Are you a slave to your mobile phone?

True slaver

• Phones today have become omnipotent, omnipresent and omnieverything! In India, there are 300 million smartphone users and growing exponentially. It’s what we use every day for everything. But while the smartphone brings us closer to those who are far away, it separates us from those who are right in front of us. While it makes us connect with more in quantity, it completely destroys the quality of that connection. Teenagers have turned into screenagers, friends have turned into machines and restaurants have become Instagram ATMs. But just how addicted are we?

What not to do

• Now that we’ve established who the slave is, what do we do next? Lots, actually. The most important one is not to blow it out of proportion. Don’t give
• up your phone completely or fall into a trap of going to a place where they take it away from you for a period of time. Don’t digital detox. That’s even more brainless than your slavery. The minute you think of it like that, it also establishes that a phone is toxic. It’s not. The smartphone is the single greatest piece of technology ever to have been created! The problem is not the phone, it’s our mindless usage of it.

Three easy things

• Let’s start things off slowly to get some control back. Here are three things I did that were easy, didn’t require any major sacrifice and completely changed my phone-life balance.
• 1. Don’t charge your phone in your room. Put it on charge in a different place and you’re spending more time with family in the evening, you’re not checking your phone at all at night and doing a lot of interesting non-phone related things in the morning.
• We live in an age of distraction. A recent report found that there are now more mobile phones on the planet than people. The ability to concentrate on a task is central to learning (as Daniel Willingham says: ‘Memory is the residue of thought’). So how can we encourage students to better manage their mobile phones during revision?

• An alarm sounds as I wander away from my desk towards the water fountain and I instantly swing back towards my seat. As the buuuu-buuuu-buuuu rings it is perfectly in tune with my colleagues’ repeated pleas of “make it stop, make it stop, make it stop”. I have no sympathy. They put me up to this and I have been tolerating this incessant noise all weekend. I have been testing the Proximo, a new device from technology accessories company Kensington which aims to prevent you from ever losing or forgetting your iPhone. I have it set to maximum sensitivity, so that in the event that, let’s say, I stand up from my seat in a coffee shop, failing to realise that I have left my phone on the table, I can’t get more than a couple of metres away before both my alarm and a little key fob attached to my clothes start making a racket. It works pretty well. I’m always leaving my phone on the sofa at home and then wondering where I have put it. No chance of that now.

• It’s what we use every day for everything. But while the smartphone brings us closer to those who are far away, it separates us from those who are right in front of us. While it makes us connect with more in quantity, it completely destroys the quality of that connection. Teenagers have turned into screenagers, friends have turned into machines and restaurants have become Instagram ATMs. But just how addicted are we? We are living in a distractive age. A recent report found more mobile phones on the planet now than people do. Learning is central to the ability to focus on a task (as Daniel Willingham puts it: 'Memory is the remnant of thought'). But how do we enable students to handle their mobile phones more effectively during revision?