Losing to the phone? You might need more nothing

What finally helped me after years of failing to cut my screen time

The most common question I get asked - 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), 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.

• 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. I use my laptop a tonne and I watch a lot of telly at home - my daily doing nothing time helps counterbalance all of that.

Once I decided on doing nothing, here’s how I implemented it -

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

• If doing nothing was the priority rather than reducing screen time, it changed the way I thought about the humble podcast, the seemingly harmless habit that destroys the silence on offer on the walk home from the station.

• And of course, phones being hopelessly addictive, I needed all this enforced. So - life being short - I ordered a customisable high vis vest from Amazon and used my fellow commuters as social reinforcement. Strange where life takes you.

---

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 default. But I found doing nothing easier said than done - I needed to learn to sit with my negative thoughts. (I suspect this cloud of negative thoughts was worsened by my phone use - a vicious circle.)

• The quiet helps you hear and learn to resist the otherwise automatic call to the phone. And over time you can build up internal barriers to picking the thing up. When I did look at my pickups many months later they had come down substantially.

• And I felt a tonne better in surprising ways - improved mood, more energy, more optimism. Read more about me trying to understand that feeling here. I suspect that all phone use affects baseline mood - in my view, you don’t get any for free, and so it might be worth tackling usage that you might have considered harmless (like, say, on a train commute).

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. Thanks to my daily doing nothing, I no longer feel I’m fighting the phone 24/7.

Would reading a book do the same job? Very possibly. But me personally I could never stick to it. Treating it as training - start small, expect it to be hard - was better for me than expecting it to be pleasant. (Though I’ve done a lot of meditation and might be a special case.)

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

---

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.