‘Phone detox’ was harder than I thought
MY DETOX regimen for the summer was trying to spend less time with my phone.
Americans check their phones an average once every 12 minutes, according to phone insurer Asurion, and researchers are starting to raise questions about whether that’s good for our necks, our attention spans and our minds.
Under pressure from their customers and shareholders, Apple and Google are working on tools that let us monitor how we use our phones.
I decided to try it myself, to see if I could curb my worst habits. Two of the challenges deal with time management: a 24-hour notification fast, and a day when you only check your phone once per hour. Three deal with clutter: pruning back apps, clearing out old photos and videos and making a minimalist homescreen. And two deal with disengaging yourself from your screen: turning your phone to black-andwhite for the day, and another where you sleep out of arm’s reach from the phone.
Having gone through the cleanse, I then started to monitor
Strict time limits didn’t work: On a diet, you’re essentially in charge of yourself - you police what you eat, you block out the time to exercise for yourself. But a phone is a communications device, which means that you also have the harder task of policing the actions of others.
how well the lessons stuck. Here’s what I found.
Strict time limits didn’t work: On a diet, you’re essentially in charge of yourself - you police what you eat, you block out the time to exercise for yourself.
But a phone is a communications device, which means that you also have the harder task of policing the actions of others.
That made the time-based challenges very difficult for me. On the fifth day I had to commit to checking my phone only once per hour, to keep me focused and discourage idle scrolling. In fact, it was almost completely ineffective and made my workday almost impossible. I was either on eggshells about missing something all day, or cursing myself for not having the willpower. I failed spectacularly.
The truth is I can’t ignore a message from my boss for 50 minutes just because I talked to her at the top of the hour. And there are always some texts you need to answer right away - like, “What’s the plumber’s number!?”
The last day of the cleanse tells you to try clearing your home screen except for a few essential apps - texts, calls and mail. The clear screen was so oddly calming for me, that I’ve kept it that way ever since.
Most of what I do on my phone is read an unhealthy amount of text, where going black-and-white isn’t a big problem. That drove home that “phone addiction” is actually a number of very different smartphone activities being rolled into one pop-culture diagnosis.
It also made me wonder about some of the monitoring tools coming from phone makers, which are essentially one-size-fitsall data dumps, with charts that tell you how you’re using your phone. You can set limits app-byapp, but that seems to treat the symptoms rather than the cause of problematic use.
I still check my phone constantly; once every eight minutes, according to Apple’s early tracking tools. And some of the screen time I pruned from my phone went to other screens - the living room television, my desktop. If the goal is less screen time overall, I’m not sure I accomplished that with this quick-hit attempt to curb my addictions. — Washington Post.