Seven rules to stop your phone taking over your life

2013-10-11 09:01:20

Tom Chatfield

Transform your relationship with your phone with these rules, and prepare to

enjoy life s greater pleasures.

How often do you check your phone when you re out and about? I ve been

reflecting on this question while writing in a rented cottage in Scotland,

without internet access or phone signal. I counted the number of times my hand

twitches towards my pocket, where a smartphone usually nestles. The tally was

at least once an hour.

These frequent little checks of personal devices are known among human-computer

interface researchers as micro-interactions rapid glances at email, social

media and apps, often lasting only a few seconds.

If it s disconcerting that checking my smartphone has become a habit, there s a

particular irony for me: for the last few months, I ve been involved in a

project to design a code of conduct for smartphone usage on Australia s

Sunshine Coast. The code comes in seven parts, and aims to help holidaymakers

stop their smartphones taking over time they ve set aside for leisure, each

other and the place they re in. Behind it, though, lies something that applies

to us all: the need for new etiquettes in an era where shared notions of

acceptable behaviour lag years, if not decades, behind the tools we ve

incorporated into our lives.

Here, then, are seven smarter smartphone rules, designed to stop technology

getting in the way of other experiences.

Talk now, text later

Or tweet later. Or email later. The list goes on. The thinking behind this is

simple enough. Courtesy of the magic screens in our pockets, we can do almost

anything online, anywhere, at any time. And so we do failing along the way to

put boundaries around leisure and pleasure, meals and sleep, vacations and

intimate moments. We gorge ourselves on digital delights, and obligations, and

somewhere along the way fail to savour who or what is right in front of us.

Which leads on to

Take a phone-free day

There s an uneasy edge to this challenge: shouldn t we simply learn

self-control? Every device has an off button, after all. Yet we can be

peculiarly unwilling to use it - a tendency captured in the delightful acronym

FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out. How can we resist the continual dopamine hits of

someone liking our status, replying to our messages, or retweeting us?

Our conscious minds have a limited capacity for high-quality decision-making,

and guard it jealously. As author Charles Duhigg put it in his 2012 book The

Power of Habit, most of the choices we make every day may feel like the

products of well-considered decision making, but they re not. We decide once

to keep our mobile phone switched on and fitted snugly into our pocket - and

then our initial choice vanishes, sliding instead towards something automatic.

Habits are those actions where life has crept under our skin and become a part

of us.

So, break the routine and make your habits visible once again. Perhaps the

best way is to leave your phone on the bedside table for the day, but you might

also try a technique I discovered by accident while travelling: engage

airplane mode , and breathe in a blissful few uncontactable hours.

Or, of course, you can take a more extreme approach. Take the method employed

by author Evgeny Morozov, who routinely locks his digital devices inside a safe

with a timer. He even claims to place his screwdrivers inside as well, which

prevents him prising the safe open in a moment of weakness.

Avoid being a search-it-all

In other words, forgo maps, search engines, and review websites once in a while

and embrace serendipity instead.

If you must use your phone to explore your surroundings, consider one of

various apps that encourage chance discoveries. Plug in a destination to the

(somewhat tongue-in-cheek) app Serendipitor, for example, and it will give you

directions that encourage wandering rather than speed, or even instructions

such as follow that car .

Consider how many conversations and encounters might never have taken place if

every question in history had been answered by one person staring at a private

screen. Getting a little lost and relinquishing control both literally and

metaphorically is the perfect way to find new questions you didn t even know

you wanted to ask.

Elbows and phones off the table

I ve written elsewhere about the habit of phubbing : snubbing other people by

ignoring them and paying attention to your mobile phone instead. It s a word

that caught the world s attention for a reason: because of a rising desire to

push back against the social consequences of indiscriminate, and

undiscriminating, technological immersion.

Nowhere does the rudeness of phubbing matter more than the dinner table, where

the idea of good manners arguably began. If there s a difference between dining

and merely ingesting calories, it s this sense of occasion and of something

owed in gratitude and pleasure to those we re sharing it with. With recent

studies suggesting that simply leaving your phone on display while dining

breeds a host of negative feelings in those around you, it may pay more than

you realize to keep your tech out of sight and mind.

Look before you snap

We are, the philosopher Aristotle argued, what we repeatedly do. Among other

things, we are people who take pictures on their phones a lot. This is fine -

just ask my new-born son s doting grandparents. Yet we need to recognize that

living life through a lens can damage the very things we re aiming to capture.

Take my most recent experiences of a gig, which consisted almost exclusively of

watching the band refracted through the tiny screens of a thousand smartphones

held aloft. Musicians, too, have baulked at this practice: in April, the band

Yeah Yeah Yeahs posted a sign asking fans to pocket their phones during their

performance.

As the filmmaker Sofia Coppola put it earlier this year, it can feel like

living does not count unless you are documenting it. Yet the very act of

mediation substitutes something prefabricated for the process of laying down

and living with a memory.

I treasure the video and images I took around my son s birth. But I treasure

them because they point me towards something else: the experiences I lived,

intensely and entirely, in those moments.

Taste before you upload

Sometimes, digital technologies treat us like something a little less than

human: as merely eyeballs staring at screens and fingers clicking on buttons.

But no matter how many geeks may dream of being uploaded into the Matrix, we

remain embodied beings. We exist in particular places at particular times and

we can only make the most of our moments by giving full expression to the gamut

of our senses.

Before you share that Instagram snap, then, make sure you pause, taste, breathe

the air deeply, fix the present moment as fully as your physical presence

permits and only then give vent to whatever two-dimensional representation of

the experience takes your fancy.

As the computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier has pointed out, sensory

measures such as taste and aroma are neglected by almost all digital

technologies together with every other quantity that a programmer hasn t

expressly set out to include in their algorithms. This is how our tools work;

but it can also breed a fundamental forgetfulness that, if we re not careful,

causes us to count the value only of those things our screens themselves can

measure.

Kiss your phone goodnight

Lying on the pillow, it s tempting to pick your phone up one last time. Yet

prepare for your sleep to be disrupted. Why? The screens on electronic devices

emit blue light, which your brain associates with daylight. Exposure plays

havoc with your body clock, while stimulation just one more link, tweet,

email or text does the same to your much-abused attention span. You can

forget the joys of reverie, too, and the licence that comes with letting your

mind wander.

And that s before we get onto the more intimate possibilities of bedroom time.

For the author DH Lawrence, one of modernity s worst tendencies was to put sex

in the head instead of down where it belongs something that surely counts

double for glowing screens and late-night games of Candy Crush Saga.

Finally...

A code of conduct can t solve every problem. But it can help us to break out of

half-acknowledged habits and to remember that moments well spent are quite

different from time merely filled. As the British author Tim Harford concisely

puts it, smartphones are habit-forming, so think about the habits you want to

form.

In Scotland, meanwhile, my useless phone now rests inert on a chest of drawers.

In the absence of physical contact, the pangs of internet cold turkey are

starting to ease. I ll need to pick it up soon, though. I m off for a brisk

walk up a hill where, if I m unlucky, several days' worth of emails will be

waiting at the top.