The Daily Phone Detox

I waste a lot of time on my phone (and the internet) throughout the course of the day. So, I decided to see what would happen if I cut myself off for a week between the hours of 8 and 5. Here’s how it went.

This piece is designed to accompany a video I posted to my YouTube channel (linked down below for anyone who has 10 minutes to spare), but here I’ll focus on some of the key aspects of this experiment as well as some things that I didn’t bring up during the video.

You Don’t Realize How Often You Check Your Phone Until It’s Turned Off

I had a feeling this would happen, but I was surprised by how often it happened. Throughout the course of the day, I would reflexively pull out my phone and tap the screen to wake it up. Given that it was turned off, it wouldn’t do anything, reminding me of the experiment. Especially for the first few days, this happened repeatedly; essentially, any time that I lost focus or became idle, my hand instinctively went for my phone. Fortunately, over the course of the week I got better about this, and I actually got used to the fact that my phone just wasn’t available to me between the hours of 8 and 5. If you don’t believe me, try it for yourself: turn off your phone for a day (or maybe just a few hours), and take note of how many times you reach for it. You might be surprised by the results.

Like It Or Not, I Was Still Chained To My Phone

One of the most frustrating things about the experiment was that I knew that I would need to use my phone for 2-Factor Authentication and COVID-testing. I loved the idea of not needing to break my rule for a whole week, but I realized before I even started that it wasn’t going to be possible. In the grand scheme of things, only having to turn on the phone once or twice over the course of the week wasn’t all that bad, but it still felt wrong. Here I was, making a conscious effort not to use my phone, and I couldn’t even last a week without it. The truth is, my life at Tech is pretty repetitive, and I imagine that I would struggle much more with this experiment if I was actually outside of the college bubble. I have relatively few responsibilities, and only a handful of people would contact me if they were having an emergency, but that won’t always be the case. As time goes on, doing an experiment like this will become less and less feasible, and I suspect that I will never regularly turn my phone off during the day in the future.

What Did I Get Out Of It?

One of the biggest themes of this experiment was improved productivity. I undoubtedly achieved this goal; not being able to waste time meant that I allocated more time to doing work, school-related or otherwise. It also kept me from my unhealthy habit of regularly checking my News feed or my YouTube analytics, something I found quite freeing. But, of course, there were some not-so-great aspects of the experiment. Not being able to take breaks was a challenge. It wasn’t that I intentionally cut out breaks; my plan had been to replace my breaks where I would watch YouTube or go on my phone with reading. Unfortunately, since I spend so much time reading for my classes, reading my own book didn’t feel like much of a break. I ended up attempting to switch between different mediums of work (video editing, reading/writing, etc.), but this only worked for so long if I didn’t have anything else to break up my day. I also found that my evenings were slightly less productive than usual; it was as if I was trying to catch up on the news and updates that I had missed over the course of the day. That being said, my days as a whole were still much more productive, and as a result I think the experiment was a success.

What Happens Now?

I have very mixed feelings as this challenge ends. On the one hand, there were days that I felt great, got a lot of work done, and didn’t mind that I’d signed myself up for this experiment. On the other hand, I didn’t like feeling disconnected from the world every time I went outside, and not being able to go on my phone or the internet on the weekend was less than ideal. For now, I’ll be keeping my phone turned on again so people can easily reach me during the day, but I’ll be limiting my use. I’m still not planning on letting myself use my phone and the internet during the day as much as I did before, but I can already tell that without putting some mechanisms in place this will be a challenge. As much as I’d like to rely on self-restraint, I may end up investigating some apps that can help reinforce my positive behaviors and keep me from reflexively checking my phone.

If you’ve made it this far, you might as well watch the full video. There’ll be another experiment coming soon…