Sundays without a phone

Last November I spent most of a Sunday answering messages I hadn't needed to open. Each reply took a minute or two. Between replies I looked at other things. By late afternoon I had neither finished the letter I meant to write nor gone out for the walk I had promised myself.

The following weekend I left the phone on the little table by the front door. I kept the ringer on. My family could still call, and I could hear it from the kitchen. I wanted a day with fewer interruptions, not an experiment in being unreachable.

For the first hour I kept walking into the hall. Sometimes I had a reason: the weather, the time, a message about lunch. Sometimes I arrived without one. It was faintly ridiculous, like opening the fridge when I knew what was in it.

What needed the phone

I discovered several small dependencies. The recipe I wanted was saved on it. So was the address of a friend I was visiting. I had stopped wearing a watch, and the kitchen clock was six minutes slow. None of this required a new system. I wrote the address on an envelope, copied the recipe and changed the clock's battery.

Other things were worth making exceptions for. If I was travelling, I took the phone. If someone needed to arrange a visit, I answered. On one wet Sunday I spent an hour talking to a friend who lives abroad. That was the best part of the day, and there seemed no sense in disqualifying it because a screen was involved.

The arrangement became simpler once I stopped trying to achieve a perfect phone-free day. I could use it for a purpose and leave it in the hall afterwards. What I was trying to avoid was carrying it from chair to table to bed without thinking.

The afternoon that was left

I had imagined I would read enormously. In practice I did the washing, made lunch and spent rather a long time looking for the garden secateurs. Without the phone, these remained ordinary tasks. They did not acquire any special glow.

But there were fewer little breaks inside them. I finished a chapter before standing up. I took the laundry out before it needed washing again. When I went for a walk, I didn't stop under a tree to answer an email that could wait until Monday.

There were dull patches too. I wanted something to fill them, and sometimes I turned the radio on. Once I went to bed early. Once I retrieved the phone and spent the evening reading restaurant reviews for a city I had no plans to visit. The next Sunday I put it back by the door.

After several months, the useful part is mostly physical: I know where the phone is, and it isn't beside my hand. I don't need to negotiate with myself every time I sit down.

I prepare these letters during the week and schedule the Sunday editions in advance. Replies wait until I am back at my desk. If there is something urgent, people who know me know to ring.

There is a small bowl on the hall table for keys. The phone lives beside it on Sundays. Sometimes the cat sits on both.