I Went Without my Smartphone for a Week

I thought for sure the world was going to end, it didn’t.

I lost productivity. I did not lose a bet with my daughter that I could go for a week without my phone. I initially did feel a sense of disconnect. I realized how much FOMO these stupid things create. The sense of belonging that comes from the phone is false. That somebody needs me because of my phone (via availability) is also false.

Now to qualify my phone usage. My wife and I were early adopters of the mobile phone and completely forgoing the home phone. So our cell phone usage as a primary communication tool is 17 years of habit in the making.

I am your typical corporate employee that carries two smartphones. One is an iPhone which is for work and the other is an Android device which is for my personal use. In my prior 100 postings to the blog, more than 70 of them were created by capturing voice dictation to help create the bulk of the materials that I use for the posting. I would capture thoughts while walking the dogs or walking about on campus at work or while driving and stuck in traffic. It kept my productivity high without trying to type on a small screen or camped out in front of a computer.

Voice dictation is a quick and easy way to capture those thoughts, albeit without its faults, as sometimes dictation can be fraught with error. I would suspect 85–90% accuracy depending on your surroundings. However, the effort of creating materials for the publications was with my personal phone using Google Docs and the voice dictation that comes with the GBoard system. You can do the same with an iPhone in Google Docs or most other mobile writing platforms.

My Android was struggling with a battery failure. I have been limping along for the last two months to get to the number goal of 99 initial blog postings. At times I would be in the middle of a dictation it would fail in the middle of my voice documentation because of battery issues and it was extremely frustrating. Even so, I persevered (it was a struggle — the frailties of first world problems) and was able to create that initial group of postings. My thought was to send my phone in for warranty service after those 100 blog posts were complete and continue to use traditional writing tools on my laptop. I figured I would accept this and have a little bit of struggle through typing efforts.

My logic was to forward my personal calls to my work phone. That would allow me to use my work phone for light texting in communication with the family during the repair of my personal phone. My daughter (nine at the time of this writing) had made a bet with me that I would not be able to survive without my personal phone for a week. I felt that by having my work phone I could easily accomplish that effort without too much feeling of loss. However, during that time my work phone came up for a refresh. The refresh is when corporate decides to replace your phone with a new phone. I had my original iPhone for almost 3 years and it was due.

Okay. No problem. My personal phone was due back the next day and I would be able to switch back. The day my replacement personal phone showed up, I gave my iPhone back to my IT department to refresh and they would replace it within three days…

After unpacking my replacement personal phone I charged and powered up the device with no issues. I did all the system updates and installed my backup data — about 2 hours of effort. After that time, I realized the phone was faulty. The company sent me a refurbished replacement unit but it had failed quality control checks because the display was garbage. The display was flickering and flashing and was pretty much non-functional. I spent some time trying to troubleshoot the system and found it was primarily due to adaptive brightness. When you woke the screen from sleep by using the power button on the side, the display would flicker. Even if I turned off adaptive brightness or any other battery trick you could imagine, the thing would flash and make static noise that would practically cause epileptic seizures.

Wonderful.

I boxed up the replacement phone and shipped it back to the manufacturer the same day. Now I was without both phones. What was I going to do?

Initially, FOMO (fear of missing out) started setting in. I no longer had that crutch, that distraction that would be used to check on the status of anything, everything and something at any time during the day on a whim. That habit of checking my phone is an addictive tendency. I resemble it to gambling. Roll the dice, see if anyone is wanting to talk to me. Or if there was something posted that can be the game-changer in my personal income. A quick-to-get-rich idea that happens to pop up only on my phone. Realistically it was causing me to lose productivity at work The switching costs were killing me and I did not realize it until this forced loss of use.

Check out this study in relation to the technostress that comes from the use of smartphones. I can imagine the researchers followed me around for a week taking notes because pretty much everything in this report is me. I suspect it is you too.

Here are some initial side effects that I noted after not having both phones for a week:

I received my replacement work phone on Friday with an iPhone 7. I hate it, it needs a case. I am not a fan of iPhones but I sucked it up and moved on. However, I do like the updated iOS and screen time usage app that identifies how much time you are spending on your phone.

I have the same sort of app on my laptop that tells me where my time was being used. It is called Rescuetime.com and accounts for the amount of time that is considered productive or distracting throughout your day. I like that functionality on my phone now.

To my surprise, I received my second replacement personal phone on Saturday although I was not expecting it until Monday. After spending most of Saturday doing traditional chores and waiting for the phones to update with software, apps, and backed-up information, I realized how dependent I had become on these electronic pacifiers. I will have to install RescueTime on it to better measure my activities and maybe change my behaviors!

I do love the flexibility and productivity that you can gain through the use of your smartphone. I discovered that we have plenty of slack time in our lives and the smartphone can help fill that time with productive and creative activities. Yet it can also be wasteful. Although I do not have all my emails caught up, I was able to create this blog post during my dog walk this morning. Bonus points!

I dare you to go mobile device free for a week. Find out what happens! Log your efforts. Post your experiences in the comments section and see where you too can gain back some of the sanity and productivity we lose due to electronic distractions!

Go forth and be brilliant.

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