Notes from a week without screens

In March I spent seven days without a screen. No phone, no laptop, no television. I told the people who needed to know, left a landline number with two of them, and went to a cottage with a stack of books.

I want to report this carefully, because the genre it belongs to is usually dishonest.

Days one to three were bad

Not peaceful. Bad. I reached for a phone that was not there roughly forty times on the first day, and each reach was a small dose of something I had not realised I was taking hourly.

By the second evening I was restless in the way I associate with waiting for test results. There was nothing to wait for. The restlessness was structural.

Day four changed

The best description I have is that my attention stopped arriving in pieces. I read for three hours without noticing the time, which had not happened in years, and I finished a book I had abandoned twice.

I also became extremely boring. I noticed a hedge. I thought about the hedge for a while. There was no way to tell anyone about the hedge, so the thought stayed where it was and turned into something else.

Most of what I call thinking is actually drafting a message about the thing I have just seen.

What did not happen

I did not have a revelation. My concentration was not permanently repaired, and it did not carry cleanly into the following month. Within about ten days of coming home the reaching had returned, though at maybe half its old rate.

Nobody needed me urgently. Nothing collapsed. Two people were mildly annoyed. That is the entire cost.

What I kept

Two things survived the week, and both are small.

• The phone charges in the kitchen overnight, not beside the bed.
• One afternoon a week, usually Sunday, the laptop stays shut.

A week is not a solution and I would not sell it as one. But it did give me a clean reading of what the baseline feels like, and I now recognise the reaching for what it is.