I think I’ve figured out how to break the phone habit. I’m going back to old models, old ways of working that were mostly developed in the days before the phone. I’m not sure this will work for people younger than me, at least they might not have the “muscle memory” I have.

For most of my working life, the pattern was “do things, go to work (the office), sit down and do things at a computer, stop. Go home. Do other stuff, mostly not on computers.” Sure, as time went on I did more and more “online” … in fact I worked at “America Online” for a bit and its predecessor CompuServe several times before that. But there were morning and evening news-papers. There were books. There were projects in the workshop. Bike rides. Playing with friends at the railroad tracks. There were rituals of watching shows on one of the 3 available TV networks at night, and odds were good your friends were watching the same thing, or nothing at all because, let’s face it, Pink Floyd was right “I got 13 channels of shit on my TV to choose from”. So you did other things. In the world offline.

I’m going back to that. I don’t take my phone to breakfast. I’m rebuilding a ritual of sitting down at my computer and doing my “online” things. Mail. RSS feeds. News-ish websites. Messing with computers for the fun of it.

When I sit down at my computer I plan my “online day” (emacs, org mode and denote are awesome). But there is an offline “me” before and after that. I journal on paper. I plan my day on paper. When planning my online day, I usually consult the plan for the offline day. But not always. And then there are the things that are just not planned. I just do things.

My phone is not always in my pocket, in fact, it’s usually not. I’m re-establishing the habit of reading … paper books … after journaling. Both stimulate thought patterns that just don’t happen when you let the dopamine induced gratification cycle of doom-scrolling, texting and social media rule your lives.

I view the phone as primarily a source of interruptions. In my new (old) regime I’m choosing to schedule my interruptions. I look at things on the phone only later in the day after I’ve done my thinking, reading, planning and doing. Same for online news sites, mostly. This was a pattern I tried to follow at work as well. I class meetings, phone calls, dealing with insurance companies, paying bills and the like as mostly interruptions that should be pushed to the end of the day.

To be honest I do have the luxury now of being retired. If you’re in the middle of a career, going to school or raising kids you probably can’t control things as well as I can (or fail to control them and thus have no-one to blame but yourself). But I think the principal holds. Manage interruptions. The phone is fundamentally a source of interruptions. Segment its use in your life. I also have patterns to return to, patterns where the interruptions came more from the family members in my home and friends at school and later work rather than one of the 2 billion randos on Facebook spread across the globe. And I think dealing with in-person, face-to-face (not “Face"book) interruptions from people you know is just part of what makes us human.

I could go on, but I think this is about enough. There was life offline. There can be again.

No AIs were harmed or used in the production of this screed.