I'm not sure why it says I was on my phone Sunday. I was certainly not. It may have counted a specific notification or something.
I have used my phone for less than an hour in the last week.
It’s funny. I have spent many years making intentional changes to how I use my phone — going greyscale, minimizing notifications, designing, and re-designing, and re-re-designing my apps and screens — and now, for the first time, I have gone a week practically phone-free, and it sort of just happened by accident.
Here's what happened. I woke up last Saturday and hesitated for an instance on my initial impulse to check my phone as a part of my morning bathroom routine. The fact that I check my phone during that time was itself a result of many iterations. I used to keep my phone on my bedside table, like most people. I checked it first thing in the morning after shutting off the alarm clock app. I later decided to keep it out of arm’s reach of my bed, and eventually out of the bedroom entirely. For a while, I tried not checking it until after a certain time, at least an hour or two after waking up. But eventually, I decided a quick morning check and put away was not a bad way to start my day, so long as I did not get stuck on it for a long time, or become tempted to treat non-urgent items as urgent, or let them bother me for one reason or another. I decided to keep my phone charging in the bathroom overnight so that I could check it standing up around the same time when I brush my teeth and weigh myself in the morning. It’s harder to get stuck on your phone when you’re checking it in your bathroom standing up.
So back to the story, this last Saturday, after hesitating to check my phone first thing, I decided not to. After a couple hours of not checking it, I realized I could go the whole day. For about as long as I’ve been iterating on how I use my phone, I’ve been intrigued by the concept of a digital sabbath, or at least a phone sabbath. That would mean no phone from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, or all day Saturday, or something like that. A weekly 24-hour fast from my phone has always seemed good and healthy. I might have done it once or twice before, but I have thought about it a lot more than I have acted on it. There is always some excuse. But this past Saturday, I had no plans, and no excuse. There was no foreseeable reason why I would actually need my phone, so I figured I’d go phone-free for the day, and I did.
When I woke up on Sunday, I was not champing at the bit to get back on the thing. I was much more interested in the possibility of going longer without it, so I started the day that way again, and I finished the day that way again. Monday seemed like a natural morning to break the phone fast after a full weekend, but when I woke up I realized I didn't need it, so I didn't use it.
Tuesday arrived and I broke the fast that afternoon, after 3+ days, not because I needed to or even wanted to, but pretty much just to break it. While I didn't need it for anything, there was one thing I wanted to do with it. I wanted to get Signal (the messaging app) working on my laptop and I needed to scan the QR code using my phone in order to re-link the devices. I don’t use Signal for anyone I talk to daily, so it certainly could have waited. I also knew I didn't have any important Signal messages awaiting responses because I get the notifications on my Apple Watch. I just need to use my laptop (or typically my phone) to message back. But I used the Signal re-link as a small excuse to break the streak so that the streak would not become the main thing. I didn’t want the main thing to be to see how long of a streak I could do. I wanted to make this more than a streak. I wanted to establish with myself that I can break the streak for 10 minutes of phone time, then put the phone away again, and continue using it minimally. So that’s what I did. I used it for another 10 minutes or so each of the following days and that’s about all I’ve used it for this week (you can see in the screenshot) — less than an hour in total, and I know it could have easily been 0. Nothing I used it for was necessary.
I wanted to write a bit about this because I’m pretty surprised about how it all happened. I always figured one day I could very intentionally detach from my phone when I finally cut all the ties and replaced all the things I did on my phone with alternative ways of doing them on my laptop or watch, but I did not expect it to just happen like this. So I wanted to assess how it happened, including the simple "this happened, then that happened" described above, but more than that, thinking about the contributing factors. I think the most important factor was that, after all these years, I was finally ready to detach, even though I didn't realize it.
Thinking about it now, I can see clearly that I was ready in a way that I was not a year ago. For example, it was about a year ago that I started wearing an Apple Watch daily for the second time in my life. The first time was from about 2015 to 2017. I bought the first model when it first came out for the same primary reason as I appreciate it now. I thought it could give me the opportunity to spend a lot less time on my phone. I liked it, and I wore it for a couple of years, but it did not live up to my expectations in terms of helping me to detach from my phone. The Apple Watch didn’t have cellular at the time and I didn’t realize when I bought it that it had to be within a certain range of my phone in order to serve many of the phone-related functions. I could use it around my place instead of my phone, like if my phone was in another room, but I couldn’t go out on Friday night without my phone, which was something I was hoping to be able to do when I bought it.
By the time the versions with cellular came out, I had lost interest and stopped wearing a watch altogether, but about a year ago, I bought a new Apple Watch primarily for it’s ability to passively track my fitness throughout. I got the version with cellular so that I could go for a run, track the run with my Runkeeper app, and listen to a podcast while I did it, but the cellular ended up being useful for much more than that. For example, I started going for walking calls with just my watch and leaving my phone at home. Over the course of the last year, I got more comfortable with using the watch for more and more things.
Another critical step was getting the Wallet app working. I usually carried my wallet around when I left the house until about a year or two ago. By then I realized I could use Apple Pay on my phone pretty much everywhere. I knew I could get Apple Pay on my Apple Watch as well, but I never did it because it required me to put a passcode on my watch and I didn’t want to do that. I had to put a passcode on my old Apple Watch in 2017 as a part of my employer’s policy for having work messages on there, and I ultimately stopped using the watch entirely because of that. I had to basically enter a passcode any time I wanted to use the watch for anything, which sort of defeated the purpose of its convenience. Maybe I was missing a setting back then, but this time around a fellow Apple Watch wearer informed me that I could turn on the passcode function to only require the passcode any time I put it on after having it off. Since I usually put my watch on in the morning and take it off before bed, that meant just once per day. This one-time daily passcode was no big deal compared to the every-use passcode I used to deal with, so I turned it on, enabled Apple Pay through the Wallet app, and started paying for everything using my watch. Several months later, it still feels pretty cool, especially since I'm less than a couple of years removed from carrying leather everywhere and swiping cards. I feel like I leapfrogged Apple Pay with my phone similar to how some people in developing countries leapfrogged computers and flip phones going straight to a smartphone. I pretty much went straight from swiping cards to waving watch -- no phone or wallet needed.
So, as of a few months ago, I could pay with my watch, message with my watch (speak-to-text), make calls, listen to podcasts, listen to music, check my calendar, and record notes. That’s most of what I use my phone for, but there are some other little things as well. For example, when I weigh myself every morning, I usually press a button in an app on my phone (Renpho) which logs the weigh-in so that I can track a bunch of weight-related metrics over time. Fortunately, Renpho has a simple watch app as well which has the same button. I can’t check the history and everything on my watch, but I don’t need to do that anywhere close to daily. I can just press the button on my watch, step on the scale, and boom, data logged.
I thought I needed to keep my phone on me for a bunch of edge cases, like to call an Uber, but this few day phone fast motivated me to identify those edge cases and see if I could solve for them. I feel I was able to do so. With Uber, for example, you can call an uber from your laptop at https://m.uber.com/go/pickup. You can also use your Apple Watch to call 1-833-873-8237 and tell them your location and destination. There is an annoying little complication where they send you a code to confirm your identity, and since you don’t have your phone (you would not be doing this if you did), you have to end the call to check your texts for the code, and then call back again and give them that code. Still, it’s doable. And how many times a year will I need to call an Uber when I am by myself and not by my laptop anyway? Very few -- I don't use Uber much to begin with. If I'm with someone, they can call it and I can Venmo them, and if I have my laptop, I can call it from there. I added the link to call an uber from my computer to a bookmarks folder on my Google Chrome browser called “Phone Apps”. I added Venmo as well because I can't send those from my watch either. But I do get notifications of Venmo requests on my watch and I can easily complete them when I’m at my computer — no need for a phone.
Podcasts are a little annoying so I’ll call out those as well. I use Apple Podcasts (perhaps there’s a more watch-friendly podcast app). For Apple Podcasts, you have to have the podcast pre-downloaded in order to listen, even though the watch has cellular. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but it’s not that big a deal. You just have to save or download the podcasts from your phone or computer. They’ll sync to your watch next time you charge it, and so long as you do that, they’ll be ready for when you want to listen. You have to mess with some settings in the Watch app (on your iPhone) to get it to store the maximum number of downloaded podcasts that it can, which I think is about 10 saved and 10 downloaded or something like that. After that, it shouldn’t really be a problem because you should never have a queue that is more than 10 episodes long. It actually helps a bit to avoid the choice paralysis of having too many to choose from. It forces you to be a bit more intentional about what you listen to.
In closing, I would say that being off my phone this week has made me more intentional overall. It’s made me more aware of things. And I find that there is less time in my day that gets sucked away with my knowing really what I was doing during that time. On my phone, I can often get stuck in a cycle bouncing between Twitter, Safari, and ESPN or some set of apps like that, in an endless loop, none of which is really necessary. It’s basically doing nothing while doing something or doing something while doing nothing, whichever sounds more like a waste of time to you. This week, my phone has become a tool that I keep in the drawer and use for Two-Factor Authentication when I need it, which is also pretty infrequent. I’m not sure if it will stay that way, but this week has shown me that it can if I want it to. I could use my phone even less than I use my toothbrush, which is once or twice a day for a few minutes. Don't worry, I always brush well in the morning, but brushing before bed has always seemed optional to me. Maybe I should brush more. Maybe you should use your phone less.
