Life still goes on without my iPhone. In the last few months I have realized that I spend lots of time on my iPhone in an unproductive manner. Here are some of my thought on the front end of my experiment, Without my iPhone?Now that I have been able to have time to reflect on the my time without my phone I am now stepping forward with a possible idea to downgrade to my dumbphone. During the week I reverted back to using my Moleskine, the small notebook that I used all summer. Over the summer I would keep important Bosnian phrases, names, events, dates, times, and other information that I would have normally entered into my phone. I did not bring my iPhone on my summer travels for obvious reasons of safety. My notebook worked very well this past week to keep track of meetings, thoughts, ideas, and just my overall mood.
In the notebook I wrote my issues of not have a phone, the pros and cons of the situation, and circumstances that were shaped by its absence. I kept a system of pages where specific data would be placed. I keep one page of events for the week with the day of the week, time and event description. This makes for a quick unified page of everything that is occurring during the week. I also had multiple pages of loosely organized thoughts from my time studying, in class, and during church. Anything that came to mind that I should do I would write. For instance since I did not have my phone I could not text. I had to wait until I was near a computer to use Google Voice. I simply would write reminders of whom I need to text and then send the text when I got to a browser. This causes some problems because it forced me to plan all of my events ahead of time and hope that people did not change their mind on the meeting place or time because I would have no way of knowing. My week without a phone broke down on Thursday morning when I had three meetings back in a row and then facilitating prayer time afterwards. I need to text people to ensure they would be coming to prayer and also confirm meeting times with people. In the future I will be able to plan better for future events and make sure they are hammered out a day in advance.
This experience has caused me to doubt my ability to communicate well without a phone. I am not saying without an iPhone, but simply without a phone, that can place and receive calls as well as simple texting. At this time I feel like I would not see a significant drop in productivity if I only had a simple Nokia flip phone. If anything I would see some of the trends I observed from the past week. I would be less distracted during class, study time, and in general life. Also I would stop paying $25 a month for the data that I hardly use whilst on Techs campus. That would save $300 a year of data costs and also I would be able to possibly sell the iPhone for about $150. That would be saving that could be passed along to other means of spending.
This entire blog post has simply been an avenue to channel all of my thoughts from the past week into on document that I will be able to look back on. I don't know how my outlook on the events will be but I am interested to see what I think about this decision in two, three, four years.
All is Great in the Lord
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