Over this past weekend, when given the challenge to shut off my phone for 24 hours, I didn’t believe I could make it. My phone is probably involved in almost every activity I do throughout the day. Weather its taking notes down for my classes or tweeting my latest pointless thought. It guides me when its dark, tells me when its going to rain, and even notifies me when I get poked on Facebook. I can honestly admit to being one of those people who are completely dependent on their phones.
Knowing this about myself I had to factor in three important variables; what day, what am I going to do, & of course how will I notify people of my whereabouts! Being the weekend and all, its kind of hard not being on the phone making plans for the night. How will I go about organizing a little get together with the close friends? So I thought to myself, Friday and Saturday are too important to be out of the loop. I finally made my decision that Sunday is perfect! I mean, who cares about Sunday?
It’s a day of relaxation so I thought it would be perfect! Now I had to plan, what am I going to do. Earlier this weekend a friend of mine who was actually visiting from Florida had called me wanting to meet and catch up. Right before turning my phone off late Saturday I gave him a call explaining the situation, he laughed and told me to come pick him up from his aunts at 12 AM and to just simply get out of my car, walk to the front door, and knock. (Obviously texting a simple “ here. ” Would have been simpler).
Besides that I thought I would just wing it and see where the day takes me. Now I just had one last issue, I got to hide it! Knowing myself pretty well, I knew it was a bad idea to have the phone around me, if I planned to actually commit to this. I decided to simply leave it in my mother’s possession for safekeeping. With these three issues resolved I’m now ready to, “ slide to power off”. So Sunday begins. I woke up at around 11AM (kind of late due to the fact I couldn’t set the alarm on my phone).
I got out of bed rushed out to the kitchen and looked at the oven for the time! I quickly proceeded to shower and get ready. At 12AM I arrived at my friends aunts house to pick him up, knocked on the door and he came right out (no big deal after all). We then went to lunch and spent a few hours talking and playing some call of duty on my Xbox. Without noticing, it was almost 6 at night! Wow! I was impressed. By this time I probably would have had to plug my phone in for the second charge of the day!
Now it was time to go to the gym, I usually use my phone to playmusicbut I had to bust out my little mp3 from back in the day. At the gym I’m rarely on the phone so this hour and a half went by swiftly has well. When I returned home I showered and started preparations to begin on my homework. It being 8PM now I thought the worse was over! So I read my 20 pages of Feed and did some of my history assignment and probably finished at around 9: 30PM. At this point of the day I didn’t even remember I didn’t have my phone glued to my side.
I realize now that having all those cool features and apps on my phone only makes me waist my time and procrastinate on the important things I should be doing. The last few hours till midnight I simply watched a few episodes of The Walking Dead to pass the time. It really wasn’t much of a challenge after all; it was actually very relieving not being involved in anysocial mediaand texting throughout the day. Perhaps I will make this an event for every Sunday!
