via Shutterstock
holiday dinner with everybody looking at their phones
Nothing says Happy Holidays quite like a family huddled around a fireplace gazing lovingly…at their phones. (Raise your hand if your family gatherings look like this, too.)
I decided this past Thanksgiving was the day in which I would commit to a day-long digital detox. Upon entering my aunt’s cozy, brick, Nordeast house, I set my purse down at the door and didn’t pick it up again until we left. I figured I would start exhibiting severe withdrawal symptoms 20 minutes in. Seven hours later, I hadn’t checked Instagram Stories or Snaps…or really even wanted to.
Without my phone in tow, I had two free hands all night, people! I could dish loads of meat and carbs onto my plate unimpeded by technology. It was so freeing–I actually helped other people with my empty hand! (Bet you’ve never heard of a millennial doing that.)
“We all think that we’re master multi-taskers, but the research shows that very few people are effective multi-taskers,” says Colin Agur, a Gen-X journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in cellphone usage and effects. “There’s a limit to how much we can think at a moment.”
Walking down an urban street or through a mall, you’ve likely been the victim of someone sloshing your coffee, or violently shouldering you, eyes glued to their phone. Often, you too have perpetrated these social crimes.
“Part of what makes phones different is that they are so small and so handy, and we can scroll through them with a single hand, and it’s so easy to do all of that, that we don’t even realize when we’re doing it,” says Agur.
We’ve all been there. It’s midnight and you have to be up before the sun, but here you are scrolling through Twitter, which turns into a rabbit hole of Googling life’s greatest questions.
“There’s an obvious solution to this, in theory,” says Agur. “We shouldn’t have our phones in our bedrooms—we just get real alarm clocks.” We could dedicate specific spaces or times, like meals, to unplug. He calls these off-line solutions.
We check social frequently, for minutes–even seconds–at a time. Agur calls this “staccato communication.” It doesn’t feel like much, but it adds up. “You’re not doing one thing, you’re doing a whole bunch of things in a semi-attentive state throughout the day,” he says. The easy out? “Drop your social media apps on your phone, but that’s a big ask.”
Another method that hits where it hurts: monetary incentive. When his colleagues go for drinks, Agur says, “they’ll stack their phones in the center of the table, and whoever touches his or her phone first buys a round of drinks.”
While these ideas may work for singular situations, the long-term solution is simpler than going cold turkey on technology. Budgets, diets, and speed limits are reasonable guidelines to keep us in check. Enter: screen time boundaries.
“There’s an app for that,” says Agur. He recommends Flipd, which lets you set a timed lock out, and AppDetox, which tracks your screen time by app. StayOnTask is the nicest one. “It’ll just gently ask you at random moments throughout the day, ‘How are you doing? Are you focused on the things that you want to be focused on today?’ I don’t know if that’s nice or Minnesota Nice.”
Are these the cure-all for iObsession?
“It’s kind of counterintuitive that you download more apps to stop you from using the device that holds all the apps,” says Agur. It’s a double-edged sword: Studies have found that more apps on your phone can increase your information overload. “I’m not sure that this is a perfectly clean fix—I’m not sure anything really is.”
There’s not a clear method to combat the notification madness. “People should do what they can,” says Agur. Whether you abandon your phone for a bit every night or add apps to manage your screen time, choose manageable guidelines you can stick to.
The real goal, Agur says, is self-monitoring. “All of these really blunt tools become less necessary. You just somehow figure it out—when and how you’re going to use a device. It’s not easy to get there. I don’t claim to do that myself.”
Now, the moment of truth: Would I digital detox again?
Ask me on New Year’s, and I might hold onto my phone, kicking and screaming. But, yes, I would do a digital detox again—it was surprisingly refreshing.
Now I have to go check my notifications and post 97 times.
