I received an interesting reply from a reader yesterday about my post on phone addiction. She mentioned she was worried adopting the tool mindset would make her hard to reach.
“One thing I really struggle with is how as a college student we are expected to text back really quickly and use our phones to make plans with people…I would love to be able to keep my phone in a zipped away pocket in my book bag and not check it all morning but I feel like I have to whip it out between every class change, because friends expect me to respond.”
-Eliza
Separating yourself from your phone doesn’t only affect you. If you started leaving your phone at home or in your dorm, you might find people get upset that you aren’t in reach. Instead of finding a way around it, I think we should embrace being hard to reach.
I have this reputation, or at least I did in college. My friends would make fun of me for never responding to texts. (This is actually how my now fiancé knew I liked her, because I responded to her texts right away.)
Being hard to reach had its advantages, but it also had it’s drawbacks.
The Need Mindset
The social norm is to live with your phone attached to your hip. So, when people try to contact you and fail, they might automatically assume you’re ignoring them. In a work context, if your coworkers or boss expect you to be glued to your email or Slack channel, they may even be upset if you don’t respond quickly.
Like I said in my last post, people are glued to their phones because of the “friend mindset.” But this reader’s email made me think of a worse mindset: the “need mindset.”
The importance of our work and social lives can convince us we need to be glued to our phones, whether because of a work culture that demands it or a fear of missing out. What’s needed is a bit of cost-benefit analysis:
The benefit of never missing an email or text (need mindset) has a high cost of distraction.
The benefit of being less distracted has a low cost of missing a few texts/emails (tool mindset).
Sometimes, missing a few texts/emails comes at a higher cost than we anticipate.
Become Hard To Reach
Friendship, work, and parenting were all done perfectly well before smartphones. Smartphones made those things easier, but constant connection actually takes the value away from those things.
Lunch with a friend, concentrating on a project, or playing with your kid aren’t made easier by your phone, but your phone can take you out of those important moments.
If a friend wants you glued to your phone so they can have lunch with you, they might not be thinking it through. Would they want you to check your phone during lunch? Of course not.
Similarly, your boss emailing you about a large project wants you to work on that project. Would she want you to be glued to your email trying to multitask? Hopefully not. If she does, she has a poor understanding of how the brain works.
If you become hard to reach, you’re going to get more value out of your time. If you keep your phone on during high-value activities, you’ll be worse at doing them. Explaining this to an offended friend or an overbearing coworker could go a long way.
So lean into being hard to reach. Eventually, people will see that you’re not hard to reach because you’re a jerk. You’re hard to reach because when you do spend time with people, you get to give them your full attention.
The phone is just an obstacle. When you get beyond the phone is where it gets really fun.
I’ll be starting a series soon about the four walls of the deep life. The purpose of this blog is to bring big ideas together and create something new. Authors like Jon Acuff, Cal Newport, James Clear, and a few others have some revolutionary ideas on how to live.
When we live well, we glorify God. I want to learn how to do that.
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