I Locked My Phone Up - My Creativity & Focus Went Through the Roof

I just emerged from a week of digital detox where I put away ALL my electronic devices in a literal lock box. This was to emulate the solitude I would have had while camping in the wilderness, which has always been healing. I’ll share my experience in today’s issue and we’ll end with some thoughts on “time” and a video on how I accelerate learning with mind maps.

Okay first, how did I conduct this exercise? Well first I had to make sure my calendar was cleared of meetings. Fortunately, the holiday season is perfect for that.

Timed lock safes are bulky and expensive, so I got a Master Lock box plus a Kitchen Safe timer box. I then locked up my laptop, iPad, and phone in the Master Lock box, put the key in the Kitchen Safe, and set the timer for 4 days. To make sure I was still reachable in case of emergencies, I left on my cellular Apple Watch and Air Pods to let calls through. As a bonus, it also tracks sleep (more on this later).

So what happened? The first day was pretty hard because I was so used to grabbing my phone and checking it. By the afternoon, however, I resigned to my fate and got over those impulses. It’s surprising how quickly we can get used to constraints once we don’t have a choice. All I had were my journal, books, and a stack of Economist magazines that I never got around to reading. So I dug in.

Day 2 and 3 passed much smoother and I began to really enjoy my untethered existence. It still felt weird to not feel the weight of a phone in my pocket or have a screen to come back to at night, but walking through my neighborhood and talking to people without any distractions or hurry was very pleasant.

By the final day, I was both sad and relieved to be at the finish line. Sad because I knew my deep reading time was coming to an end, but I was also looking forward to getting back to friends and my work.

Top Takeaways

The week was overwhelmingly positive and if I had to rank the top four benefits, they’d be:

1. Sleep! I’m a regular insomniac who rarely gets consistent good sleep. It’s very frustrating to wake up randomly at 3 or 4am to just lay there counting sheep. This of course puts a cloud over the rest of the day before it even starts!

Check out the great sleep from Tuesday to Friday! Okay, “great” at least by my standards 

Thanks to the Apple Watch, I was able to track my sleep during this experiment. Starting with the very first night, I showered and started winding down at 9:30pm, knocked out around 11pm with Kindle in hand, and didn’t wake up until I was supposed to right before 7am. Not only that, my deep sleep and overall sleep quality was noticeable improved. This is very unusual for me. The major variable that was removed was digital device use. It’ll be interesting to see if my sleep returns to “normal” now that I’ve got all my gadgets back.

2) Creativity: I had several breakthroughs in my career direction this week. The freedom of walking to the cafe in the morning to simply journal, read and converse with my roommate produced a huge influx of new ideas, precisely because I wasn’t focused on it and trying to squeeze my brain for results (there’s also a growing body of studies that point to this exact phenomenon). I look forward to sharing some of these insights with you in next week’s issue.

Finally got my laptop back to type these words you’re reading, but it was so nice to just journal for hours at the cafe.

Trying to reconstruct Nassim Taleb’s lessons into my own context. Probably no one will ever want to get a used book from me hah...

3) Focus: Deep reading has always been a critical part of my learning. In fact, I’m a super slow reader and consider it instead as a process of “reconstructing” and adapting the brain of the author. The end result is that the writers whom I absorb become my “Council of Advisors” - a collection of mindsets and lenses that I analyze the world with. Consequently, I’m extremely picky about who I spend my literary time with. Borrowing Seneca’s words, it’s those “whose genius is unquestionable”. This week provided ample opportunities with Nassim Taleb and “Antifragile”.

4) Motivation: Constant doing (video filming and editing, traveling, calls, or writing) eventually wears down at my motivation because I feel like I’m doing for the sake of doing. If I’ve learned anything from practicing Intentional Productivity, it’s that it’s critical to slow down, relax, and even get bored so that I’m itching to get back into the fray.

The act of locking up digital devices by itself didn’t directly lead to all of the above. Instead, they all played on each other: less virtual screen time and more real time allowed me to be calm enough to read throughout the day, present enough to tunnel deep into conversations, and the lack of pressure to be anywhere in particular allowed my mind to wander into new areas. Finally, full days of mental stimulation and physical activity (lots of walking and at least 45 minutes of exercise per day) put me into deep restful sleep at night, which got me fresh and ready to go the next morning to repeat the whole process again.

Of course this doesn’t replace the true camping solitude I crave, but it does give me a good template to moderate my daily digital diet. I’d love to hear about your experience if you get a chance to try it out yourself, or at least a version of it!