I'm working on my ability to sit and do nothing while ignoring my phone

When I was a kid, there were often long stretches of time when you had to sit and do nothing.

Like if you were taking a test in school and finished early, you had to fold your hands and stare into space until everyone else finished.

Or if your mom took you to the doctor, you had to sit in the waiting room and do just that – wait. If you weren't interested in reading one of the 500 copies of Highlights magazine strewn about the pediatrician's office, your only other option was simply to exist for several minutes until the nurse called your name.

I don't recall especially loving those times when I had no book to read, no game to play, and nothing stimulating to do. But the point is I did it, and I could do it because we all learned to do it out of necessity.

This is one of the few areas of life in which my 8-year-old self far surpasses my current 55-year-old self. Whereas in 1977 I was quite skilled at doing nothing, I have somewhere along the way completely lost that ability.

Nowadays, I need something to occupy my time and attention every waking moment. Several times a day, that means pulling my phone out of my pocket and either scrolling mindlessly through Facebook or playing a game.

I can't endure even the slightest bit of inactivity.

I was going to blame all of this on my phone, but the real culprit here is of course me. I have allowed myself to become addicted to smartphone time, and I don't know how to be rid of this dependence other than proactively forcing myself to do nothing for minutes at a time.

So that's what I do. When I catch myself reaching for my phone to fill "dead time," I sometimes hold back and instead just sit and think.

It can be miserable. I was at one time a very patient person, but now I get antsy if I'm not watching something, playing something, or checking something off my to-do list.

There is much value in simply existing and being mindful of your surroundings. I know this, but that doesn't mean it's easy for me. I struggle to truly relax.

Take this blog post, for example. I'm just about finished writing it and have no idea what I'm going to do next. I'm terrified that, a minute or two from now, I'll have no choice but to stare out the window.

I'm getting twitchy just thinking about it. Where's my phone?

I'm no Luddite, but I still organize my life largely with pencil and paper

If you're someone with a smartphone (and I really hope you are...it's 2024, after all), you have at your disposal thousands of apps to help manage your time and keep track of your life.

There are calendar apps and scheduling apps and reminder apps and apps that help you find other apps, etc. The best ones are simple to use and render some aspect of your life easier to wrangle.

I use many of these apps myself. But if you were to ask me, say, whether I'm free the evening of July 16th, I would grab my phone not to load one of these apps and check my availability, but rather to text my wife with a simple request.

"Hey, could you please send me a picture of the calendar page for July?"

She would respond with a photo of the calendar that hangs on the side of our refrigerator on which we write down important events, appointments, birthdays and anniversaries, and all manner of things of which we might need reminding.

As I say, there are plenty of apps that could do this for us, including some pretty nifty family calendar apps. But we choose to stick with the tried-and-true analog approach of writing stuff down on the kitchen calendar.

Similarly, while I construct my weekly to-do lists in Microsoft OneNote, my day-to-day lists are written in pencil on small sheets of lined white paper. As I accomplish each task, I check it off.

Are there faster and easier ways to do this digitally? Absolutely, especially within OneNote itself. But for whatever reason, I stick to non-digital wood byproduct as my medium of choice for daily task management.

I cannot tell you why I/we do it this way. Habit, maybe? Familiarity?

It's certainly not "ease of use." There's nothing easy about asking my wife to take a picture of our home calendar and text it to me. It would be much faster simply to consult a shared calendar app.

Maybe it's the satisfaction of physically checking something off a list. Or the subconscious connection to a time 40 years ago when my mom wrote everything on our own kitchen calendar.

Or possibly it's resistance to having to learn something new, though I really hope that's not it. The day I start thinking that way is the day you can feel free to put me in a nice rest home somewhere.

I guess it really is just force of habit. Eventually we'll shift our approach to all-digital timekeeping, I'm sure. In the meantime, I like to think it's a small nod to a slower time when we all collectively had less to do and more time to write it down.

Kudos to you, Mr./Ms. Engineer Who First Thought of Cell Phone Flashlights

I get my money's worth from my smart phone, putting it to varied use throughout each and every day. It's an integral part of my existence.

But of all the apps loaded onto that phone, there is perhaps none more handy and none that I activate more often than the flashlight.

It's such a simple idea, really. Once phones started integrating cameras, they needed flashes for photographic lighting purposes. Why not allow users to turn that flash on for extended periods any time they needed to illuminate, say, a dark room?

There's nothing complex about the concept, but like so many things in life, its genius is in its simplicity.

I use that flashlight every morning when I'm up early and making my way around our bedroom as I get ready to exercise, dress for work, and generally just get my life in order. Since I'm always up before Terry, It helps me see what I'm doing without having to turn on the bedroom light.

A seemingly obvious feature, yet brilliant in its effectiveness and ease of use.

I don't know if it was the first phone to include it, but Apple started offering flashlight functionality with the iPhone 4 back in 2010. Somewhere there is an Apple engineer to whom I hope the company gave a large wad of cash for suggesting the feature.

You, sir or ma'am, are almost literally the light of my life.

I used to have an attention span before smartphones came along

I recently took my son Jack to get his second COVID vaccine. Afterward, as we were sitting in the observation area, I looked at the people around us.

At one point, every single person in that room except me was looking at their cell phone. And it's not like this was a room of relatively young people. The two nurse volunteers sitting up front both had to be well into their 60s, possibly their 70s, and their gazes were trained squarely on iPhones.

I don't say this to claim any sort of moral superiority, by the way. The only reason I wasn't on my phone at that moment was because I recently became aware of how addicted to this device I was, and I've been making a concerted effort to just sit and "be" during quiet moments, rather than checking Facebook or playing my Yahtzee app.

Because, you see, there used to be a time when we as a society were all pretty good at just sitting still and waiting. Before smartphones, you were often in situations when there was absolutely nothing to do for a period of time, for whatever reason, whether it was because you were sitting in a doctor's waiting room or were finished taking a test in school.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost the ability to just patiently wait. All spare moments were spent on the phone.

Even now when I get a quiet moment, there's a real itch to grab my phone. So very often, I purposely resist the itch and just sit there.

I've found some benefit to this. Our brains tend to go go go all the time these days, and they're not necessarily wired for that. They need time for reflection, contemplation, and inward thought. Collectively, we're starving them of this sort of lower-level activity.

So I'm trying. Really, I'm trying.

The urge is still there to go on Twitter whenever I manage to free up a spare 37 seconds. And while I'm not sure if and when it will go away, I'll admit I'm really enjoying returning to the 1990s for short bursts of time.

You know, back when I possessed some modicum of patience.