This examination is such a public service, Kerri, thank you! I cringed while I read through out. I feel I've come a long way with my tech use generally and go through periods where I'm *okay* with my phone use, it still occupies an out-of-proportion place in my life. I also find that because I'm expecting the Light Phone to arrive in May, I just sort of don't put the parameters as strictly on the smartphone because "it will be gone soon anyway" - which is a silly excuse, and the time between now and May I do not want simply wasted on my phone! This was a good reminder of that and tech-lite is going to be a big part of my Lent, I think.
Oh my gosh, iPhone and laptop in the same week?? That’s rough, and especially so in winter, with little kids!
What’s funny about your comment is that my original examination just said “device” instead of “phone” but I changed bc it seems like phones are ubiquitous but maybe it actually just does depend on the person. Certainly gamers would say that the computer is the thing they use most.
Jen Fulwiler talks a lot about how moms esp, who lack the more traditional village, turn to phones bc it’s natural to want connection to others, and need a break from your kids. I think the real solution is just to have a walkable village that is multi-generational and generally supportive, but that takes a lot of work and intentionality (as we have talked about so many times!) in the meantime, it’s all about figuring out that messy middle.
Someone recently wrote about how average phone use means 10 years of your adult life on a phone- but my husband and I were talking about how that stat is widely variable. I message friends, a lot. He spends hours listening to podcasts/ lectures about things like natural law. We have no problem with these things in and of themselves and we try to discern them periodically. It sounds like your laptop represents both connection and learning, which are both tough to come by in the little kid years!
I’m also praying through these questions and trying to be both realistic and gracious to myself in acknowledgment of what I’ve been through and how tech can serve my life right now. But I’m also trying to find a way to have a dumb phone that does international internet-based messaging and uses Libby :)
So interesting Haley -- for me, the laptop is great but I can't have it out around the kids. They're too interested in it (or want to watch a video on it! We don't have a TV so when we watch something it's on my laptop). So with two little kids, the farm, everything else, I find myself trying to do things "in between" while doing other things -- voice memoing while also watching the kids, checking email at a stoplight, etc. I already feel my attention is very fractured just with this season of life and the phone always make me feel all over the place mentally.
I also have a habit of scrolling - Notes, doomsday News, even my own photo roll - when I'm tired. So I'll have wasted 30 minutes with a book next to me on the chair. And as you all know, 30 minutes for a busy Mom is 30 minutes you DO NOT get back! So for me, when the phone is gone - I'm fine. I don't have my phone right now - the screen broke (3rd time in 3 weeks.. Is God telling me something!?) and I feel fine. This morning is one of my one or two work mornings a week so I have some uninterrupted laptop time for Substack, audio editing, catching up on emails etc. There's no reason why I need to feel so frantic with my phone around the kids etc.
I also really love photography and I'd like to get back to using my digital camera in an intentional way instead of just snapping photos on my Pixel (I have over 30,000 photos on my camera roll... HOW? NO ONE needs that many photos!!!)
So for me that's my motivation. I do think it's important to assess very individually (as Kerri's post encourages us to!) how phone/tech generally fits into our life and what we are okay with/what we're not. I am GRATEFUL for the internet - I make a financial contribution to our family as a primarily stay at home Mom solely because of technology, and I also just have fun! Going on podcasts, chatting with other people, debating issues. It feeds me intellectually in a demanding season. I don't want to give that up. BUT I do want to be more intentional about it. When I'm with my kids, I want to be with my kids. If I pick something up in between things, I want it to be a book. Then I can save my 'online time' for when I WANT to be online, not when I'm feeling frazzled and out of my head and looking for a dopamine hit.
To your earlier q Kerri: I don't use audiobooks. I just can't focus on them. I am keeping my smartphone as a Wifi connected device in the house or to use with the Lightphone hotspot when out if needed. So I'll still use Whatsapp (I have many family/ friends overseas) and have access to Spotify for music/podcasts, but I don't have to have those things on my primary phone all the time.
I feel like having the Light Phone be a hotspot is a game changer for keeping wifi enabled Smart devices on hand for 'when needed' (or even to download your audio books on!) but giving you the freedom back to *just have a phone that is a phone* for the majority of the time. I've heard good things about Brick too! For me the psychological pull of the phone is still strong enough I think I'm the type of person who just needs it *gone* so Brick would be helpful but not enough (I'm also home most of the time and could too easily go to the physical location to open apps - I know myself, I would do it!)
So can I ask is your plan to give US and International people your Light phone number to text or call when urgent, but otherwise you will WhatsApp people when you’re home on Wi-Fi? (I think the fact that I work from home on wi-fi is making this hard for me to imagine! I don’t actually use my phone much beyond maps when I’m out, bc I’m either driving or with people doing stuff.)
I'm switching over my number to my LightPhone so everyone can just text me as usual on the new dumb phone. The only people I text with routinely are really family members - my Dad and my husband. Friends will check in, but I'd rather do a phone call in any case. I use WhatsApp for most of my 'social life' -- voice memos with friends (international and local) and WhatsApp can be used on Wifi on a desktop as well as over Wifi on a Smartphone device or tablet, so that's how I plan on using it. I'd really like to. be able to have my Lightphone be my primary device - the only one usually on my person when I'm going about my day - and only picking up my smartphone when I want to have some 'catch up time' or to download a new podcast etc.
I would really love a Light Phone if the texting could somehow be internet-based (and therefore, international-friendly), rather than SMS-based!
Do you use Libby/ Overdrive/ Hoopla for borrowing audiobooks from the library? If so, I'd love to hear how you plan to navigate that with a Light Phone.
So I actually destroyed my iphone in a kitchen mis-hap several days ago. It was an interesting time to seriously think about how I used it. (And then I destroyed my macbook a few days later..... yeah, rough week. haha)
I considered and looked into a few dumphones (sunbeam, lightphone, wisephone). But what I found in the period with no phone vs. the period with no laptop was that I am far, far more dependent upon my laptop and am not actually attached to my phone in the same way as I hear people talk about? Part of this is that I don't leave my house a lot (at all?) by myself with a bunch of little kids in the winter....I am very much a homebody and it's not like I'm out doing things by myself (haha) so my phone is mostly just available at home for a photo or video here and there at home, and some strategic use of apps-as-tools. So maybe my cop-out is that I "don't need it" but only because I'm home... most the time. I actually haaaaaaated having only the phone without my laptop. I told my husband "maybe this is what people mean when they say they use their phone too much... do they just not have computers? Because this is really annoying to have to do it all on here!" haha
But I do use my smartphone for 1) audio or music when I/we do go out. my prenatal appointments are far, so is church, and we have to do roadtrips to see family 2) for navigation because we are still getting used to things in Wisconsin and 3) for facetiming as all family is far away. So I did end up getting a refurbished phone because my husband and I talked through these things and the fact that these are genuinely helpful tools for me.
Now, all the things I do on a laptop throughout the day is more the issue. I winced a little, too, at some of these questions. I'm finding a hard balance as a mom, because time just doesn't always come in perfectly proportioned (or anticipated) amounts. So sometimes I'm not sure how to interact with it, or how I'm supposed to do life with tech. I can, admittedly, get cynical seeing women with childcare or flexible husbands whom they tag-team childcare with be like "oh yeah, would never use a screen around my kids, even though I have this whole internet-based business or job that I somehow make time for!" And then there are women who are just mostly luddites already and aren't even reading stuff like this. lol
And here I am, wanting to be a person somehow using the internet but with not much margin. I suppose it comes from other places, which is part of the point of the examination. So, perhaps in my overwhelm and discouragement I should just print this off, sit with it, and have the Holy Spirit show me what's up.
*oh, one helpful trick I think Ben Christiansen shared was bookmarking the inbox of substack and have that be what opens (instead of the default Notes feed). Been doing so for a couple months now. I see why people with the app get so sucked in. You literally can't NOT see the algorithmic feed of Notes when you open the app! But for desktop users this is a gamechanger.
I feel similarly about the laptop, Haley! I've never had a smartphone (I use Overdrive on the laptop and I just bring that along if we listen to podcasts in the car; we have an outdated GPS that stays in the van; video calls are all on laptop or desktops; we also just used laptops when traveling abroad a few years ago, since for some reason international basic phones aren't available at European airports anymore...), but I've had plenty to deal with just limiting laptop use! So many things are tied to the screen nowadays. I'm grateful for the limits of the laptop at the very least. But all this does make me think of how reliant on *computers* we are, portable or not, and I wonder what it would mean to step back from that dependency in a significant way, even just partially—we're quite a ways from the kind of social fabric we had before telephones of any sort, for instance!
(On this: I'm known for not having my dumb phone on me all the time around here, so one of my friends stopped the other day and said she figured she'd just drive by to see if her daughter could have a play date for a bit, since I wasn't answering my phone! We were all home, so she dropped her off and the kids played outside for a good while. And when we were in Germany a couple years ago, I paid lots of attention to the church clock tower to keep track of when I was supposed to meet up with folks—particularly when my watch died...)
Thanks for sharing the details of how you navigate these decisions, Tessa! I really appreciate those “old fashioned” examples of people just dropping by or using a clock tower to tell time- these were normal in my younger years and not that long ago- it would be nice to bring them back.
And I hadn’t thought of just bringing the laptop in the car… something else I used to do when listening to audiobooks on CD!
Kerri, thank you for this. I posted about this idea last week, so it's heartening to know I'm not alone. Your questions are very helpful and touch on many old habits I noticed resurfacing since joining Substack last fall. I appreciate that you're making it normal to ask these questions, and providing such helpful ones for us.
I unsubscribed from a lot of great publications to quiet things down - I might resubscribe later, who knows? Recently, I got an alarm clock (I haven't had one since high school) to keep the phone out of my bedroom. Thanks to people on Substack, I've started reading more challenging books after a long hiatus due to being a working mom + pregnancies, moving, etc.
Technology fills in a substantial void for many of us -- communion with God, loving community, a disconnect from the joy and pain of the physical world. Lent is a great time to ask God and others to help fill the void. Thank you so much for this timely and thoughtful post.
Oh how cool that you wrote about this just last week! It seems like maybe we’re all being nudged to reconsider these things.
Thanks for sharing how you’re navigating these waters. I tried 2 different alarm clocks in the past few years… but I hated them both, ha! Maybe I need to go to a store that actually sells them.
The last question about what my phone “represents” for me is key- it really is a means of connection and that’s why I have a hard time with boundaries around that aspect of it. If only all my friends were also neighbours!
Ha! Maybe alarm clocks are inherently a nuisance, I don't know, I'm not sure it's possible for me to "win" with one.
Yes, Kerri, the mingling of relationship with tech is presenting itself to me as an ethical question lately, and I'm trying to approach it in a slow, reasonable manner rather than an emotional or reactionary one. I'm always interested to hear others' thoughts on that particular idea, if you come across any or have any of your own! You are blessing many people whom you reach through your phone, and also surely plenty in person, too.
Lovely set of questions and the openness with which you've written this.
Strategic Changes I've made wrt technology:
1. all apps (except WhatsApp and work email) have notifications off. Even on WhatsApp, most groups are on mute.
2. Bedtime mode or DND set to start from 10pm to 7am. my phone turns greyscale and puts on DND. (My previous phone had an Auto-power off which I set for 11pm and it was literally the best feature now that I don't have it anymore. Because it turned off my phone by itself, it wasn't a choice I had to make or be deliberate with. If its off to the side and it happens to be 11pm, poof! off! helped to close out chats with friends or people and officially say bye to the world that way.
3. I practice the sabbath discipline, and for those 24 hrs, my wifi-data is also off (in addition to DND or focus mode). I can't keep my phone off entirely in case my family needs to communicate, but my close friends know that any texts they send will be seen and replied to only after sabbath. I turn on wifi if I am listening to worship on my phone, but I try to avoid that device otherwise. Sabbath is the day when my phone could be in a drawer in a room and I am elsewhere in the house and wouldn't even know where I kept my phone.
4. At various points during the year, I uninstall Instagram from my phone and log out of it on desktop as well, as a fast/abstienese/frustration from the noise etc. there's no pattern or fixed date for each time I do this, but usually a month or 3 (my longest so far).
5. I only have key communication apps, finance, food and shopping, bible and commute related apps. Instagram, Spotify and YouTube are the only social or entertainment apps I have on my phone.
And while all of the above is for my phone.. my rules, relationship and boundaries with my iPad are different (and not entirely healthy as can be). DND and focus mode etc still applies but there are differences nonetheless:
I don't carry the iPad with me to work, but its the last thing I see before I sleep. My phone has no entertainment, my iPad has all the subscriptions and apps installed (I don't watch everyday but its there). The iPad is creative and entertainment device for me, so it has my design apps, kindle, Garage Band, netflix, disney, prime, spotify, podcast etc etc. so its mainly used for those 2 purposes only. But in all honesty, whenever I am travelling overnight, I always wonder if I should carry my iPad with me (along with phone, earphones and my actual kindle) and its such a convicting thought each time.
It's quite long, but these things have helped me maintain my phone usage to under 4hrs/day (cause I access all the apps/purposes etc through desktop/laptop during the work hours)
Thank you so much for taking the time to share how you navigate these challenges! I love hearing the specifics of how others do it. And wow- a phone that would just turn itself off sounds great! For your sabbath, is the phone just in a drawer with no Wi-Fi, but it would ring if someone called in an emergency?
Yes Kerri! My phone can still receive and make calls even with the internet off. As long it is not on flight mode, calls should go through. Plus, if wifi/net is off, I don't need to put on silent separately, cause why bother.
THIS should be part of everyone’s Lenten fasting and reflection. We just don’t see how much time we give to these devices, even for good or “necessary” tasks — time that could have been focused on Our Lord and our families and friends. Thank you.
This examination is such a public service, Kerri, thank you! I cringed while I read through out. I feel I've come a long way with my tech use generally and go through periods where I'm *okay* with my phone use, it still occupies an out-of-proportion place in my life. I also find that because I'm expecting the Light Phone to arrive in May, I just sort of don't put the parameters as strictly on the smartphone because "it will be gone soon anyway" - which is a silly excuse, and the time between now and May I do not want simply wasted on my phone! This was a good reminder of that and tech-lite is going to be a big part of my Lent, I think.
Oh my gosh, iPhone and laptop in the same week?? That’s rough, and especially so in winter, with little kids!
What’s funny about your comment is that my original examination just said “device” instead of “phone” but I changed bc it seems like phones are ubiquitous but maybe it actually just does depend on the person. Certainly gamers would say that the computer is the thing they use most.
Jen Fulwiler talks a lot about how moms esp, who lack the more traditional village, turn to phones bc it’s natural to want connection to others, and need a break from your kids. I think the real solution is just to have a walkable village that is multi-generational and generally supportive, but that takes a lot of work and intentionality (as we have talked about so many times!) in the meantime, it’s all about figuring out that messy middle.
Someone recently wrote about how average phone use means 10 years of your adult life on a phone- but my husband and I were talking about how that stat is widely variable. I message friends, a lot. He spends hours listening to podcasts/ lectures about things like natural law. We have no problem with these things in and of themselves and we try to discern them periodically. It sounds like your laptop represents both connection and learning, which are both tough to come by in the little kid years!
I’m also praying through these questions and trying to be both realistic and gracious to myself in acknowledgment of what I’ve been through and how tech can serve my life right now. But I’m also trying to find a way to have a dumb phone that does international internet-based messaging and uses Libby :)
So interesting Haley -- for me, the laptop is great but I can't have it out around the kids. They're too interested in it (or want to watch a video on it! We don't have a TV so when we watch something it's on my laptop). So with two little kids, the farm, everything else, I find myself trying to do things "in between" while doing other things -- voice memoing while also watching the kids, checking email at a stoplight, etc. I already feel my attention is very fractured just with this season of life and the phone always make me feel all over the place mentally.
I also have a habit of scrolling - Notes, doomsday News, even my own photo roll - when I'm tired. So I'll have wasted 30 minutes with a book next to me on the chair. And as you all know, 30 minutes for a busy Mom is 30 minutes you DO NOT get back! So for me, when the phone is gone - I'm fine. I don't have my phone right now - the screen broke (3rd time in 3 weeks.. Is God telling me something!?) and I feel fine. This morning is one of my one or two work mornings a week so I have some uninterrupted laptop time for Substack, audio editing, catching up on emails etc. There's no reason why I need to feel so frantic with my phone around the kids etc.
I also really love photography and I'd like to get back to using my digital camera in an intentional way instead of just snapping photos on my Pixel (I have over 30,000 photos on my camera roll... HOW? NO ONE needs that many photos!!!)
So for me that's my motivation. I do think it's important to assess very individually (as Kerri's post encourages us to!) how phone/tech generally fits into our life and what we are okay with/what we're not. I am GRATEFUL for the internet - I make a financial contribution to our family as a primarily stay at home Mom solely because of technology, and I also just have fun! Going on podcasts, chatting with other people, debating issues. It feeds me intellectually in a demanding season. I don't want to give that up. BUT I do want to be more intentional about it. When I'm with my kids, I want to be with my kids. If I pick something up in between things, I want it to be a book. Then I can save my 'online time' for when I WANT to be online, not when I'm feeling frazzled and out of my head and looking for a dopamine hit.
To your earlier q Kerri: I don't use audiobooks. I just can't focus on them. I am keeping my smartphone as a Wifi connected device in the house or to use with the Lightphone hotspot when out if needed. So I'll still use Whatsapp (I have many family/ friends overseas) and have access to Spotify for music/podcasts, but I don't have to have those things on my primary phone all the time.
Thanks Katie! That’s super helpful. I’ve been thinking about getting a dumb phone and or Brick or something…
I feel like having the Light Phone be a hotspot is a game changer for keeping wifi enabled Smart devices on hand for 'when needed' (or even to download your audio books on!) but giving you the freedom back to *just have a phone that is a phone* for the majority of the time. I've heard good things about Brick too! For me the psychological pull of the phone is still strong enough I think I'm the type of person who just needs it *gone* so Brick would be helpful but not enough (I'm also home most of the time and could too easily go to the physical location to open apps - I know myself, I would do it!)
So can I ask is your plan to give US and International people your Light phone number to text or call when urgent, but otherwise you will WhatsApp people when you’re home on Wi-Fi? (I think the fact that I work from home on wi-fi is making this hard for me to imagine! I don’t actually use my phone much beyond maps when I’m out, bc I’m either driving or with people doing stuff.)
I'm switching over my number to my LightPhone so everyone can just text me as usual on the new dumb phone. The only people I text with routinely are really family members - my Dad and my husband. Friends will check in, but I'd rather do a phone call in any case. I use WhatsApp for most of my 'social life' -- voice memos with friends (international and local) and WhatsApp can be used on Wifi on a desktop as well as over Wifi on a Smartphone device or tablet, so that's how I plan on using it. I'd really like to. be able to have my Lightphone be my primary device - the only one usually on my person when I'm going about my day - and only picking up my smartphone when I want to have some 'catch up time' or to download a new podcast etc.
Thanks, Katie! It was hard for me to read too...
I would really love a Light Phone if the texting could somehow be internet-based (and therefore, international-friendly), rather than SMS-based!
Do you use Libby/ Overdrive/ Hoopla for borrowing audiobooks from the library? If so, I'd love to hear how you plan to navigate that with a Light Phone.
So I actually destroyed my iphone in a kitchen mis-hap several days ago. It was an interesting time to seriously think about how I used it. (And then I destroyed my macbook a few days later..... yeah, rough week. haha)
I considered and looked into a few dumphones (sunbeam, lightphone, wisephone). But what I found in the period with no phone vs. the period with no laptop was that I am far, far more dependent upon my laptop and am not actually attached to my phone in the same way as I hear people talk about? Part of this is that I don't leave my house a lot (at all?) by myself with a bunch of little kids in the winter....I am very much a homebody and it's not like I'm out doing things by myself (haha) so my phone is mostly just available at home for a photo or video here and there at home, and some strategic use of apps-as-tools. So maybe my cop-out is that I "don't need it" but only because I'm home... most the time. I actually haaaaaaated having only the phone without my laptop. I told my husband "maybe this is what people mean when they say they use their phone too much... do they just not have computers? Because this is really annoying to have to do it all on here!" haha
But I do use my smartphone for 1) audio or music when I/we do go out. my prenatal appointments are far, so is church, and we have to do roadtrips to see family 2) for navigation because we are still getting used to things in Wisconsin and 3) for facetiming as all family is far away. So I did end up getting a refurbished phone because my husband and I talked through these things and the fact that these are genuinely helpful tools for me.
Now, all the things I do on a laptop throughout the day is more the issue. I winced a little, too, at some of these questions. I'm finding a hard balance as a mom, because time just doesn't always come in perfectly proportioned (or anticipated) amounts. So sometimes I'm not sure how to interact with it, or how I'm supposed to do life with tech. I can, admittedly, get cynical seeing women with childcare or flexible husbands whom they tag-team childcare with be like "oh yeah, would never use a screen around my kids, even though I have this whole internet-based business or job that I somehow make time for!" And then there are women who are just mostly luddites already and aren't even reading stuff like this. lol
And here I am, wanting to be a person somehow using the internet but with not much margin. I suppose it comes from other places, which is part of the point of the examination. So, perhaps in my overwhelm and discouragement I should just print this off, sit with it, and have the Holy Spirit show me what's up.
*oh, one helpful trick I think Ben Christiansen shared was bookmarking the inbox of substack and have that be what opens (instead of the default Notes feed). Been doing so for a couple months now. I see why people with the app get so sucked in. You literally can't NOT see the algorithmic feed of Notes when you open the app! But for desktop users this is a gamechanger.
I feel similarly about the laptop, Haley! I've never had a smartphone (I use Overdrive on the laptop and I just bring that along if we listen to podcasts in the car; we have an outdated GPS that stays in the van; video calls are all on laptop or desktops; we also just used laptops when traveling abroad a few years ago, since for some reason international basic phones aren't available at European airports anymore...), but I've had plenty to deal with just limiting laptop use! So many things are tied to the screen nowadays. I'm grateful for the limits of the laptop at the very least. But all this does make me think of how reliant on *computers* we are, portable or not, and I wonder what it would mean to step back from that dependency in a significant way, even just partially—we're quite a ways from the kind of social fabric we had before telephones of any sort, for instance!
(On this: I'm known for not having my dumb phone on me all the time around here, so one of my friends stopped the other day and said she figured she'd just drive by to see if her daughter could have a play date for a bit, since I wasn't answering my phone! We were all home, so she dropped her off and the kids played outside for a good while. And when we were in Germany a couple years ago, I paid lots of attention to the church clock tower to keep track of when I was supposed to meet up with folks—particularly when my watch died...)
Thanks for sharing the details of how you navigate these decisions, Tessa! I really appreciate those “old fashioned” examples of people just dropping by or using a clock tower to tell time- these were normal in my younger years and not that long ago- it would be nice to bring them back.
And I hadn’t thought of just bringing the laptop in the car… something else I used to do when listening to audiobooks on CD!
Kerri, thank you for this. I posted about this idea last week, so it's heartening to know I'm not alone. Your questions are very helpful and touch on many old habits I noticed resurfacing since joining Substack last fall. I appreciate that you're making it normal to ask these questions, and providing such helpful ones for us.
I unsubscribed from a lot of great publications to quiet things down - I might resubscribe later, who knows? Recently, I got an alarm clock (I haven't had one since high school) to keep the phone out of my bedroom. Thanks to people on Substack, I've started reading more challenging books after a long hiatus due to being a working mom + pregnancies, moving, etc.
Technology fills in a substantial void for many of us -- communion with God, loving community, a disconnect from the joy and pain of the physical world. Lent is a great time to ask God and others to help fill the void. Thank you so much for this timely and thoughtful post.
Oh how cool that you wrote about this just last week! It seems like maybe we’re all being nudged to reconsider these things.
Thanks for sharing how you’re navigating these waters. I tried 2 different alarm clocks in the past few years… but I hated them both, ha! Maybe I need to go to a store that actually sells them.
The last question about what my phone “represents” for me is key- it really is a means of connection and that’s why I have a hard time with boundaries around that aspect of it. If only all my friends were also neighbours!
Ha! Maybe alarm clocks are inherently a nuisance, I don't know, I'm not sure it's possible for me to "win" with one.
Yes, Kerri, the mingling of relationship with tech is presenting itself to me as an ethical question lately, and I'm trying to approach it in a slow, reasonable manner rather than an emotional or reactionary one. I'm always interested to hear others' thoughts on that particular idea, if you come across any or have any of your own! You are blessing many people whom you reach through your phone, and also surely plenty in person, too.
Thank you, again, for this article!
Lovely set of questions and the openness with which you've written this.
Strategic Changes I've made wrt technology:
1. all apps (except WhatsApp and work email) have notifications off. Even on WhatsApp, most groups are on mute.
2. Bedtime mode or DND set to start from 10pm to 7am. my phone turns greyscale and puts on DND. (My previous phone had an Auto-power off which I set for 11pm and it was literally the best feature now that I don't have it anymore. Because it turned off my phone by itself, it wasn't a choice I had to make or be deliberate with. If its off to the side and it happens to be 11pm, poof! off! helped to close out chats with friends or people and officially say bye to the world that way.
3. I practice the sabbath discipline, and for those 24 hrs, my wifi-data is also off (in addition to DND or focus mode). I can't keep my phone off entirely in case my family needs to communicate, but my close friends know that any texts they send will be seen and replied to only after sabbath. I turn on wifi if I am listening to worship on my phone, but I try to avoid that device otherwise. Sabbath is the day when my phone could be in a drawer in a room and I am elsewhere in the house and wouldn't even know where I kept my phone.
4. At various points during the year, I uninstall Instagram from my phone and log out of it on desktop as well, as a fast/abstienese/frustration from the noise etc. there's no pattern or fixed date for each time I do this, but usually a month or 3 (my longest so far).
5. I only have key communication apps, finance, food and shopping, bible and commute related apps. Instagram, Spotify and YouTube are the only social or entertainment apps I have on my phone.
And while all of the above is for my phone.. my rules, relationship and boundaries with my iPad are different (and not entirely healthy as can be). DND and focus mode etc still applies but there are differences nonetheless:
I don't carry the iPad with me to work, but its the last thing I see before I sleep. My phone has no entertainment, my iPad has all the subscriptions and apps installed (I don't watch everyday but its there). The iPad is creative and entertainment device for me, so it has my design apps, kindle, Garage Band, netflix, disney, prime, spotify, podcast etc etc. so its mainly used for those 2 purposes only. But in all honesty, whenever I am travelling overnight, I always wonder if I should carry my iPad with me (along with phone, earphones and my actual kindle) and its such a convicting thought each time.
It's quite long, but these things have helped me maintain my phone usage to under 4hrs/day (cause I access all the apps/purposes etc through desktop/laptop during the work hours)
Thank you so much for taking the time to share how you navigate these challenges! I love hearing the specifics of how others do it. And wow- a phone that would just turn itself off sounds great! For your sabbath, is the phone just in a drawer with no Wi-Fi, but it would ring if someone called in an emergency?
Yes Kerri! My phone can still receive and make calls even with the internet off. As long it is not on flight mode, calls should go through. Plus, if wifi/net is off, I don't need to put on silent separately, cause why bother.
Thanks! That’s very helpful
Thank you for this!!
You’re very welcome!
What a useful article! I am sharing it to my family and Catholic men I know.
THIS should be part of everyone’s Lenten fasting and reflection. We just don’t see how much time we give to these devices, even for good or “necessary” tasks — time that could have been focused on Our Lord and our families and friends. Thank you.
Thank you, Julia!