I always wondered how different my days would feel if I no longer had a phone.
This weekend my Pixel 4 finally gave up. The screen froze and I held the power to restart, but the screen never came back on. Ordering a replacement phone was easy, but I’m still without my phone for the whole day.
Partly out of interest - and partly out of boredom - I’m reflecting on what it’s been like without my phone today.
Losing your right hand
You know that feeling during a powercut when you can’t do the things you normally do when the power is on? Like you go to boil the kettle for a cup of tea but nothing happens? That’s how this morning felt.
Without my phone I suddenly lost access to all of my logins and apps. All my conversations cut short, any emails coming in left unread, my Fitbit data unable to sync. It’s silly but so many of my daily touchpoints are done with a phone in my hand so it was odd not to have that. And though I had my laptop, I found that it wasn’t much use to me.
So many of my logins are connected to a Google account, and I’ve set up two-factor authentication to access them all. Even with the right password I couldn’t get to most of my accounts without my phone. This was brilliant security when I had access to my phone but today it’s bitten me in the arse.
What else did I lose?
I transfer my favourite photos from my phone to my hard drive regularly, but I hadn’t done it recently, so without using Google backups I think I lost about four months worth of photos. Howeer I regularly send photos to people through chat apps or post them on social media, so I guess in a way at least some of my favourites were backed up in other ways.
The photos will be lost forever but I think I can recover everything else? Many of my notes are synced with Notion, or using some other cloud service, and I hope I can reinstall all of my old apps with their logins on my next device.
A day without my phone
I didn’t want to change my plans today because I didn’t have a phone, so off I went into town. And I was surprised by how much nicer it was!
- There seemed to be more little everyday moments that I probably would have missed before. I saw some lovely butterflies and people-watched on the bus into town rather than just scanning through my phone.
- Normally I would want to message a friend if I experienced something exciting, but today I got to enjoy these moments fully on my own. I won a jackpot at the arcade and I got to just watch hundreds of tickets print instead of needing to film and share it.
- I felt a lot less anxious. I wasn’t worried about what I was missing online, because I had a really good excuse not to check.
- When I needed to get the bus home I simply turned up at the station and got the next bus. I didn’t feel like I needed to ‘optimise’ my route home like I usually do.
- At home I was able to enjoy things. Like eating a good lunch and writing up this blog post.
Maybe something important and time-sensitive happened while I wasn’t looking today. But probably not. I’ve gotten too used to being available, and today has proved that I don’t need to do that. Particularly on a Sunday!
Final thoughts
Honestly I think there’s been more positives than negatives to this. The biggest lesson from my phone dying a sudden and inconvenient death is that I don’t want it to play such a big part in my life any more. Yes that will mean I’m not as up-to-date with whatever’s happening, but I like feeling in control of my attention.
There are some things I will need to keep a phone for, but for today I’ve been relieved to not have a phone to look at.