Why you should unplug from technology once a week

A while ago I was experimenting with a custom kernel and ROM on my phone, because apparently I can't leave a working device alone. Long story short, I bricked it, and not in the gentle "stuck in a boot loop" way. It would not respond to anything, and the only fix was physically disconnecting the battery, which I did not have the tools to do.

While my first reaction was panic, my second was to grab my laptop and start searching for fixes. Somewhere around ten minutes in, I noticed something I did not expect, which was that I felt relieved.

There were no notifications and nothing buzzing. Even though nobody could reach me, the world, as far as I could tell, kept going.

The stress you don't know you're carrying

Constant connectivity is like background noise, in that you do not notice it until it stops. We have made it normal to be reachable all the time, to check our phones without deciding to, and to feel phantom vibrations in a pocket that is empty.

When it does stop, the first thing you notice is how quiet your head gets. As the low hum of "I should check something" fades, the urge to have an opinion on whatever is trending this morning goes with it.

I will be honest, the quiet was a little uncomfortable at first. It turned out I had been using my phone to avoid thinking about things that needed thinking about. Without a feed to fill every gap, you are left with your own thoughts, and some of them have been waiting a while.

So I made it a habit (sort of)

Even after I got the phone working again, I started unplugging for a couple of hours every Sunday. I do not unplug for the whole day, because I am too dependent on technology for that and pretending otherwise would be a lie. But I do take a few hours, on purpose, with the phone somewhere I can't reach it.

For the rest of the week I lean hard on focus modes, since most of what pings me can wait (I wrote about that idea in async communication and peace of mind). Between the two, it is the best compromise I have found for staying sane while still doing a job that lives on a screen.

What the hours actually look like

There is no grand ritual. Some Sundays it is my reading club, which is exactly what it sounds like: physical books and other actual humans arguing about them, with no Kindle highlights or Goodreads updates, only paper and conversation.

Some Sundays it is coffee. When you sit in a café without hunting for the Wi-Fi password or the right angle for a photo, you actually taste the thing you ordered. (As someone with strong opinions about coffee, this matters more to me than it probably should.)

Sometimes it is just reading, the kind where you lose track of time and look up to find half the book gone and your coffee cold. Sometimes it is meeting people and letting the conversation wander without anyone pulling out a phone to settle an argument.

And yes, sometimes I watch a movie. Before you call me a hypocrite, a screen telling you one story is different from a device throwing seventeen apps at you while you pretend to relax. My problem is with the constant pull, which a movie does not have.

What I didn't expect

The productivity part surprised me. You would think giving up a few hours of connectivity would cost you, but mostly it showed me how much of my "productivity" was just checking things. When you can't look at email or Slack for a while, you realise how little of it actually needed you right then, and how rarely the urgent thing is actually urgent.

It also made me notice how much attention I had been handing to a device when I should have been giving it to the people in front of me. Conversations go deeper when nobody is half-listening.

If you want to try it

Start small, since a couple of hours is plenty. The trick is to plan something to do rather than planning to not do something, because "don't touch your phone" is a terrible plan and "go to the café with a book" is a good one. Find a reading club, or a friend who likes long conversations, or a pen and an old-fashioned notebook.

The first hour will feel weird, since your hand will reach for your pocket on its own. That is fine, and noticing it is kind of the point.

I am not going to tell you this will change your life. While it is only a couple of hours a week, I am still on my phone plenty the rest of the time. But those couple of hours are the ones where I think most clearly.

P.S. It took bricking a phone for me to figure this out. You can probably skip that step.