While I am loath to suggest that anyone can “fix their life” via consumerism, this year I have at the very least managed to tinker around the edges with some thoughtful deployments of a credit card. Here are a few things I bought—all under $40—that have allowed me to banish my phone to the shadowy reaches of my apartment for much of each day, making me feel substantially calmer, saner, and more present in my life.
A Landline Telephone
I’m sure you know this, but research shows that merely being in the same room as your cell phone shreds your attention, even if you’re not using it and it’s completely out of sight. I notice this in myself. If the phone is there, I absently pick it up. I scroll. I text frivolous thoughts to my friends. Particularly, I do this in moments of boredom or friction. Say I’m in a draft, trying to write, and I arrive at a sentence that doesn’t quite know how to unspool. Often, instead of sitting with my feelings of perplexity or frustration, I instinctively pick up my phone and lose 15 minutes to whatever beckons online.
Due to various responsibilities, I need to be reachable at all times, which means I can’t simply lock up my phone. Instead, I spent $15.70 on a secondhand cordless landline from eBay, a chrome device of gorgeous simplicity that sits on the counter by my stove. And with a $40 Bluetooth gadget, I’m able to make my cell phone ring through the landline, so I don’t pay for extra phone service or juggle two separate numbers. It’s not complicated or expensive at all, particularly given the magnitude of its rewards.
Each day, I leave my cell phone in a closet in the back of my apartment where I would never organically encounter it, and if someone calls me, the landline rings and I pick it up. I try not to touch the cell phone before noon. It’s resulted in remarkably focused and placid mornings. I read, I write, I watch the sun rise. I notice the clouds when I’m walking the dog.
And a side benefit of the landline has been that phone calls lead to completely different kinds of conversations than texts. Texting is “here’s a meme” or “look what my toddler got up to.” It is generally not “I’m concerned about the identity shift that might occur when I become a parent next month” or “why do you think I’m perpetually falling for this problematic type of man.” Via text, you get a superficial gloss. You get soundbites and images. On a call, you get the real stuff. You can probe, you can riff, you can meander through the flotsam of someone’s life.
A Vide Poche
Each day, once I break the seal on my cell phone, it tends to creep back into my life. Around noon, I check my texts, and suddenly I’m embroiled in various conversations about someone’s birthday plans or their pregnant sister or where we should meet for lunch. At this point, the phone is beside me again, and my productivity is throttled. I’m not getting anything done. The landline solved my mornings, but to solve my afternoons and evenings, I bought a vide poche.
“Vide poche” is a fancy term for a knickknack tray. In French, it means “empty pocket”—it’s that little dish by your door or your bed where you stash the odds and ends that you carry around: keys, wallet, cough drops, loose change. A vide poche could be a repurposed bowl or dessert plate or soap dish, but I bought a small Marimekko tray for 20 bucks. It’s handsome and it sits on a table next to my front door, waiting to receive my things.
The point is that, once I retrieve my cell phone from the back closet around noon, it becomes more integrated into my day. And prior to the vide poche, if I brought my phone to the grocery store or used it to track mileage on a run, the phone might have remained in my pocket once I got home, thereby hitching a ride back into my life. But now, my phone has a designated spot where it lives. Whenever I walk in the door, I reflexively place it there—conveniently located far, far away from my various workstations and stove. That way, if I want to check my phone, I have to stand up and walk to it. I’ll often do that. But it makes the phone much less appealing to use.
A Cookbook Stand
Once I substantially curbed my screentime, I made a surprising discovery: It’s while cooking that much of my phone use occurs. I’m a power user of the NYT Cooking app, which means that in the course of preparing a meal, I need to constantly wash and dry my hands so that I can scroll through the recipe and check how much flour to add. It annoys me. And not only does it interrupt my flow, but once I’m on the phone, I’ll inevitably get sucked into email or texting or Slack. I don’t need to be doing any of that—I’m cooking!—but nonetheless, there I constantly am.
One night, after losing myself to the internet when I should have been chopping carrots, I got frustrated. Then I remembered that crazy invention called cookbooks, which I once used quite a lot. So I decided that, at least on some nights—for some dishes—I’d migrate back that way. And to preserve counter space, I bought an $18 cookbook stand, which has made cooking so much more pleasurable. I cannot believe it took me this long to figure it out.
Cookbooks, I should add, are extra useful when friends are over. I do not like to pick up my phone in the presence of guests because I think it’s rude. (And it’s also contagious; when one person looks at their phone, everyone else reflexively does the same.) It used to be that when I cooked for people, I was forced to triangulate my attention between my precious friends, my precious dish, and that malevolent custodian of recipes, my phone. But like Gandhi himself, I like to be the change I want to see in the world, and now that I have a cookbook stand, I can put my phone away.
The landline, vide poche, and cookbook stand have not fixed my relationship to my phone. My goal was to reduce the number of times I unlock my cell phone each day from several hundred (ghastly!) to a more manageable “below 25” (still ghastly, but much improved). I am not there yet. I still text a lot. I sometimes lie on the couch and scroll the news. But I am doing much better. I use my phone less, and I notice it in my brain—a clarity of focus, the surprising wandering of thoughts, the ability to be present, the sheer amount of time it frees up for reading or writing or exercising or tidying or contemplating what multitudes might lurk behind the vacant eyes of my dog. These improvements cost me, altogether, less than a hundred bucks. I truly love an evening where my phone is nestled in its dish by the door and music is playing and a cookbook is open and my whole apartment smells like browning onions and simmering meats and if someone needs me my landline will ring and otherwise my mind belongs to me.
