Spending a week without my phone!

Over the past couple of years and specially the recent several months I’ve always tried to be more intentional with what it is that I do, I think that’s made me a better person not only when it comes to work but also my relationship with my friends and family.

But I’ve realised during this lock-down period that the phone has become more of a nuisance than it has been a blessing.

You know when I got my first iPhone back in 2012, there wasn’t really much to do. I mean, whatever it is that you could do, you could do it better on your computer.

But now, there’s just so much that you can do with your phone. And while I’m grateful for the advancement we’ve made, I think we’ve let our behavior run amok when it comes to discipline.

The video version can be found below

Alright, so let’s do this.

Day 1:

So the first day started by about 5 because I was wrapping prior engagements and I thought I might not get as many insights as I would like but I couldn’t be more wrong.

There were countless moments where I caught myself reaching for my phone and that was a little disturbing.

I’m going to make sure that there’s a notebook always at hand to jolt down whatever I’m feeling and experiencing. I mean, I could do this on the iPad but I guess I’ll take this opportunity to avoid the screen as much as I possibly can.

After a couple of hours, I distinctly remember feeling that the room was missing something or was incomplete.

I did, however, notice an abundance of free time, specially towards bed time, so instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media till I fell asleep I watched a couple of videos that were on my watch-list, had a shower and crashed.

Day 2:

Now I’m not sure how insightful this day is because I was rather busy with shooting another video. For one, I barely reached for the phone about 5 times.

But there’s definitely quite a lot of free time, it’s nice but it’s also strange. I can’t put my finger to it, the strangeness of it yet.

One thing I did realise last night though, because technically I haven’t switched my phone off and it’s just tucked neatly away in that cabinet, is that I’ve became super aware of the barrage of notifications that I usually get and more so because now I know I’m not supposed to check. Usually I would be in the midst of it, not realising the sheer volume of information I was indulging in.

But I won’t lie, a part of me was a bit concerned about missing something important.

Given that a certain degree of work has to happen on the phone, I’m devising a system for myself that I’ll abide by for the next several days.

I’m limiting WhatsApp usage to minutes in the morning and in the evening just to respond to anything pertaining to work.
For the rest of the time, my phone will be neatly tucked above my desk where if I do happen get a call it’ll get re-directed to my iPad.

I’m sensing a new bed time routine forming, that is: dinner, watching some YouTube videos, showering and crashing.

Now, Is this routine that’s there to stay? I’m not sure, I think it’s a bit too early to make that assumption. So, anyway, good night.

Day 3:

Mornings have been particularly interesting. Generally, I would spend about 5–10 minutes meandering through the phone but now, there’s nothing better to do than to just get up.

Turns out work proceeds seamlessly via FaceTime & email as well.

Okay this is too easy, it’s day 3 and to be honest, I was expecting more. I was expecting more of a challenge, something like a withdrawal or something. But not this, definitely not this.

Several months back in a video of mine I stated my intent with this channel which was that it’s meant for creators of all kind. And one of the common obstacles I’ve seen people face is with being consistent or getting into the flow.

While there are a myriad of reasons for it being that way and we can never truly get rid of every distraction, I think we owe it to ourselves to at least try. And once we do start identifying such problems in the systems around us and start working on resolving them, I think we come a lot more closer to our goals.

Night time routine maintained it’s course, all in all a pretty good day.

Day 4:

Okay, so before I started this experiment I truly believed that there will be days where I’ll just give up and use the phone but that hasn’t happened.

I’m not sure if that’s a great thing but I guess 7 days are not enough to assess any impact whatsoever, things like these do take time, they take months, at least.

The few times my friends needed to reach me they just called and that just worked.

Apart from that, not much of an insightful day when it comes to the phone though.

To be honest, the phone in its entirety is not to blamed at all. We cannot blame sugar for getting fat, it’s our consumption of it or rather our overindulgence of it.

And when you think about it, we’ve quite organically made the phone a part our lives but unlike the other activities which are quite orderly in themselves and have a stipulated time frame, the phone on the other hand is not.

We live in a world, where we utilize so many different apps for so many different things and we’re quite accustomed to getting a notification anytime, invariably ruining the moment that we’re having.

I’ve spoken about this in my previous video, getting into the flow and not being distracted is one of the truly essential things when it comes to creation and this non-consensual distraction does not seem to help but at all.

Day 5:

More or less the same, nothing life shattering has happened because I’ve avoided the phone.

I’m such a huge nerd, I just love going through statistics and observing different patterns and rhythms. Before I started this particular week, I tabulated my phone usage courtesy the screen-time feature of the iPhone.

So, here it is.

So on a daily basis, my daily average is 4 hours 23 minutes, out of which…

Social networking is 17 hours
Creativity is 2 hours 15 minutes
And something called as the other is 1 hour 50 minutes.

And that, that’s a lot of time.

And I get about 382 notifications a day, which is 15 notifications an hour and I think that’s a lot of micro distractions.

And I definitely want to reduce all of this, so I think I might have to be a little harsher on my restrictions.

Day 6:

You know, at this point it’s become so easy that I don’t know even know why I started this experiment to begin with.

Actually, I’d be lying if I said that. So, give me a moment.

I want to take this moment to talk to you about a certain stoic philosophy. Broadly speaking, there are things that are in our sphere of influence and things that are beyond our control.

Gravity, absence of sunlight at night, someone else’s opinion of us are just few of the things that are just not in our control. We can, however, within our sphere of influence build systems to tackle this lack of control. We’ve placed a man on the moon, we’ve invented the lightbulb, we, the homo-sapien, have to the best of our capabilities figured things out.

My point is that we have it in us to assess where we are, to figure out whether we’re doing what needs to be done for ourselves and our goals and if not then to take necessary steps to correct that as we see fit.

Day 7:

Okay, question to myself: Will I do this again?

No, because even though it was an interesting experiment, it was an avoidance of a problem rather than a solution.

I think that drastic measures don’t work. If you’re trying to inculcate better habits, it’s best to ease into them gradually and gauge how that goes. I’ve made a video on why things take time and that holds true for this process as well.

Having said that I’m going to be imposing certain restrictions on my Instagram and WhatsApp usage to about 50% of what it was, I think for just meandering through social media, an hour is enough.

It was an interesting experiment, it was an interesting week and I hope you try it as well. Do let me know how that goes for you. One common obstacle that people face with venturing into this experiment is that they have work which the phone facilitates which is fine, which is understandable, but one way to approach that would be to sit down and understand how much non-work and meandering happens between actual work and come up with solutions for the same.

Thank you so much for watching and I hope I was able to entertain your face.

Thank you for your time and as always.