Step aside, phone #3
The final week of the phone experiment
This was a short experiment for me, largely because I joined the group late and only really had 2 weeks of serious efforts to reduce phone time. I’m generally pleased with how this has gone.
One thing I tried to do a lot this week was use the iPhone focus modes and keep my ringer on. This is generally setup so calls from any contact can come through, and texts from specific people - depending on the focus - are allowed. This allows me to leave the phone elsewhere in the house and not worry about missing a call or a text. If it’s during the work day and my boss or coworker texts me, no problem. I do need to adjust the texting settings though… when I’m actually texting someone, the loud DING becomes rather much rather quickly.
I’ll probably finagle the focus settings a bit but continue to use this approach.
What did I get up to while I wasn’t scrolling? Well, not much, honestly. I’ve actually felt pretty unproductive recently, in terms of hobbies and personal life. This might be due to an increase in workload, but I’m not sure. Even when things are slow at work, I’m just lacking some motivation to sit down and play piano, go for a walk, shoot some photos, etc.
What didn’t I like? Although it felt good to limit my phone, at times this prevented me from doing things I wanted to. The daily crossword? Don’t want to raise my stats. Letting Terrica use my phone? What if she throws off my numbers. Playing music? Nah, I’ll use my laptop instead so if I change the album, it doesn’t add to my screentime.
With something like this, I need to remind myself of the reason I’m doing it. There’s one way to describe minimalism that I think fits well here: removing what doesn’t matter and what isn’t important to us, so that we can focus more clearly on what does. So for me, it’s not about not having a phone - no one would arrest me if I switched from an iPhone to a flip phone, it would just be inconvenient.
One thing I did like by the end of this short experiment is before I would leave the house, I ask myself more honestly if I need my phone. And lots of times, the answer to that is no. So I leave it behind, and for a few minutes, I’m just walking, going to trivia, or buying groceries.
Will I keep tracking my screen time? Probably to an extent. It would be cool to have stats for the whole year instead of just a couple weeks. And hopefully I don’t switch back to mindlessly scrolling, but maybe I can start doing the crossword for a few minutes each day.
Average: 1h 23m per day. Slightly lower than last week but not much.
Daily breakdown with top screen-timed apps:
Sunday: 1h 5m, but it’s scattered. 11m on safari, 8m messages, 8m clock.
Monday: 52m, mostly messages (24m)
Tuesday: 57m, mostly messages (24m, 9m NYT games)
Wednesday: 2h 2m, maps (42m) and messages (24m, wildly consistent lol)
Thursday: 57m, messages (22m)
Friday: 2h 10m, messages (58m)
Saturday: 1h 40m, messages (18m), notes (14m)
Something I don’t understand about the apple screen time totals is what is not displayed in the breakdown. For Saturday, if I add up the times from the detailed breakdown, rounding everything up (i.e. the 11 seconds on the Alaska Airlines app to a full minute), I only get to 1h 20m. What is the phantom 20 minutes from?
Laptop for a complete picture: 17 hours for the week, about half spent on photo processing.
I went for a photo walk on a misty and cold day, left my phone behind, and saw this hawk, quite close and personal:
I don’t think I have any major takeaways from the experiment. Using my phone less had an impact, but it wasn’t life altering. I’d recommend it though. I never felt deprived of my phone during this experiment - there were no screen time limits, no app restrictions, no rules. Just a more conscious approach of, “do I need to use my phone right now?” I’m very prone to the experience of opening a device to “quickly check one thing,” and before I know it, I’ve forgotten that thing and spent 5 minutes doing other things. This was a nice way to address that and catch myself mindlessly using my phone.
Read the other participants final reports and summaries here:
Manu’s week 3 recap: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/step-aside-phone-week-3
Kevin’s week 4 recap: https://cliophate.wtf/step-aside-phone-week-4
John’s week 4 recap: https://johnrakestraw.com/post/screen-time-report-4/
Cafelog’s week 3 recap: https://cafelog.fr/step-aside-phone-week-3/