Turning off my phone (just for a bit)

It took me a long time to turn off my phone for the first time.

My first smartphone was an iPhone 3G. That's when I first learned phones needed to be recharged everyday and should never, ever be turned off.

My house had a landline back then. So did work. People called and if someone else picked up "Sorry, Dui isn't here. Do you wanna leave a message?" "No thanks, I'll try his cell".

A lot changed. The cell phone is now just phone. We carry it around like cell phones and never turn it off like landlines. Nobody "tries" it since they know we have it on us.

It was a huge change but change is hard to notice when it's gradual. Here's a funny example of when eBay changed their background from yellow to white.

One day, eBay designers decided that a bright yellow background wasn’t cool anymore, so they replaced it with a white one. Customers didn’t like it one bit. So many people complained that eBay rolled the change back to yellow. Then, over a period of several months, they modified the background color one shade of yellow at a time, until all the yellow was gone and had been replaced with white. Hardly a single user noticed.

DeGrandis, Dominica. Making Work Visible (p. 245). IT Revolution Press. Kindle Edition.

The phones now have "a white background" and "hardly a single user noticed."

Sleeping vs Disconnecting

The sleep button is not a button for putting our phones to sleep – only their display. The phone is awake 24/7.

If not for its battery life, there'd actually be no reason for their screens to ever turn off. Just like computers back then and Apple watches today.

To really put the phone to sleep, we have to turn it off.

My phone was becoming more intertwined with my life as time went on, a setup that made me available for synchronous communication with anybody, at any time, for any reason. It was hard to be present.

Interestingly, the possibility of turning my phone off for a bit didn't occur to me for a long time.

Even today, the advice for handling phone interruptions is rarely turning it off. "Leave your phone home", "Leave it in a different room", "Silent mode", "Do not Disturb", even "Put them all away on the phone jar". But turning it off? .. not so much.

I wonder why? I think there's some definitive inevitability of disconnection with a phone that's turned off that's not quite the same with other approaches.

Not breaking that last thread of connection. Just in case something urgent happens.

In any case, I'd often be distracted by social media and work.

Twitter and Slack.

Trying it out: turning the phone off for a little bit

For me it started at dinner.

Dinner was my time to be with family. I have a loving wife and our days were busy with work, chores and personal activities. Dinner was our time to talk and connect.

That was hard.

There were three types of distraction: Pulling, Prioritizing and Remembering.

Pulling: It wasn't so much the push, but the pull. While the justification for being on my phone was being available in case anybody needed me, most of that time was me checking Slack and Twitter to see if there was anything important I should have been aware of.

Prioritizing: My other difficulty was prioritizing. Some things weren't emergencies, but the more timely they'd be done by, the better. And there's no better time than now. Often, that meant talking to other people.

Remembering: When something had just come up in my mind, it was easier to just do it right away, lest I forget about it. Where would I write it down anyway.. on my phone?

I never talked about turning my phone off for dinner with my wife.

I just brought my phone to the dinner table as I did every other day, but that day, held the power button for 5 seconds, slid the slider to the right, and turned it off.

It was magical. I was completely present at dinner with my wife and didn't feel a single earning to pick my phone up and ... ha! I wish! Of course I did. It was hard to focus on dinner at all. I was confused and distracted. It was weird.

I'd pick my phone up by reflex and think "oh right, the phone is off. I can't see what's going on. Why did I pick it up?".

I'd look at the turned off screen and think "I should check notifications", and my mind would then interrupt with "there are no notifications, the phone is off". 10 seconds later: "I should check notifications."

It was funny how much pull my turned off phone, laying over the table, had over my eyes.

It didn't last forever. As I turned my phone off more often for dinner, it got easier.

I could keep the phone on top of the table and it wouldn't pull my attention as often. I could now keep it in my pocket and not pull it automatically.

Most importantly, my mind would wander less towards "what if there's an emergency right now and they're calling me and I'm not picking it up?"

Controling disconnection

Eventually I got pretty good at disconnecting by turning my phone off.

What I liked about turning off was that it gave me the most control over when to be connected and when not to be.

Sometimes I wanted to be disconnected, like at dinner with my wife, but it was hard no matter what other tactics I used.

The level of control of a turned off phone over my connection is so much higher than of my sheer willpower.

The inevitability of disconnection so helpful for my mind not to wander about what's happening elsewhere.

Of course I could always just turn my phone back on whenever I wanted. The fact I was only temporarily disconnected and could reconnect at anytime was obvious. But didn't feel obvious. It felt wrong and I felt anxious.

It took practice.

Increasing the friction of time to reconnect from the instant it takes for a phone on sleep to show its screen to the minute it takes to turn it on was very valuable. I could still do anything that was really important, but now I could also not do everything that wasn't.

Most valuable of all, this ability to disconnect from the Internet and digital people was essential for me to gain back control over my attention.

And focus on dinner with my wife.