Ok, let’s be honest here. Even the people who believe they do not have an addiction to their smartphones will readily admit that they waste too much time on them. In today’s technology-driven economy though, being connected is a crucial component of everyday work. And the blurring of work and personal life is muddied even further by the advent of even greater connectivity tech that keeps work at our fingertips. So, on one pocket-sized device a person can be instantly transported mentally from their current activity at the gym or in a park to the latest fire drill at the office. Additionally, those of us at the office are provided “productivity tools” which can turn into anything but. Ring, buzz, chirp, ping; they each beckon for our attention and interrupt us from doing good, focused, meaningful work.

But the real distractions are often not the office bugging us on weekends or the wee hours of the night, but our built-in distractions that we carry about on our smartphones – friendly, social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. I am a bit of a news junkie. I have news apps and websites that I frequent so that I always know what’s going on in the world. When I am mentally bored, Twitter and the news feeds provide amble stimuli and the next thing I know, I’m running late for something.

It was this time warp that I would enter that really got me concerned. The fact that I got sucked into it. Jean M. Twenge, a researcher who specializes in generational differences, has noted in her recent article, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?, that this next generation, post-Millennials, the iGen as she tagged them, have seen a dramatic change in behavior that is unseen in generations before. Not even war has made such a divisive impact as the birth of the smartphone. My youngest is on the early cusp of that group. All of my kids have been burned and tormented by social media. Their lives, and so my life, are worse for it because it can bring out the ugly in us all. According to both Twenge and Sandee LaMotte, a CNN Medical Producer, young people are far more likely to be depressed and suicidal now and their relationship with their devices and social media appear to feed those feelings. I have seen my eldest daughter’s entire outlook change for the negative because she took a long peek at her social media accounts. The struggle to resist comparing herself to so many people who all look like they have perfect lives, the perfect job, boyfriend, husband, house, teeth, figure…. The challenge is to stop scrolling or at least to find other apps that don’t make us feel so bad. Yet those apps are just as addicting, even if they are inspirational. Pinterest is equally if not more addicting even while it is a great resource of encouragement. Even Letgo appeals to the idea of looking at other people’s junk, as if peering through windows on a nightly stroll through the neighborhood – it’s like an online, never-ending garage sale.

In an article this past December about smartphone addiction, LaMotte prepared a quiz to test the addiction level of smartphone users. A score of under 20 – not a problem (you probably have a flip phone), 21-60 – mildly “nomophobic” (fear of NO MOre PHOne) and above that, you probably can’t go long with out it. I scored a 57.

This got me thinking about that time warp. LaMotte gave some good suggestions but without some sort of accountability, I knew I would not really follow through with any of them. It wasn’t just that I was wasting enormous amounts of time but that I regularly complained about not have enough time to do other things that I loved, like drawing or even the mundane, like folding wash. I was also, according to her investigation, damaging my brain.

Enter the Digital Detox.

Just making a few accommodations to address my growing problem did not seem committed enough for me. I needed a goal, so I set out to recapture my attention. I knew my worst offenses. It just so happens that just a couple weeks ago, I went through a mini-detox – my favorite app for an aggregate of trending news articles, Drudge Report, had gone through an update and now wanted me to log in to use it. I rejected that idea and chose to uninstall the app. I had not realized how dependent I was for news from just that one app. I found myself always looking for it. I can always go on the website but that would require a bit more effort. More deliberately, I chose to detoxify myself from Twitter and all news outlets for 5 days to see if I could regain some of the quality time, or at least understand more about my smartphone dependency.

Methodology

Twitter, FoxNews and News12 (local NJ news) are apps I put on my phone and regularly visit. Especially Twitter. I use that as a news feed since by following multiple organizations and topics, it becomes a de facto aggregate like the Drudge app was. Additionally, I could follow my favorite sports like Track & Field, or my youngest daughter’s college, Caldwell University (she just graduated but I still “like” many of their posts as a form of solidarity and encouragement.)

While the objective was to get off the smartphone, but by digital extension, I chose to curtail my laptop use as well. I never go on Twitter on the computer but I find it easier to navigate the news websites on desktop. This was not decided but grew organically from the start of my little experiment.

Next, I needed a way to track my activity. In order to gain any appreciable insights, I had to have some empirical data that could be analyzed. Knowing myself, I would need reminders. I am notorious for my things-to-do lists, they are everywhere about the house, my work bag, desk, purse, car. So I set up four alarms throughout the day. These alarms would prompt me to record my app activity, as well as my anxiety levels or feelings. Google Forms is a great, free product. I built a survey that would log the date, time, whether I went on the sites or not, mood, time of day, etc. For the first day of my experiment, as I used the form, I refined it.

For five days I tried to avoid those apps and websites and log my progress. In the meantime, I explored how I could best represent this information visually. The premier personal data visualizer, Nicholas Felton, produced an annual report, Feltron, of pretty much every single thing he did for ten years. His infographics (the word does not do the results justice) are a plethora of aggregated details from his life, presented like a work of art. He too, offers an app for tracking but I did not find that until after I began this test. I also found enormous inspiration from two information designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. These two women decided on an ambitious project of logging a weekly topic. creating a hand-drawn chart for that information (drawn on postcards) and mailing them to each other. Giorgia lived in NYC, and Stefanie, London. The two photographed their art and the act of mailing them. The resulting body of work is truly beautiful. Understand, I decidedly never liked info-graphics. Pie charts where as creative as I got. I had long ago considered this to be something boring that I just could not stomach. Numbers… yuck! And yet, this was both amazing and inspirational. What made it so attractive was its hand-drawn friendliness. The legends were as revealing as the graphic. I was inspired, though I admit that I am under a time constraint that might curtail the hand-drawn part. But I was sketching my data with new fervor and plotting my course.

Results/Findings

A total of 16 entries were logged in those 5 days. Occasionally, I missed one by either sleeping through an alarm or not hearing it because I was busy or my phone had died. Now, I made a small mistake in creating the form at work through our G-suite. So, while my reminder was on my personal device, an LG V20, I could only access the form from either my work computer (Macbook Pro) or my concession device, an iPhone 7, because of the firewall. So, at this time, I am unable to share the actual form and resulting spreadsheet directly for the raw data.

Verbatim Comments

Overall, I thought I had done very well. But the truth was that I had indeed accessed some of those sites 31.3% of the time. When drilling into the data, and comments I made, many of those were actually impulsive taps. Once I realized what I had done (Oh, no! I went to Twitter!) I bailed the app and admonished myself for not being attentive to my own actions. This alone was quite revealing. In each time, I already had the device in my hands. I could see and hear the notifications come in. This proved to be a bit of a compromise. I was able to get 50-100 characters or so of news without actually going on anything and I hadn’t banned myself from email, and when I would come home, the news was almost always on (my husband, bless his flip phone, is very addicted to TV news). But clearly, a habit had formed that was being worked out now.

The desire or need to tap those notifications had literally circumvented deliberate thought in my brain. I was reacting to stimuli without thinking. I could have turned off the notifications or even deleted the apps. I included those as a measurement for strategies employed to successfully detox. But in reality, I did not want to do that – it became a game of willpower. This resulted in more mental effort expended towards this experiment. It was near the forefront of my thoughts all day long. My best method was simply to put the devices in another room. Out of sight, out of mind. I did that five times.

I was tempted all the time at varying degrees. This, along with my feelings and where I was physically, were the most interesting revelations. Yes, like most people, checking feeds while in bed was a huge temptation. But I found myself craving distraction, at of all places, work. (“At work” meant logged in for business – I work from home twice a week, so my couch or desk next to the laundry room, are also considered “the office.”) If I was mentally bored or procrastinating, bingo – I was itching for some Twitter or news links from which I could lose myself for a while.

Conclusion

The chart at the top of this page is the cumulation of this effort. It represents my five-day struggle with myself and my device. As a result of this small experiment, I was able to retrieve several hours from my week. Hours, not minutes. I started taking care of some things that I had procrastinated on such as folding and putting away clothes. I squeezed in a couple of workouts. I tried to be more attentive to my family, and one of my favorites, additional sleep. I went to bed earlier. That doesn’t happen often.

Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, which I am working my way through now, notes that the quality of life for those who can enter deep work, such as craftsmen, who oftentimes cannot afford to have even the slightest break in focus, most often have the greatest meaningfulness to their lives from that work. They experience great satisfaction for such intensity. From that work, mastery is experienced. They are not drained but renewed.