of my past that have gone completely undocumented, but now I have more photos of Daisy and sunrises and flowers and records and and Pez dispensers than you can shake a stick at.
In short, my phone makes it a little easier to keep myself organized, makes my work a lot easier (a big part of my job is managing clients’ social media accounts) and has a lot of upside.
At the same time, though, it’s always there. Even with nearly all of my notifications turned off, it’s still a constant distraction. Don’t feel like writing that article? Play a few turns of Scrabble. Can’t figure out the font you want to use? Scroll through Instagram now, design later. And so on.
The last thing I want to be is someone who is a slave to his phone. How many times have you been in a bar or restaurant and seen a tableful of people and they are all on their phones? And I’m not pointing fingers because I know that I’ve been at that table. In general, when I’m out with friends, I my phone case is closed. The only time I touch it is when I’m expecting a call or text or when we need to settle a bar bet about how many home runs Alan Trammell hit in 1987, the year he was robbed of the MVP award in favor of George Bell. (FYI, it was 28 home runs.)
And it’s not just bars and restaurants. I was riding my bike a couple of days ago (which is what spurred me to write this in the first place) and I saw six or seven kids (probably tweens) standing in a circle, looking like they were getting ready to pick teams for a baseball game or something, but instead they were ALL staring at the phones in their hands. Every single one of them was fully engaged with their phone, rather than with the other kids who were standing just a foot or two away. I recognize that digital living is a big part of growing up now, but sometimes it seems a bit much.
All in all, I think I’m pretty good about my phone. I don’t check Facebook incessantly (Instagram is a different story), I rarely take it to bed with me (sometimes if I’m having a hard time sleeping, I will play some Scrabble) and when I am out with people, my phone is put away 99% of the time.
Still, though, if I get a text, I stop what I’m doing and check it. Same thing with phone calls. And then, while I’m checking my texts, I might play a couple of turns at Scrabble (seriously, I have a problem) or scroll through Twitter. And then, POOF, fifteen minutes just disappeared.
I’m letting my phone dictate the terms of our relationship. This is what I liked about Priscilla’s suggestion of using airplane mode—it’s a conscious decision that puts me in control. Checking texts and messages is an appointment that I can choose to keep (or not), rather than something that I allow to interrupt me.
At the risk of sounding like a pretentious jackass (which is exactly what someone says just before sounding like a pretentious jackass), when I’m working I really need to stay in the flow. Both as a designer and as a writer…random interruptions can just kill you and it can take a long time to get back into a rhythm.
Better to turn off as many of the interruptions as you can, then let them back in when the timing works for you.
I have a schedule today that is going to require me to do my best to stay on task all day. I have four or five distinct projects that could each benefit from an hour or two of focus. So as soon as I wrap this up, I’m going to check my e-mail and my phone and then I’m going to switch over to airplane mode and just get to work.
I’ll let you know how it went tomorrow.
