Why I Stopped Using My Phone in the Morning

In the morning, I get up at seven. I drink tea. I eat bread and cheese. I feel happy.

Every evening I watch TV for three or four hours. I don't really enjoy it, and I sleep badly after. I want to change this habit. I will read a book for thirty minutes before bed. I think I will sleep better and feel happier in the morning. Maybe I will start tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I decided to walk to work instead of taking the bus. Before, I always took the number 42 — it was faster and I could read my phone on the way. But I was also feeling tired all the time, and I never really saw the sky before I got to the office. Walking takes about thirty minutes, which isn't bad. Now I have fresh air, some quiet thinking time, and I don't need to go to the gym on top of work. I'm not going to lie — on cold mornings, I still wish I was on the bus. But most days, I'm really glad I made the change, and I think I'll keep doing it through the winter.

I used to spend every evening eating dinner in front of the TV. Not a terrible crime, exactly — everyone does it — but I started to notice, about a year ago, that I couldn't actually remember what I'd eaten most nights. The food just kind of disappeared while I was watching something. It felt oddly sad when I thought about it.

I didn't do anything dramatic. I'm not someone who can follow strict rules for long. I just started eating at the kitchen table, with no phone, no TV, and whatever music I felt like. The first few nights felt boring. By the end of the week, I'd started to enjoy my meals again — actually taste them, actually notice them.

The weird thing is how small the change was, and how much it's affected me. I sleep better. I eat less. I finish eating feeling satisfied rather than vaguely disappointed. I haven't banned TV from my life. I just stopped letting it eat my dinner for me.

For years, I was the kind of person who said, out loud, that I 'didn't really have time to read' any more. I meant it, too — or at least I thought I did. I had a full-time job, a commute, a social life, the ambient exhaustion of modern adulthood. Books were something I loved, in theory, but they had migrated, over perhaps a decade, from being what I did in the evening to being what I used to do, once, before.

The change, when it finally came, was almost embarrassingly small. I started carrying a book with me everywhere. Not as a project. Not as a commitment. Just as an object in my bag, like an umbrella or a pair of keys. I didn't promise myself any number of pages. I didn't set a target. I simply made it physically available, in case a moment arose.

What I discovered, over the next few weeks, is that those moments arose constantly. On trains. In queues. In the ten unexpected minutes between one thing ending and the next beginning. I had been, it turned out, drowning in small spaces I'd been filling with my phone because it was the only thing I had on me.

I will not claim I have been transformed. I still scroll; I still get distracted; I still sometimes go three days without touching a book. But I've read more this year than in any of the last five, and it cost me nothing except the tiny act of remembering to put something different in the bag I was going to carry anyway. The real obstacle, I realise now, was never time. It was availability — and specifically, what I made available to myself.

One of the stranger habits I have developed, over the last year or so, is writing things down in a small notebook rather than on my phone. I say 'stranger' not because the practice is in itself unusual — humans have been jotting things in notebooks, presumably, for as long as they have had access to paper — but because I know, as I do it, that I am participating in something vaguely performative: the slightly self-conscious rehearsal of a pre-digital gesture, done in full awareness that a phone sits in the other pocket doing all the same things faster.

The honest version is that the notebook is not better. It is slower, untidier, less searchable; I lose it every few months, and have frequently, in rare cases, been unable to remember what my own handwriting was trying to convey. In every measurable respect it is a worse piece of technology than the device I already own. I persist anyway, and it has taken me most of the year to understand why.

The reason, I have concluded, has very little to do with productivity and a great deal to do with friction. A thought written on a phone seems to evaporate as soon as it is captured, absorbed into the blank efficiency of the grid. A thought written by hand, by contrast, leaves some small trace of its original weight. Looking back through the notebook, I can tell from the slant of the letters which ideas I considered, at the time, to be important, and which ones came to me during a long queue. It is a record of my thinking, rather than a record of my words.

I am aware, of course, that this is the sort of observation about which one should be faintly embarrassed. It is the kind of mildly self-satisfied analogue-vs-digital reflection that the modern essayist seems almost compelled to produce at some point, and I cannot fully defend myself against the charge of falling into the genre. The best I can do is flag it.

What I can say, more cautiously, is that the notebook has become, over the months, one of the very few places in my life where I am present at the speed of my own thoughts. No metrics, no notifications, no algorithmic recommendations for what I might also like to think about next. It is, in its unremarkable way, one of the less-monitored corners of my week. And this, I increasingly suspect, is a kind of modern luxury I had not known I was missing until I noticed how rarely I was allowed it.