Tools to stay away from my phone...

The Seven-Month Change My Life Challenge, Week 4

Each week, I’m sharing a quick star rating and one-sentence progress report for how I’m doing on each of the seven goals I’ve set to change my life over the next seven months, and then tell you a bit more about one of the seven goals.

1. Training for the half-marathon: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   Five runs last week, covering a total of 15.8 miles. I could’ve extended my long run an extra .2 to reach 16, but I just didn’t want to. And that’s fine! For the first time this week my Garmin programmed me a ‘sprint’ workout and it was so fun not to have to worry about pacing and just to put my foot on the gas for 15 seconds at a time. (Humbling to then watch Phily Bowden’s latest video and see that her easy cool down pace at the end of a long progression run was basically identical to my 15 second sprint pace. Running is truly great for keeping me humble, you know).
   I checked in on my ‘Fitness Age’ in the Gamin app after this morning’s easy run and discovered that for the first time, my Fitness Age is the same as my actual age (right now, that’s 31.5). Up til now, that metric has always been older than I am, so it’s great to see that according to Garmin’s magic bundle of metrics, what I’m doing is making me fitter - and it really does feel that way.

   

2. Master’s dissertation: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   I still haven’t started actually writing, which is now becoming urgent. This week’s goal is to get words on the page, even if they’re utter crap.

3. Look after the space I live in: ⭐️
   It’s been a bit of a bare minimum week from this respect. I will say that ‘bare minimum’ still meant that I kept up with the laundry, changed my sheets, and loaded and unloaded the dishwasher as needed (let’s not talk about the piles of clean laundry I haven’t put away…).
   I reactivated my Vinted once I got back from Latitude, and the one sale that completed last week netted me £35 more into my Vinted balance (hiking shoes that didn’t work for my feet).

4. Screen time below 3 hours: ⭐️
   3 hours and 30 minutes - that’s less than last week but still too high.

5. Read the books I already own: ⭐️⭐️
   I finished four books this week - two on Kindle, two in paperback. I did, however, fall foul of Waterstones’s 25% off pre-orders sale. What can I say, I’m only human… and a fair few of the books I ordered were for Christmas presents. As well as the pre-orders (which I’ll mention as they arrive), I ordered One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El-Akkad (ad - commission link). The situation in Palestine is going from dire to truly horrific and I feel a duty to learn more. I’m about four-fifths of the way through and it’s a really excellent book - with parallels too to my work on climate.
   Despite one new book coming into my possession this week, I still had a physical to-be-read shelf of one book less at the end of the week… so I’m not seeing this as a complete fail?

6. Draft 1 of the Unhinged Fiction Project: ❌
   Nothing doing here. The dissertation is more important at the moment.

7. Knitting progress: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   Continued to make progress on the blanket for Baby G last week - had a very happy couple of hours listening to The Favourites on audiobook (ad - commission link) and working back and forth, back and forth, on the satisfyingly tactile waffle pattern of the blanket I’m making.

Weekly Focus: Screen Time Below Three Hours

“Millennial feels uncomfortable about the time on her phone?” Groundbreaking.

It’s as simple as this: I want to live my life more, and that’s not going to be found on my phone. Also, staring at a small screen isn’t good for my eyes. From that respect, I’m trying to shift my Instagram scrolling and Substack reading from my phone to my iPad and computer (the browser version of Instagram is pretty crap, and trying to watch Reels always crashes Safari… which at least is a good way of stopping me falling down a scroll hole). I’ve also been focusing more on physical media - reading the books in my flat and the magazines I subscribe to (The Simple Things, Oh Reader, and I’ve just re-subscribed to Slightly Foxed).

In terms of the phone use itself, I have some tools on it to try and keep me away from it. Firstly, my phone is almost always on some sort of ‘Focus Mode’; either Do Not Disturb or one of my custom focus modes which allows notifications from a select few people but not from the vast majority of apps I have. Secondly, thanks to a recommendation from

Immy Sykes

, I have the Opal app on my phone. It restricts access to my most time-sucking apps and websites (social media, the Guardian, and the New York Times) for hours at a time, and is just painful enough to switch off that I often think better of it and just put my phone away.

Best

Lily