Do the Downtime

Bring back the bliss of the ‘90s!

Do you control your phone or does your phone control you? I’m addicted to my phone and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. It’s not totally my fault either. Corporations spend gazillions on research and app development specifically designed to ensure that they ensnare more and more of our time! One tech CEO said their greatest competitor wasn’t another company, but was SLEEP. Can you imagine?! These companies don’t want us to even have real lives or to get a good night’s rest! They want us to soothe our brains by scrolling and shopping and searching for never-ending answers to all of life’s questions!

So what can we do about this problem of always having our nose in our phones? We can Do the Downtime! Learning how to downtime has been the most important part of my screen addiction recovery program. (I’m still enrolled and will likely be a lifetime member.) Downtime is the most brilliant feature of the iPhone in my opinion! You get to choose to have your apps grayed out with no red numbered icons grasping the curious mind. Android's equivalent of iOS's "Downtime" is the Digital Wellbeing feature, which allows you to set screen time limits, track app usage, and schedule display changes to promote better digital well-being. I’ve only used Apple’s Downtime so everything I’m mentioning today is from my experience with it. You can select which apps you want to downtime, which apps you want to always remain available for use. Personally, I downtime all shopping and social media apps, leaving my browsers, banking, and email apps open. Personalize it depending on what you are most tempted with for time wasting! You can set times for automatic downtimes or just manually put it in downtime mode. When I first started doing this, even going one hour made me feel all twitchy and tingly and cut off from civilization. Now, I crave the peace and quiet and comfort of not seeing 70 unread messages. Sometimes I breathe an audible sigh of relief when I slide the toggle into downtime and leave it there for most of a day. Nothing is usually all that urgent anyway. My friends and family know if they really need to reach me, a regular text or an old fashioned phone call will get me instantly through my Apple Watch. I like to pretend my phone is an old-fashioned green corded phone and I “hang it up” on a shelf, then proceed to live my life like we did in the ‘90’s! It’s lovely! I whisk (potter is more truthful) about doing my daily duties while THINKING and PONDERING about things. We mustn’t let the art of thinking die out! We need to water it with Silence and Solitude and Simplicity and Slowing Down. Not douse it with another podcast or a constant audiobook. If you don’t like the sound of your own thoughts, you need to make friends with your very own mind in order to enjoy being with yourself.

Now I know it’s ironic that I’m typing this epistle on my phone and you are looking at yours while you’re reading it; but our phones are here to stay in this our day. We use them for work and for play and that’s OK - as long as we are making intentional choices. Yet little by little, downtime by downtime, we CAN get our lives back and teach our children by example that life is more than what’s seen on the screen. I was most pleased to reach an all time low personal screentime average of 4 hours 40 minutes per day the other week! My average was commonly double that in the past. It’s a work in progress over here, and I think it always will be. We have to help each other win this war against losing the way life used to be. I tell Danielle to put up her iPad, she hides my phone, and then we decide to bike together back into the bliss of the 1990’s. Do the downtime and come along for the ride!