First look at this sentences. “I texted you a couple of minutes ago? Haven’t you checked it? I didn’t get your reply.” Or “Did you see the notification from FB group?” or “Have you watched that YouTube video?” The base of all the three sentences is phone or screen. We don’t want to miss a single message from our friend and we want to send the reply immediately. Why? The answer is obvious. We are getting addicted to our phones. These days everything is on phone. So many apps are ready to download. They claim to make our life easy by giving us everything on our fingertips but by all means they are making us more and more addicted to phones. I don’t think next generations can ever imagine a life without phones. And listening to our childhood stories, when we didn’t have a phone or TV in every house and they were treated as a luxury, will become some fairytales for them. We cannot change it but we can definitely limit ourselves from moving forward on this path. I took a 7-days challenge of #Phonedetox and believe me it wasn’t very hard. We find unlimited excuses to use our phone. I won’t call myself a phone addict but I can feel the usage has definitely increased what so ever be the reason which I am going to tell in the next paragraph.

Let’s first try to see if those excuses really worth it and what positive changes I have seen from phone detox challenge?

-I read blogs on my phone (it applies to me and many other bloggers)

-I will forget my friend’s birthdays if I don’t see the notifications.

-Connecting to my school friends on WhatsApp.

-Checking news and emails on phone are convenient and time-saving.

-My kids are around so I cannot watch everything on TV. I catch up on the missed episodes of my favorite serial on YouTube.

Now let’s, talk about the positive side of this challenge.

If you decide to take this #Phonedetox challenge, you will be:

• More productive when you are away from your phone: There is less distraction when you are not touching the phone during your busy hours. You will realize when you are not checking your messages in the middle of your work, you are able to finish it in one go.

 

• Able to focus more:  Whenever I attend any webinar, it asks us to turn off our phones. The only reason I can think of this requirement is to avoid any kind of distraction. Yes, by not checking every single FB or Instagram notification, you can focus more.

 

• Quality family time: You all would agree to this. Without having a phone in your hand, you can listen to your kids more attentively, you don’t find yourself just nodding your head while they are asking you for something and you are busy checking messages. Kids get your undivided attention.

 

• Mentally you are relaxed: When you are expected to respond immediately (somewhere you have set that expectation) and you miss it by any chance then you feel bad and you feel left out. But if you follow the detox technique and see the benefits, then you learn to prioritize things and you are mentally more relaxed.

Let me be very honest. I wasn’t using my phone a lot before I actively entered into blogging. Earlier my phone was mainly for receiving and making calls, listening to podcasts, and once in a while for some YouTube videos. But after I started blogging, I was more active on phone than before. I joined few blogger WhatsApp groups/pods and obviously reading their messages and replying to them, reading posts is expected from me. Since these groups are in India so by the time I get to check my messages, it is already late. I don’t want to further delay my reply.

Even before this challenge has started, I started to fix a time for my readings and engagement. As long as social media is concerned then I was never on FB or Twitter or Insta all the time. Except for Insta, I access social media accounts from my laptop. Evening time is family time for me. I do not access any of my accounts. This challenge was definitely worth a try which made me take one step further by dedicating a specific time for going off the phone.

Thank you Ashvini and Shilpa for this initiative. I encourage you all to start with one week and you will see the positive side of it and would like to continue it even after one week is over.