Productophile Experiment #1: Let’s get your phone to sleep for a day
Productophile is a fun-term I invented to refer to productivity-loving people like me and you.
“Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.” — Robin Sharma
What a nice way to start a blog post and drive away the audience? Not really. That’s not what I am trying to do. I just tried this thing randomly one fine day. I wanted 0 minutes of screen time on my iPhone.
These are some of the random tech-related experiments I keep doing all the time: Putting my phone on flight mode, turning on ‘Do not Disturb’ from 10 PM to 8 AM, using the phone for just one hour a day, etc (I will write about these experiments if you want me to, later on).
For this experiment, I just wanted to give it some rest for a day as I heard somewhere that switching off your phone once a week for a few minutes is good for its performance and battery. So naturally, me being me, decided to take it to the next level — switching it off for a day. And… It was one of the best days of my life. I got so many things done within 16 hours of my day (after waking up, of course). There were tough times which made me realize how much dependent I am on my phone but I was also able to outsource most of its utility into some offline devices like using pen and paper for making To-Do list instead of some app on my phone and even my Distraction Journal had less entries for that day since most phone-related distractions were cut off.
Should you try this? If you don’t have urgent business on your phone then, why not? Try switching off your phone for a day and see how it impacts your productivity. If it doesn’t work you can resort to Flight Mode or Do not Disturb mode later on. As per my phone’s battery and performance… I am not sure how much of that really improved. But anyways, I think my phone might have been grateful to me also for not binge-chatting and going through the Reddit-Insta-YouTube hedonic treadmill. Everyone enjoys a break!
Takeaway: Switching off your phone for a day might do the unbelievable.
~Aditya Darekar
