I stopped checking my screen time

And started doing nothing

Phone Free Will’s Summer Shorts continues. Answers to reader questions, weird miscellany.

The most common question - why don’t you just cut down your screen time like normal people do?

Very fair.

In the years after I made my daughter cry because I looked at my phone rather than her during a ballet recital, I tried a lot of things to reduce my screen time. I tracked it carefully.

But I kept reversing whatever successes I had. I was a yo-yo screen time reducer.

Then I decided on a change of tactics - I chose a small part of the day in which to do absolutely nothing.

In practical terms, switching from “less screen time” to “more nothing” had lots of benefits -

• It’s far easier to track the introduction of a new habit than it is to track cutting down a bad habit. I used a few hacks to bed in the habit (including “stacking” it to something I do every day, i.e. commuting), and it was a relatively simple regime when compared to the mess of failing hacks aimed at cutting my screen time.

• It solves the problem of determining what is “good” phone use. Substack and WhatsApp seem like harmless apps - but they’ve both got an infinite scroll. Reading news can be active citizenship or needlessly ruminating on misery. Watching telly on Netflix feels benign enough - but the other day I walked past their tube advert saying “Pssst we do games now”.

• It solves the dilemma over which other tech “counts”. I suspect all tech use drains us to some extent - phones just happen to be the most portable and omnipresent form (unless I lose my senses and somehow end up buying these glasses I see advertised everywhere). I use my laptop a tonne and I watch a lot of telly at home - my doing nothing time helps counterbalance all of that.

But this change in approach has had some odd effects that make very little sense to outsiders -

• I needed a time of day that I wasn’t using for anything else. The most obvious candidate was my tube and train commute, which put me in the opposite camp as everyone else in the whole world. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.

• And it means the biggest phone use villains are the ones most likely to replace my doing nothing time. Enter the humble podcast, the seemingly harmless habit that destroys the silence on offer on the walk home from the station.

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I don’t think society has solved this whole phone problem yet. I’d argue that the missing piece of the puzzle is nothing.

If you can learn to be at peace with boredom, doing nothing is a choose-able option; but without it, the phone is the only default. What’s more, the quiet helps you hear and learn to resist the otherwise automatic call to the phone - you will have built up internal barriers to picking the thing up.

When I did look at my screen time many months later it had come down substantially. And what’s more I felt a tonne better in surprising ways - improved mood, more energy, more optimism. Although I still have some external barriers in place - I charge my phone downstairs, keep my phone in a different room when I work and restrict some apps (particularly Substack) - I find I don’t dismantle those barriers like I used to. Confident in my doing nothing time, I no longer feel I’m fighting the phone 24/7.

That’s all very compressed. If you’re not immediately convinced, your punishment is to read all the other articles on here.

Next week’s reader question. And it’s a biggie. Early on I was asked by a big Substacker (in a rather pointed way) - why don’t you just read a book?

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Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.