Author: natthompson27

I used software to track my time: I tracked app usage through Screen Time, desktop browser usage through an app called “Clockify”, Apple Podcasts to track which Podcasts I listened to, and a Google Sheet to track TV, reading, and video game time.

Inspired by Ethan’s exhortation to avoid using Microsoft Excel to visualize our media diet, I decided to use Microsoft Excel to visualize my media diet. I remembered reading about the Japanese artist Tatsuo Horiuchi using Excel to create paintings with the Autoshape tool, and tried to create something similar. Unfortunately, making beautiful art is hard:

In this painting, I represented the amount of time I spent consuming media with various items in a landscape. The overall canvas size represents all the time in one week. Each item’s size roughly corresponds to the amount of time spent on that activity. The grass represents time spent sleeping, the sun represents time spent on social media, and the Reading Cow represents time spent reading news, books, or papers. True to the Excel form, I turned the sun into a pie chart. The sizes are inexact: I tried to write some VBScript to calculate the area of an arbitrary polygon but this turned out to be nontrivial, so I decided to spend more time sleeping instead.

One valuable lesson I learned from this exercise is that I do not have the patience or artistic skills of Tatsuo Horiuchi. Another is that I spend a lot of time on Twitter, which is a website that makes me unhappy, and that I should stop doing that.

Here’s the spreadsheet, if you’re interested. The art looks bad in the Google Drive viewer, but if you have Excel you can download the .xlsx file and open it.

One thing I remember about being a young kid was that I was bored all the time. I lived in a small town, didn’t get cable TV or a Nintendo until about age 11, and had too short an attention span to read for hours on end. I hated being bored, and I still do.

But I was definitely a lot more creative when I was a kid than I am now. I have a working theory that people are the most creative when they’re bored, and I’d hoped not having a phone would make me more creative. Maybe I’d have some good ideas, maybe I’d try doing something new and break out of a rut.

I didn’t. I was probably a little less creative than usual, though I was also hung over which unfortunately ruined the science of the whole thing. I bought a book thinking I’d have a much easier time focusing than usual, and I read about 20 pages of it before getting bored. I played a bunch of Fire Emblem instead.

Even though there was no magic genius I unlocked by ignoring my phone, I did feel a good bit more calm than usual, and made slightly better choices. I read the Styles section of the Times at a diner. I cooked dinner, though I did look up a recipe online. Instead of getting mad at my dog for whining at me, I took her for a run.

I took a run in the afternoon. I run pretty frequently, but this was weird for me for two reasons. First, I like to track my pace and location using a GPS tracking app. Second, I don’t like to run when I’m not in great physical condition (for example, hung over) because it makes my average pace on the GPS tracking app go down which will hurt my ego. But I don’t like to run without the GPS tracking app, because how else am I going to get credit for running?

Anyway, I ran for a few miles, but I don’t know how long. I don’t know how fast I went, but it probably wasn’t very fast. Mostly this made me think about the harsh reality of what will happen to my running performance when I get older. But maybe, I guess, it’s healthy to be able to get some exercise without being obsessive and competitive about it. Maybe even it’ll make me a faster runner to run when I don’t think I’ll be very fast. Whatever.

Here are some other things that surprised me about not having a phone:

• I have a bunch of tiny little questions throughout the day that I’m very used to Googling. How many people live in Lithuania? When I don’t have a phone, I just forget them.
• I expected it to make me more spontaneous, but if anything I was more conservative.
• I did not miss Twitter or Instagram or email.
• I did miss TikTok?
• I didn’t think about Donald Trump all day, which was pretty nice.

My primary takeaway is that if I want to change my personality, I’ll need someone to take my phone away for a lot more than 24 hours. My secondary takeaway is that I really want a computer to give me credit for exercising.