A few years ago, I began to observe something in my own behavior that made me a bit uncomfortable. And that was that from the moment that I woke up to the end of the day, my life was a series of screens

Shadowing

A few years ago, I began to observe something in my own behavior that made me a bit uncomfortable. And that was that from the moment that I woke up to the end of the day, my life was a series of screens. I started the day with the thing that woke me up first thing in the morning, my phone, and so I sat there in bed watching various cooking videos on Instagram and bouncing around between a bunch of different applications. But then it was time to get out of bed and cook breakfast, and so the thing that I focused then on, in addition to the omelette in the pan, was the iPad that was right next to the oven. And then it was time to do some work, and so I went to a different screen which was attached to another screen itself. All the while, this little devil on my wrist was tapping and beeping and blooping and distracting me as I was trying to get important stuff done. But there was one particular offender out of all of these different devices that I wasted more time on than anything else. That was this dastardly thing: my phone. I could spend hours on this thing every single day. And so I decided to essentially, for all intents and purposes, get rid of the thing for a month. As an experiment, I thought, "I'm going to live on this thing for just 30 minutes every single day at a maximum." And so this is the amount of time I have for maps, this is the amount of time to call my mother, this is the amount of time I have for everything that I could possibly want to do, to listen to music, to listen to podcasts, and I observed what happened during this time. It took about a week to adjust downward into a new, lower level of stimulation, but once I did, I noticed that three curious things began to happen.