AWOL in April

On Creativity and Smartphones, Part II

"Creative Outlet" by mark sebastian

As friends and readers may recall, six months ago I tried to break up with my smartphone, hoping that using my phone less often would allow more unstructured time to let my mind wander and create space for creativity.

It worked. With the help of my good friend Neil, I made it through that experiment and came out with some evidence to back up my theories—I had definitely felt more creative in that month, not to mention less distracted and stressed.

But, gradually, my old habits returned and I found myself using my phone once again to fill my downtime. I slid back into other old bad patterns of overwork, exhaustion, and general grumpiness.

And I noticed a parallel “falling off” in my writing around the same time—drafts coming out messy and rushed, feeling unfocused. In particular, I was having an increasingly hard time with complex, structural stuff. As I’d try to focus on how to connect various disparate sections of my work-in-progress, I’d find myself staring at Instagram or scrolling the news instead of what I’d wanted to be doing.

1.

So for the month of April I decided to try something more drastic than before. Instead of simply “breaking up” with my smartphone, I'd begin a new relationship instead.

I emailed my friends and family to let them know I would be “AWOL in April” and ordered a “dumbphone” to replace my smartphone.

During my previous experiment, as I’d thought back on highly creative times in my past, I realized they’d been in an era (2009-2012) where my smartphone just couldn't do nearly as much as it does now. I wondered if I could go back in time, as it were, by picking up a phone that was more like what I used then.

The dumbphone I picked out was actually much dumber than what I’d used in 2010. It was more like a beeper than a phone, even. It had a black and white e-ink screen and came out of the box with only two functions (I can’t, in good conscience even call them “apps”): Phone and Settings.

Phone covered both calls and text messages. In Settings I could turn on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. No web browser, no calendar, no Google Maps, no social media, no Spotify, no nothing. Text messages were text only—anything with an image or a web link would go to my email, where I could see them later.

The dumbphone also had the ability to turn on a Hotspot so that, in an emergency, I could push my data to a device that was able to do more.

In one tutorial video, a young man reviewing the phone kept his old smartphone around in his backpack and only turned it on between the hours of 9 to 5 to connect to the Wi-Fi at work. He used it for his job, then switched it off before going home.

It sounded great to me—I loved the idea of organizing my phone usage around different kinds of work and being able to stay focused on one thing at a time.

Worried about being too cut off, however, I went into the dumbphone settings and added a few tools I thought would help. It had options to sync all my Contacts, add a Calendar, Directions, Podcasts, and Music. For Podcasts I could subscribe to my usual pods and they’d appear on my phone to listen to on my commute as usual. For Music however, I had to load it with mp3 files… something I had not really done since 2011, before I started using Pandora and then Spotify. But this, I realized, was something I missed… curating my own listening experience, based on what I'd deliberately collected. I threw a bunch of old music on there and went on my way.

During my many long drives back in the 2000s, I listened to my CDs and Mp3s until I got bored, then switched to some This American Life episodes I’d downloaded. A lot of the time I just drove in silence—talking to myself, trying to figure out what to do in whatever story I was writing… it had been a big part of my process in that period.

I was excited to return to this setup again. Maybe having infinite choices and infinite distractions was the mind killer? Could limits liberate me?

2.

By the end of the first week I was convinced this was working, but I was also aware of a new distraction: having to constantly work around the dumbphone.

Yes, I was spending a lot less time on Instagram and browsing the news, but I was also frequently going to my laptop to check email. I worried I might miss some important message when I was driving or walking to class. But I reminded myself that these were my free thinking times. People could call, or text, if they had an emergency. Anything else could wait an hour, right?

The bigger issue was that I felt cut off from the good and healthy interaction of my family and friends. Not using social media, but the group chats and solo conversations with the important people in my life. I still got their messages, but responding on the dumbphone was so tedious that I avoided it. If the original message had been a meme or a linked article, I had no idea what it was about.

These things had never been big distractions from creative time or thought, but now they were, as I was switching devices all the time to figure out what was going on. The alternative was feeling detached in a way I didn't want.

My real crisis came during a school holiday where I was running around with my kids all day. My daughter need to be dropped off at a new gym class and then my son and I were going to a garden in Yonkers (for research!) that I'd never been to before. None of these places would have Wi-Fi. I'd be out of touch most of the day. And I didn't know how to get to or from any of them without my phone.

I tried going to Google Maps to download directions, but I couldn't figure out how to print my routes to bring them along. The “app” built into the dumbphone was useless and I couldn't drive and read off the tiny screen at the same time.

This was all stressing me out far worse than my notifications ever had.

Still, during the times I was off my phone and at home, I was happily writing and feeling creative again, just as I'd hoped. I was making quick progress on a new story that would potentially also be a lynchpin in my longer work… which I was beginning to see structurally at last.

During the rest of my life, however, I was scrambling to make it things work without the connectivity that I’d not just gotten used to, but that people expected. Back in 2010, I realized, I didn’t have a full-time teaching position. As an adjunct I’d been much more poorly paid, but also far less expected to be reachable. And I didn’t have children yet then, so my personal time was really my own personal time. It was a lot easier to be offline for half a day without any issue.

All for the better, that just isn’t my life anymore. So instead of looking back nostalgically, I was going to need to find a way forward that suited my life currently.

3.

By the third week I had totally given up on the dumbphone. I was disappointed, because I had genuinely noticed positive results… I was thinking about writing all the time, during my commute, and finding odd inspiration while listening to all that old music and the podcasts like This American Life and Radiolab that I hadn't checked in on for years.

My phone usage was down, my creativity was up. But it wasn't worth the downsides.

I was isolated and frustrated by the clunky interface. Worse, I was fumbling my other responsibilities, including to students and my family.

At some point I rewatched the tutorial video. What had I missed? It seemed clear suddenly. The young man in the video had no kids or significant other depending on him. He biked to his office, worked a 9-5 job, and biked home again. He could take care of all his personal matters and pursue his passions before or after work.

Meanwhile, I had a long commute by car twice a week, kids to keep up with, and many household obligations that couldn't be consigned to mornings and evenings. My job isn’t 9-5 at all (more on this in a moment) and while I'm lucky to not be in an office all day, my work time isn't structured the way other people's might be. I'm generally attempting to: grade, write, parent, clean, grocery shop, and deal with work crises all at the same time.

This got me thinking. If my work-life balance wasn't typical, then just how did it actually break down?

So for week three, I decided to track my time in my journal, Monday through Friday, from 6am to 9pm (75 hours total). I wanted to see how much work I actually did, and how the types of work were divided.

In theory, my job as a professor is supposed to divide roughly in thirds each week:

• 1/3 teaching (including class prep/grading/office hours)

• 1/3 research (writing or reading)

• 1/3 service (performing other obligations to the university)

I drew up a timeline by the half hour, and colored each chunk to show which category the activity I did ought to belong to.

My guess was that writing time would come in far below 1/3rd, which was to be expected. It’s generally the only thing that doesn’t “need” to happen right away, and the understanding is that over the the summer and winter breaks I am freer to focus my time on that, as obligations to grade and prep and teach fall off.

But because I was trying to test my creativity specifically, I also set an ambitious word count for the week: 5000 words, or about 1000 per day, which comes to something like 4 or 5 pages daily. I knew that if I stayed focused I could do this in 5-6 hours spread around the week. Sometimes this would mean writing by hand for 15 minutes in the morning or during a class break. Sometimes it would mean sitting and retyping that material for an hour or more at a time. Sometimes a bit of both.

Journals for new story, “The Hanging Gardens of Lower Westchester”

I also decided to tally all the emails I got each day which required actual mental attention, both personal and work-related. This came as a kind of afterthought, but wound up being one of the most useful parts of the exercise.

What did I discover? Well, my first discovery was not really a discovery, but something I'd always known but not totally credited: my job wasn't 9-5, as I said before.

Not even close.

Blue: Personal Purple: Teaching Red: Writing Green: Service

During this particular week I worked in the evenings until 8 or 9 PM three times. Two nights went to teaching graduate classes and the other to hosting a reading for a colleague (counting as Service).

If I was routinely working late, then, I reasoned, then I ought to be more forgiving of myself for using my “normal” work hours to do personal things. Not even like I was watching TV or napping, but just keeping up my life and family: getting groceries, doing laundry, cooking dinner, spending time with my kids. Things other people did after 5 each day, that I couldn't.

For “fun” I was usually going for a run (also helpful creative time) or gardening, both of which I think of as time for engaging in creative thinking. (My new story is about gardening actually, hence the trip to Yonkers earlier).

"autoroute à emails..." by Biscarotte

The biggest thing I realized was the sheer volume of emails coming in.

Many of these I lumped under “Service” since they were either related to advising students or handling other matters connected to my role as Director of Creative Writing (for this I make no extra money but get 1 credit of course release per year… which theoretically means one fewer hour teaching per week, though in practice it is just a lot more Service work.)

Besides my Directing responsibilities, I have 45 students in three different classes to keep track of. And I’m also running a Thesis Project and an Independent Study project.

I vaguely felt that my students emailed me a lot. They have questions, they have to miss class, they are going to be late, they have a concern or crisis. They’re stuck on an assignment. They’re dealing with a personal crisis (which they often spell out in great detail to me, not that I ask them to). I often joked with friends that, back when I was in college, when email was new, I would have sooner run into traffic than send one to a professor of mine.

But this is not the way it is now. They email me all the time, about everything. And I don’t mind that—it’s a part of my job, and I enjoy it often.

It’s just that I was badly underestimating how much time it was taking up.

Earlier, I would have guessed I spent maybe 10-15 minutes a day responding to these issues, maybe dealing with 15-20 total emails per week.

I'm actuality, it was 20 emails on just the first day. I had five waiting for me before I even got to campus on Monday morning at 10 AM.

I spent an hour that day only on emails. Some were from colleagues, some were from administrators. There were forms to sign, a meeting agenda to set, an event to promote, and contributors to a literary journal to consult with.

Suddenly I saw, on paper, how much mental energy was going to this each day.

By the end of the week my tally was 70 emails, and again these were just the ones that required a significant response of some kind. That was how I spent about 5 hours of my whole week.

Now, quickly let me say that this may seem like an ordinary (even a meager) volume to many friends working in other jobs. I totally get that. But imagine if you also had to prepare about 9 hours of presentations each week (comparable to leading a class) and then also edit around 200 pages of material (grading) and also hope to make some incremental progress on a hopefully-stellar novel somewhere in there… that’s where it gets challenging, and why five hours of emailing, for me anyway, winds up making such a big difference.

I had read about this phenomenon a few times before in books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, but always figured that was less of a concern for me since I wasn’t in a typical 9-5 job and didn’t think of my life as being consumed by email… now I saw that it was. This was also one reason the dumbphone both had and had not been working. Without getting email on my phone all day, I had to respond to it on my laptop at periodic intervals. I’d been checking every few minutes. But what if I checked less often? This is one of the big suggestions in the aforementioned books.

Emails can become a big source of slippage into distraction. I began noticing this more that week. I'd reply to a few emails and then instead of getting back to writing or grading, I'd want to “decompress” and, being online already, I’d wander to the news or social media. Suddenly ten minutes would be gone and I’d be even more stressed, not less.

Then I'd see two more emails and start over again. If I did get back into writing, or grading, I'd work a few minutes until I saw a new notification and then slide over to email again.

The final finding of my time-tracking exercise was how the week ended up splitting in the end. Of the 75 hours I tracked, exactly 35 had been spent doing work… that's a perfect 40 hour workweek, minus a daily lunch hour.

This surprised me a lot. Given how much of my day felt like it was spent on personal stuff, I had this feeling like I was not being productive at all. In reality it was balanced out exactly by all those nights working.

12.5 hours were teaching, 8.5 writing, and 14 service. That was a far more even split than I expected. And in the end I hit 4800 words by Friday night, just shy of my goal. (I snuck in the final 200 on Saturday).

That brought me to the end of a handwritten draft of the whole story, and about 1200 words typed up of a second draft… making it possible to see the whole thing getting done by the end of the month just as I'd originally hoped. And instead of feeling rushed and sloppy, I felt like the writing was getting tighter and stronger, day by day.

And I was also aware that many of the non-writing things in my week were actually quite creatively stimulating. The event for my colleague that I hosted left me with a bunch of fascinating new ideas. Each of my classes left me with some fresh creative food for thought. And the time with my kids and family also often left me feeling imaginative.

This, to me, has always been the true goal when I think about a work-life balance. Ideally the teaching, the life, and the writing all feed into one another, instead of pull from one another.

But there was one big problem.

For all I now realized that I had gotten done that week, I felt super burned out… still behind on grading, and exhausted all through the weekend.

This time I really couldn't blame it on my phone. My usage was up a bit from the two dumbphone weeks, but still down overall. I could see it wasn't really the root of the problem the way it had seemed before.

I told myself that it had just been a “busy week”… Fall 2024 registration, more service to do than usual, the extra evening event, the TA observation, and web training seminar. In fact there was a whole Saturday Open House event I’d had to bail on.

But I knew that actually my week had come in right on target, the 35 hours just what they should have been.

Normally, at this point, I'd have two options for the coming week.

First I could try to cut back on writing time in the next week so that I could catch up on grading and rest… but I knew that would also leave me pretty frustrated. The end of the story was in sight!

Or I could push through and keep up my creative momentum to finish my project as planned, and hope that my burn-out wouldn't ruin the quality. Neither a great option.

So instead, for the the final week, I wondered, could I possibly organize my hours better, and not just get my work done but manage to get to Friday without feeling like I’d lit my brain on fire?

4.

The last week of April presented a different mix of challenges again, with family coming for Passover, both kids home from school, one class cancelled, and my son's birthday to organize.

Normally this was the sort of week where I would be tempted to “punt” on creative work entirely, but I didn't want to lose my momentum on the story.

Plus, by chance, I learned on Monday morning that an older story of mine, which I'd been trying to place for nearly two years (13 rejections and counting!) was being considered at a great publication, but that they wanted me to make some major edits to the ending. This would require not only time but inspiration… I had to re-solve some two-year-old problems and come up with a better solution than before.

If I could pull it off then I'd finally see the piece published. If not, back to square one.

So, I sat down on Sunday and made a map of the coming week. Instead of logging my time as I went, what would happen if I planned it all out in advance?

I created “disconnected zones” in the day, away from the phone but also from email, for at least an hour at a time. For this I would try my smartphone's Focus Mode, which could block apps and limit calls and texts for an hour at a time.

I also turned off the notifications for all my email. My plan was to dedicate ten minutes at the end of each hour to emails and not check at all in-between. If there was a big crisis waiting for me then I'd add it to my To Do list for the day, but otherwise I'd fire off a quick response and try to be done by the end of the hour.

Then I'd be able to move right into the next hour in Focus Mode again.

I blocked off disconnected time for grading, for writing, and for gardening/exercise where I would focus on more the creative thinking needed to fix my old story.

I'd always avoided rigid scheduling like this in the past so that I could be flexible. But if it could help me destress and be creative during my disconnected time, then I figured it might be worth it.

By the end of the first day I was sold. The 14 emails I'd handled that day had not derailed me at all. Only one needed to be moved into a later To Do item and the rest were easily handled in my hour’s-end windows. I had been able to see in advance that there was a single 45-minute window for writing after getting home from teaching, but before picking up my son at school. I did the Focus Mode, disconnected, and used that time well.

Not only did I get 1100 words written but I had, on the drive home, begun to work out the new ending to my old story. Both would have to wait until after Passover, but at least I was heading into the day off (read: busy day chasing kids around at home and prepping a big dinner) feeling like I had a handle on things.

Passover was relaxing. I used the quiet moments to mentally work my way out of a corner I'd written myself into the day before. By the next day I was eager to get back to my daily schedule but—

My daughter woke up with a bad cough and we decided she should stay home from school. Instead of resuming creative momentum, I would be lucky to get a few hundred words written, and the pile of grading was still untouched.

As other parents know, this is just how it goes, and not infrequently either. During the winter months especially it can be hard to find a week that isn't at least briefly interrupted by either school closure due to weather or an illness.

These things pass in a day or two, but in the course of an already busy week that can often mean the writing has to go on the back burner for a bit. That’s not a complaint, just a reality, and one that has to be worked with. This is one reason why I’ve always tended to avoid the kind of rigid scheduling I’d attempted in week 4. But a schedule can always be changed… maybe next time I’ll write it in pencil.

And there are lots of ways to allow for creative work to happen when it can't be a matter of words on a page.

I spent the whole of Wednesday, and then again on Thursday, home with my daughter, and I did find time here and there when I could catch up gradually on the grading. My plan was to clear the deck for a big Friday morning push where I’d be able to write through to the end of my story, once she finally went back to school.

This worked out perfectly. I dug in that morning and typed for two hours, adding some 4000 words to the draft, and then in the afternoon I made it through the homestretch and got another 3000 in there, getting to the final scene just as the day ended. It was a lot of work, but I was happy with it, and—to my surprise when I looked at the final word count… the story was nearly 30 pages long, about twice what I’d imagined it would be at first. Most importantly, I could see its place, potentially, within my longer work at last—the structural block I’d been stuck on was finally coming loose.

In the end my week was still pretty evenly split, with around 6 hours each spent on Writing, Teaching, and Service—about half of the previous week, but given the holiday and the sick days, it was about right on the money.

There’ll be editing to do next week, and the fix on the older story is still waiting, but at least the pile of grading has gotten done… don’t worry, it’ll grow again, another 150 pages at least by the end of the week. But the biggest thing is that I feel a bit more confident in my ability to juggle everything as I head into May. I have just a few more weeks left in this semester, after which the Teaching and Service parts of my job will become a bit less for a while, and the Writing part can take up more.

That’s good, because I am beginning to realize that I have a new novel coming out in less than four months, and a lot to do before that happens—but I’m hopeful that with the Focus Mode/“disconnected zone” plan, I can keep this all going.

The first thing on my To Do list for next week? Returning the dumbphone. It turned out not to be the solution to my issues, but I think it did help me figure out what the real problems are. As ever, the challenges continue, but I’m happy in the end with this little experiment—and if, in six months, I end up wanting to just get a landline, then so be it.