SCN’s Day Without A Smart Phone Challenge

Although fascinated by enterprise technology, I’d never really been into domestic or
home technology.

Until 2 years ago I’d refused to get sucked into buying a smart phone and was
blissfully happy with an old Nokia phone, like  this:

Then 2 years ago, calculating airmiles I found there were enough to order a
Samsung Galaxy SII, ok, let’s go for I thought and ordered it with the airmiles.

The phone arrived in a nice box, a couple of hours were spent setting up emails,
and then over time, applications were installed, Skype, Viber, WhatsAp etc.

The phone, really a computer in my pocket opened a new world, the 8 megapixel
camera was invaluable for catching interesting spur of the moment photo opportunities
especially with the children in situations where one wouldn’t normally think to
bring the camera. The videos possibility proved equally rewarding for the same
reasons.

Surfing news sites and web sites of interest and keeping up with areas I am involved
in was easy, just lift up the phone and see the latest news.

My conclusion became, this device which I’d never been interested in, became really invaluable,
and I had become a convert.

Fast forward two years, and these days, more and more I hear my children say, Dad leave the phone
and come and play with us, oh my goodness, am I a sinner and feeling bad especially as
through my work I now have an iPhone 5 with work email integtrated, like this:

Mark’s thought provoking piece last week was for me a wake up call and a reminder about any

doubts we have that we are really getting the right amount of quality time for our work and our

domestic life.

Then this weekend a funny thing happened, I left the phone charger at work, at the office, and
had I been on call I’d have gone out and bought a phone charger, but no on-call this weekend,
so I thought, I’ll put the smart phone away and swap the sim card into an old Nokia.

That was on Friday evening.

Today we are at Saturday evening and I feel liberated, emancipated, free. As the smart phone’s
battery is flat and I free from it, free from it’s distractions which are so easy to get sucked
into, just a quick look at this a quick look at that, just check this, just check that.

Not using the smart phone for the last 24 hours has provided a freedom from distraction which
I’ve not seen for a long time.

And this got me thinking, I challenge the community, to set themselve’s a personal challenge,
to take the sim card from the smart phone and put it into an old phone for a Saturday or a Sunday.

This is a personal challenge, because nobody is competing against anybody else, in this exercise,
we are simply competing against ourselves.

So the challenge is laid down, for one Saturday, from the morning, until Sunday morning, 24 hours,
put the smart phone away and use an old non-smart phone.

In a nutshell, this means:

1) Pick a weekend when you are not on call or not expected to be checking work email

2) If you have an iPhone with a small sim card, as preparation for this activity you might need

to order a normal size sim card for the same number that you can put in the older phone,

so check the sim card size and order the bigger sim card if necessary

3) Saturday morning when you get up, take the sim card out of this kind of smart phone

[if you don’t know how to get the sim card out then look on google]

4) And put the sim card into this kind of phone

5) Keep the sim card in the old phone until Sunday morning

It will be a rewarding journey, and it would be interesting for those who try it to report in the

comments of this blog, how it went, what they felt and how they used their new free time,

unleashed from the smart phone.

Looking forward to people’s feedback and experience.

We could take this further, one weekend per month, no smart phone. Why only one weekend,
why not the times when we are not on call, if we’re not on call we don’t need to read our email,
and if people need us they can call us can’t they, you know, the old way.

So, give it a try, and report back how it went.

All the best, and enjoy your new free time,

Andy.

p.s. pictures are mine, taken in the kitchen on a Nikon D3100, which I’m still learning