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It’s more like: No Personal Assistant Day!

No alarm, no reminders, no directions, no weather or time info. In fact, no real time info of any sort. I’m relying on my laptop, and my good old friends; paper and pen!

I spent 24 hours without my phone. In this blog post I will take you through my reflection on the experience. It wasn’t smooth sailing, and I actually failed at first but managed to choose a better day to go through this experiment. I have a healthy relationship with my phone, it gives me direction and structure and I feed it with so much data. In fact, I’m more social and organized because of my phone. With that said, even without my phone, life moves on… but not as convenient and reliable as it is with my phone, my very personal assistant.

Failed First Attempt

After Trying Again, I Succeed

I decided to try again when I arrived back to Cambridge. While my phone gave me sense of safety in NYC, I feel my familiarity with the area here in Cambridge and my daily routine, made me less dependent on my phone. Given that all my apps and calendars are synched I was able to check my laptop for my schedule and activities for the day. I noticed that I spent more time on my desk at home and at the office. I would say that my productivity is higher! I suspect it’s not the phone’s fault, it’s the intrusive nature of notifications.

I only check my FB messenger when I go to FB and intentionally open the messages tab on the browser, as opposed to my phone, which has a dedicated app for messenger! Did I mention that my work group communicates through messenger? I also only check my email when I deliberately open the email window on my laptop. I disabled notifications on my laptop since I do present a lot and don’t want weird messages appearing on the screen, which was helpful since no intrusion happens while I’m on my laptop!

On the metro, I saw people’s faces and made eye contact. Sometimes I do that even when I have my phone. But this time when I wanted to avoid awkward silence and stares, I had nothing to resort to. I pulled out a receipt I had ages ago in my pocket and pretended to be reading that piece of paper…

I slept better at night. That was great cause I had nothing to do but sleep! I had no phone, I didn’t feel like reading, and my partner wont let me scroll through his feed with him (cause he’s aware I’m during a no phone period)… so i just slept! wow that felt great!

Workarounds

For my alarm at night, I just commanded google home: “ok google! set alarm to 7:30 am!”. For the weather I just asked “ok google! what’s the weather today?”. For my music and home temperature I also did the same. All these activities were not interrupted by notifications or feed, I was able to get the task done.

For my media diary log, I chose to use a platform that could be accessible from my phone and my laptop. I chose to use google sheets and screenshots to collect and annotate my artifacts. It works well and I don’t need my phone for that.

My family, which live far away from here, texted me on a messaging platform that I don’t have access to on my laptop. My mom being a tech savvy… and a mom <3 would simply copy paste her message on different chatting apps knowing that one of them would be accessible at some point of my day.

For photos, I used my canon. Yes the photos are much more beautiful. But it’s not archived in my directory and it doesn’t have enough metadata to remind me of the occasion. Also, I know I will not look at these photos again, cause I don’t share them and I don’t browse through them.

Relationship Status?

It is definitely not addiction to my phone…It’s more like we’re in a codependent relationship! Life as a PhD student and as an adult living with others that I care about requires a lot of information and scheduling to do. My phone with all its services thrive on data, and I have data! We are perfect for each other. My phone gives me structure and direction, and I give my phone data. I like to check-in to places and take pictures of those places for my own reference. I tend to forget and I like that my phone captures metadata along with visual media which serves as a record to my daily activities. I use social media cause I live far away from home and I want to stay in touch.

Lessons Learned

Without my phone I’m more intentional. work does not intrude into my life when it’s not welcomed. When I want to work I go to my laptop. One action plan out of this experience is to disable notifications from messaging apps and emails and only see them when I can do something about them..or even better when im on my laptop. My phone is there to serve me and improve my life not make others use me more and get the most out of me! *so dramatic, I know!*

While I love that phones are portable and go with us anywhere we go. While I love how they manifest as an extension to our cognitive and emotional skills. I hate that these phones are also blurring all physical and time boundaries. When it’s time to work, I like to be at work or on my desk. My phone made work creep into my bed and social events, which wasn’t healthy. One thing I’m tempted to explore, is the idea of modes; in which I set a social or work mode to my phone, then apps and notifications will be adjusted accordingly.

I’m (un?)lucky enough to have already spent a recent day without my phone – left in the backseat of an Uber and turned off within minutes of my disembarkation – so I felt like a relative phone-free pro going into this assignment. Before I turned off my phone on Wednesday night, I already knew which apps would be most usable from my laptop vs. iPad, and to enable iMessage from my email instead of just my phone number. In a sign of Apple’s dominance in my life, I set my morning alarm on my iPad (feeling a little sad I was losing one night of sleep tracking from my usual iPhone app) then charged my Apple Watch (to be swapped out with my usual analog watch so that I’d have something to track my steps). Finally, I reminded my partner that I’d be without my phone all day so he needed to just trust I’d show up to our off-peak Valentine’s Day date on time.

For most of the day, I felt fine, and in ways, more free. I’d like to think I’m not “addicted” to my phone since I wasn’t reaching for it out of habit and I didn’t crave any particular use of it. I did, however, miss key elements of certainty and distraction.

On certainty –

I had a 7:15am workout class booked for Thursday morning, and while I’d been to this particular studio before, I wasn’t sure how long the walk would be. Usually, I would have checked on my phone en route, but instead I had to check on my iPad while I was still on my home WiFi. After class, I wanted to grab a smoothie at one of the cafes I knew was near the studio, but couldn’t remember any in particular, couldn’t look it up since I was phoneless, and decided to just get on the T to school instead of (gasp!) asking any humans around me.

I had a few moments like this throughout the day, doing weird things I wasn’t used to, just because I didn’t have instant access to online information. I could have guesstimated the walking distance myself, and I could have just wandered one block to find a smoothie. Instead, I feel like I gave up – like when I didn’t have my phone on me, I became this somewhat useless person who refused to use resources unless they were on a smartphone screen.

On distraction –

I lost count of the number of times I wanted my phone on me just so I could either read (Twitter or email newsletters) or listen to something (especially since I was in the middle of Memoirs of a Geisha on audiobook.) Instead, I read… anything I could. Whether by luck or something else, I carried a lot of reading with me on Thursday. I read the actual newspaper, which I get every day but usually just skim, and learned about how Puerto Rico lost millions in an email phishing scam. I read a book that’s been in my backpack since 2019. I read the estimated time of arrival signs in the T stop way more often than I usually do, and it made time feel like it was moving more slowly. I read the ads in the T stop and finally learned about the weekend Red Line construction. I read posters and digital signage across MIT and realized there really is too much going on across campus.

I realized how bad I am at being bored, at allowing myself to just stare / zone out and think. I wanted to have something in front of my face, or in my ears, the whole day. I didn’t mind that it couldn’t be my phone, and I was lucky to have other distractions with me to keep my brain occupied, observing, intaking rather than mulling. This is the worst part about my relationship with my phone – the way it distracts me when I’m not with other people (and even sometimes when I am with other people). I think my partner and I were both secretly thrilled when I showed up to dinner still phoneless, the two of us forced to purely enjoy each other’s company over tacos and ghost pepper margaritas.

Bonus thoughts

One “good” thing I missed about my phone usage was taking photos. I love capturing small moments of joy, especially food, sometimes for myself and sometimes for social media. It’s just a convenience that decent cameras are now embedded in smartphones, and I think if I had a compact digital camera in addition to my phone, I’d be happier to leave my data-connected phone at home more often and just have a camera on me.

Another positive about phones is the ease with which we can intentionally connect with other people. I had the strongest urge to text my partner when I was on my way to dinner. I still can’t pinpoint why, but I felt that urge from the moment I stepped off campus to the moment I walked into the restaurant. I wanted him to know where I was, that I was thinking of him, and a little to know he was thinking of me (based on whether he responded to my text). I’m not sure this is a good thing – maybe it’s another sign of my dependence on my phone – but it gave me some hope about our phones as contributors to strong interpersonal relationships, and not just a crutch for modern, digitally mediated interactions.

Overall, I’d give the phone-free experience 4/5 stars. Worth a try, but probably not for everyone.

I chose Monday, February 17, to be the day I went without my phone for 24 hours. Sunday night before I went to bed, I set my phone in the other room and didn’t pick it up again until Tuesday morning. It was quite the enlightening experience. The funny part is that during the 24 hours, the biggest things I missed weren’t the things I do most on my phone but were the basic utility things like taking a picture, checking my calendar, or texting and calling my wife. I was able to make accommodations for most of these things since I had my laptop with me practically all day (had to Google how to simply take a picture with my computer’s webcam).

It was a pretty typical day, and I feel like I was able to focus much better and I got a lot of homework done, which was exactly what I needed. Knowing that I still had access to do almost anything I could do with my phone if I needed made my use of the internet much more deliberate. Being freed from the constant ping of notifications was also very refreshing.

Overall, the 24 hours was not difficult. However, the next morning, I had my phone again, and felt compelled to “catch up” on the things that I had “missed out on” the previous day. Probably due to the lack of quick convenience of checking anything on social media on my phone, I felt like I needed to check my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other feeds first thing. After pretty much wasting the entire first half of my morning, I was pretty appalled by the comparison between how I felt the day before and that morning.

“Addiction” can seem like a strong word, but I don’t think it’s necessarily inaccurate for me sometimes. The ease and convenience that having a smartphone provides makes it very easy to overuse. I really appreciate having the ability to communicate with people quickly and to take pictures and record notes, but I could perhaps do without the added extreme ease of access that such a device provides.

I’ve been interested in and have used the various tools that Google has rolled out on various Android devices, including my Google Pixel phone, all under the “Digital Wellbeing” banner. This exercise has helped me to see how using those tools have definitely helped me to tame my smartphone usage, but perhaps there are even more ways that I can tweak the tools to help me manage my behavior.

Something of note is that I will probably include my internet browser as one of my “Focus” apps that are restricted throughout the day since I can do quick Google searches throughout the day through a little widget. If there’s anything that I want to look into more extensively, I can make a note of it later and come back to it later in the day, or I can pull out my computer and check it out there.

One other thing I can do is find some sort of app or something that will package my notifications and only release them at specific intervals, instead of right when they come in. While I am aware that there are some disadvantages with that, I feel like it would help train me to be more focused.

I loved the benefits this exercise brought to light, including limiting distractions and making my usage of the internet and other technological tools much more deliberate. I only looked up things that were the most important thoughts throughout the day, letting the unimportant fleeting thoughts die out.

Overall, I had a much more fulfilling day due to the sense of purpose I held and not deviating from it. I’m not ready to throw away my phone, but I certainly will be implementing more measures to free myself from some of its enticing and addictive behaviors it can instill in me. I would highly recommend anyone trying out this exercise to get a better sense of their behavior and what they can do to improve themselves and their connection to others. It certainly helped me a lot.