The Phone Question
Everything on this site is undermined by a phone in your pocket, and I say that as someone who has not solved it and is not going to pretend otherwise.
What follows is what I have tried and what stuck.
Leaving it at home does not work
I tried this for about two months. It works perfectly for the purpose and fails for every other reason.
Nobody can reach you, which matters if anyone might need to. You cannot check a closing time or a bus. And in several of the settings I have written about, particularly early morning walks, having no phone is a genuine safety consideration rather than a purist virtue.
The bigger problem was that leaving it behind made the outing into an event. It required a decision at the door, and decisions at the door are where habits break.
Airplane mode is the compromise that stuck
On when I arrive, off when I leave. The phone is present, the camera works, the clock works, and nothing arrives.
The reason this works better than do not disturb is that do not disturb still delivers everything, it just delays the notification. You still open the phone to a queue. Airplane mode means the phone is genuinely inert and the queue arrives later, when you have already left.
It also has a physical switch quality that the software settings do not, and I find I actually do it, which is the only measure that matters.
The camera problem
The phone stays in the pocket right up until something is worth photographing, and then it is out, and then the screen is on, and then I have checked something.
This is the failure mode that I have not fixed. The sequence from taking a picture to reading a message is about eight seconds and I have watched myself do it many times.
The partial fix is airplane mode, because there is nothing to check. That reduces it to taking the picture and putting the phone away, which is fine.
What I use it for deliberately
Not everything is a leak. A few things earn their place.
Sunrise and sunset times, which as I have written elsewhere determine when a park is empty. Bus times for getting home. The map, occasionally, though I have found that being slightly lost in a city is usually an improvement.
And a very short list of places, which I keep as a note. That is the one piece of phone use that has actively improved this whole thing rather than degrading it.
Music, and why not
I do not listen to anything, and this is the least negotiable item here.
The sound of a place is most of what makes it different from another place. A park at six in the morning with headphones on is a park at any time of day. The dawn chorus, the stream you can only hear when the traffic stops, the way a business district returns your own footsteps: all of that is the content.
There is also the practical point that in a cemetery, a churchyard, a chapel or a reading room, wearing headphones reads as a refusal of the setting, and in the early morning it is a safety issue.
The honest position
I check my phone more than I would like to and rather more than the tone of this piece suggests. The point is not to have solved it.
The point is that airplane mode costs nothing, takes two seconds, and reliably converts about a third of my outings from half attended to fully attended. That is a good return for a switch.
The watch workaround
One specific fix worth mentioning because it removed a recurring failure.
A large share of my phone checks were to see the time, and every single one of those turned into checking something else. Wearing a watch, which I had not done for a decade, cut the number of times the phone came out by more than half.
That is a very small intervention with a disproportionate effect, and it costs nothing if you have an old watch in a drawer, which most people do.
Photographs, and how many
I take perhaps three photographs a month on these outings and I used to take thirty.
The change was not discipline. It was noticing, after going back through a year of them, that I had never once looked at any of them again, and that the pictures were substituting for the thing rather than recording it. A photograph of a churchyard is a way of leaving with something, and leaving with something is the opposite of the exercise.
The ones I do take now are almost all of specific practical things: a sign with opening hours, a bench I want to remember the position of, a plant I want to identify. Those get used.
Emergencies and other people
Worth saying plainly, because everything above is about reducing phone use and there are cases where that is the wrong priority.
If someone is unwell, if you are responsible for a child, if there is any reason you might genuinely be needed, airplane mode is not the right call and none of this applies. The unreachability is a luxury and it should be treated as one.
I also tell one person roughly where I am going on the early morning walks, which is a small thing that costs nothing and removes a category of worry from someone else.
