One of my class assignments this week is to go 24 hours without touching my phone, and since that aligns fairly well with some of the books I‘ve written about here over the years, I thought I might share my reflection here as well as in the virtual classroom we’re using.

I was looking forward to this experiment because I regard myself as a phone minimalist, but figured there would be hidden dependencies that this day without a phone might expose.  

My first anticipated challenge was waking up. Although I frequently wake up well before my alarm clock goes off, on the foregoing night I’d stayed up rather late watching a documentary on cave disasters, and would have most likely slept in if left to my own devices – or left without them, in the case of my turned-off phone!   Fortunately, I had options ranging from a battery-powered clock with physical bells to my Nest Hub.  I chose the latter, though it felt a little like cheating considering it was still a digital device.  My morning proceeded without any other real differences, save for the music-less drive into town. It wasn’t until I arrived at work that little disruptions began accumulating.

It didn’t help that the morning was unusual: the City is changing life insurance providers, so members of the library staff had to go to City Hall next door and fill out paperwork to update beneficiaries and the like.  The form asked for information about my prospective beneficiaries that I didn’t know offhand and couldn’t find out without my phone, so I had to take the paperwork with me to return later this week. On the walk back to the library,   the shutterbug in me noticed a particularly attractive potential shot of morning light in the trees, but not having my phone I could only stand and admire it.  Upon arriving back at work, I accessed MyBama (e-learning portal) to check the discussion boards, only to be greeted with the news that a one-time password had been sent to my phone. 

I use two-step verification for most everything, from Amazon to Gmail, and realized that was going to constitute a problem. I don’t have a fixed workstation: at my library, the reference staff alternate positions throughout the day, and I work from my personal OneDrive as a result – and now I had no way to access it. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything due today as far as local history and genealogical queries go, so I just worked on new ones that I hadn’t created files for yet, and emailed them to myself with my work address at the end of day to add to my OneDrive once I was home.  At lunch I finished the paperback novel I was reading, and couldn’t simply switch to reading the Kindle app on my phone as I otherwise would have. Fortunately,   I do work at a library.  

The afternoon was busy enough that I didn’t have time to notice my inability to check for messages and phone calls, and the evening was much the same. Once I arrived at home,  I was able to ‘cheat’ a little with regards to the one-time password and logging into MyBama:    I use the Google Messages app, and have it setup to connect to my phone via bluetooth, so if my phone is nearby, I can ‘text’ people on the computer without touching the phone.   

What did the day’s exercise reveal about my habits and phone use?    I missed a few conveniences without the phone, but was generally able to find ways around them – – remembering to bring a paperback book with me to read at lunch, for instance.  My phone use is already so sparing, though –  I’d venture to say that 90% of the time I’m holding it, it’s to read Kindle titles–  that not too much was different.  The only serious obstacle was two-step verification on emails and the like, which is not something I can bypass.   I suspect a more serious (and interesting) challenge would be a day without a computer, though that’s not one I could do on a workday.  This is also the same lesson I drew back in 2019: I’m possibly just as addicted as the phone nuts I frequently mock/bewail/etc, but my addictions are fed through a 40 inch computer monitor instead of a tiny little square.