I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I temporarily lost my phone twice this week. This never used to happen because my phone would always be by my side, but since I’ve become more and more comfortable leaving it for longer stretches of time, I’ve also found myself losing track of where it is. So I guess it’s both a good and bad thing?

In other news, this was a pretty big week of change for me. Not just work-related, but also in how I’m starting to use my time. I’ve got a huge backlog of blog posts to write (I did not write as many as I expected during this time) but I have actually worked on my writing for the first time this month AND I baked:

This is an early recipe from the Kickstarter we backed – it’s our take on Zelda’s Monster Cake (more accurately, it should be called a Monster Loaf). It was pretty fun to do something very tactile, although the experience was somewhat ruined by the constant need to check my phone because the recipe was on there. Next time, I’ll write out the recipe ahead of time.

I’ve also managed to go for a talk on Mental Health, organised by my Church’s youth group. It was pretty good – I knew a lot of the basics because of counselling, but I’m very glad to see more education and discussion going on. There’ll be a slightly more in-depth conference on mental health and the Church happening next month and yesterday’s talk just made me more excited for it. I also saw a talk on the internet age and Christianity and I’m hoping to be able to go for that – it’s very much in line with all these attempts to manage my relationship with the internet.

The coming week will be a slightly less busy one so I’m hoping to do more writing and to schedule all my blog posts before I go to Japan the week after. It’ll be my first time back in almost three years and I am SO EXCITED. I cannot wait to see my friends and visit all my old haunts. The trip might be a bit of a challenge, though, because I will want to take lots of photos and my old DSLR isn’t cutting it anymore because for some reason, everything looks blurry when I import it to my computer. Is this something that happens with older cameras?

In terms of this detox, this is the end of week four! I never really set a firm date on when it would end but I always had a roughly one-month timeline in my mind. I am finding myself reluctant to re-install the apps so I may keep the detox for a while more. It sounds so trivial, but this really emphasised that I don’t need to be kept up on the going-ons’ of all my friends to feel like we’re still connected. It’s enough to reach out and talk to people and this really keeps most of the comparisonitis at bay.

This week’s statistics and thoughts

Average phone use per day: 1 Hour 59 Min per day – That’s almost the same as last week, which is a huge surprise to me. I used my phone for almost 3 hours on Monday and Tuesday because I was trying to finish a Tsum Tsum event so I expected the average to be higher. But comparing high use and lower use days, I think that an average of 1 hour 30 minutes is something that I’m comfortable with and would want to aim for (unless I’m out and need to use Google Maps or something). It’s an amount of time that requires me to be intentional about when I use my phone but also doesn’t restrict my usage to the point where I have to adopt unsustainable practices (e.g. not checking work notifications, purposely avoiding uses of the phone where needed, etc)

Average pickups per day: 105 per day – This is eight more than last week, which is not a very good habit. I think I’d want to try for 100 or lower per day – that’s still 4.16 pickups an hour which is quite a bit.

Average notifications per day: about 249 per day – about 49 more than last week, which is quite a bit jump. I’m expecting it to greatly decrease from this week onwards, though.

Top apps: Safari, Tsum Tsum, Telegram – No change from last week.

Apps deleted: -NIL-

Apps re-installed: -NIL-

Thoughts: The Guardian published an article titled The Machine Always Wins: What Drives Our Addiction to Social Media a few days ago. The content won’t be super new if you’re already familiar with how algorithms work and how social media sites try to keep you on their platforms but it’s a good reminder of the need to be mindful about how much time we’re spending on these platforms. We can’t trust the platforms to be responsible because what they want may not be the best for us.

I’ve also been reading a book on How to Break Up With Your Phone, something recommended in the talk about self-help that I attended last week. It’s pretty interesting and I really need to get my thoughts down in a review before I start forgetting – I’m hoping it helps with the post-experiment phase as I slowly start re-introducing apps back into my phone.

The next update will probably in two weeks or three weeks time. The next two weeks will be pretty atypical in terms of how I use my phone and spend my time so I’m reluctant to use that as a measure of how this detox works. I’ll probably see if I can get a week or two of work (although it’s a new job so again, it’ll not be super typical) before I make any judgements.

This experiment is not over yet. The real test will be when my phone is more or less back to normal.