Step aside, phone: week 3
This is my third weekly report since joining the “Step aside, phone” experiment. The goal is to reduce the time spent on our phones in order to focus on more intentional activities. Every Sunday, we share our screen time stats and write a few words about how the week went.
Without surprise, life feels better without a phone. Or rather, life feels better when using the phone only for the things it is actually needed for.
I think there is no way for our now inattentive, phone-enslaved brains to realize how life-changing this is until we embrace this kind of phone-free journey.
It feels so good to be disconnected from all the digital noise, to reconnect with tangible activities, and to slow down the rhythm of things.
At the same time as this challenge, I have also banned my phone from my bedroom for two weeks now. I use an alarm clock instead, and I think it is the best change I have made in my goal to reduce screen usage in general.
Great things I noted this past week:
- As intended, I started the first volume of Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa. It is a big book, about 850 pages, followed by a second volume almost as thick, but I am having such a great time following Musashi’s journey that I have already read more than 200 pages without even realizing it.
- On Thursday night, we had a guest at home. For the occasion, I cooked a boeuf bourguignon. I prepared the marinade on Wednesday evening and started simmering on Thursday around noon. We had it for dinner, with homemade mashed potatoes. It was a success, and I took great pleasure in spending time buying the ingredients and cooking it.
- I still manage to wake up early enough to slow down in the morning and give myself some time to eat a proper breakfast and read before starting work. I have been feeling a bit down for the past two days, though, which made me oversleep a little.
As usual, let’s review the week through my screen time reports.
Third week report
Like previous weeks, this report does not include the day I am writing this post (Sunday, March 1st), which will be covered in next week’s post.
A few notes on the past week
I spent a bit more time on my phone than last week, but I was away from home for work for three days, which is more than usual. During those three days, I only had my phone to interact digitally for personal matters (this does not include professional stuff, for which I have a dedicated device, a laptop).
The three apps I looked at the most this week were WhatsApp, Safari, and Messages.
Note that I replaced the verb “to use” with “to look at” because this is how the screen report works. I think the app I used the most was Doppler, my music player, but my screen was off 99 percent of the time I used it.
Let’s now dive into each day, one by one.
Week 3 – From Sunday to Wednesday
Like last week, I included the stats from last Sunday (February 22nd). That day, I spent most of my phone time on a newspaper app.
As written above, I was away from home for three days (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday) and had to use my phone instead of my computer to communicate and surf the web.
The three apps I looked at the most were WhatsApp, Safari, and Messages.
Week 3 – From Thursday to Saturday
As I was back home, I barely used my phone. I selected and sent a few Cyberpunk 2077 photos from the Nintendo Switch App to my Mac on Thursday. On Saturday, I did not touch my phone at all. I totally forgot about it.
The three apps I looked at the most were Nintendo Switch App, WhatsApp, and Messages.
Week 3 – Wrap-up
Nothing much has changed from my last week’s wrap-up. It is going well and I can feel the benefits.
I feel so good being able to dedicate time to the things I really wanted to do more this year, which are reading and cooking.
It’s kind of weird and hard to describe, and it might sound a little silly and obvious, but I have different feelings while doing this experiment. Sometimes, time seems to slow down. It feels like I have found a sort of inner peace and harmony. I am satisfied with small things. I can think more clearly. I can read for a long time, staying focused, without my mind wandering somewhere else. It is okay not to do anything or to do one thing at a time (for example: taking a break at work to have a coffee outside without looking at my phone; or listening to music on the train, with my head against the window, letting my mind wander as the scenery goes by). All in all, I feel better.
However, as I wrote in the introduction of this post, I have been feeling a bit down and negative for two days now, with brain fog, heavy eyes, and mental noise. It makes me irritable and a bit upset. It is a recurring thing that I have difficulty controlling. It comes and goes. I hope it will pass quickly and that I will feel better starting tomorrow. At least, it did not prevent me from finding the motivation to write this post, and I think it is easier to handle as I am not addicted to my phone. I think it would be much more difficult to deal with while being stuck to my phone for several hours a day.
Well, it is now time for the final week of this challenge. After that, I will continue to embrace a phone-free daily life, because it only adds positive things to my life, so it would not make sense to stop. I will write more about that in my final wrap-up post about this experiment.