Good morning.
Our first Friday together. ☕
We accidentally ended summer with back-to-back family vacations. I'm not mad about it.
First, a week in Maine with my husband's entire family. Then, a Lamb family reunion in New York that hadn't happened since I was about 10.
You can't exactly say, "Sorry, I just spent a week with the other side of the family." So we packed, did laundry, packed again, and went.
Two weeks of family togetherness felt like a pretty good time to try a few experiments. One was incredibly simple:
I put my phone away during the day. Every day.
Not in my pocket. Not face down on the table where I could still see it light up. Actually away.
And it was kind of amazing.
I missed a few texts from friends. The world continued turning.
More importantly, I didn't check in on work the way I have on vacations in the past. There was no quick peek at Teams that somehow became 20 minutes of thinking about a problem I wasn't supposed to be solving.
I was just...there.
I had conversations with family members we only see once or twice a year. I went exploring the beach with the kids. I sipped my morning coffee by the water. I wasn't constantly splitting my attention between the thing happening in front of me and whatever might be happening somewhere else.
It made me realize that we talk a lot about protecting our time, but not nearly enough about protecting our attention.
You can take the vacation. Block the calendar. Put up the out-of-office message. Do all the things you're supposed to do to create the space.
But if your attention is still somewhere else, did you actually create capacity?
Our phones have made it completely normal to be physically in one place while our brains are simultaneously at work, in a group text, reading the news, checking the weather, looking at a restaurant menu for Thursday, and somehow watching a woman we've never met reorganize her pantry. (Gets me every time.)
It's ridiculous when you think about it. 🙃
And I don't think the answer is throwing our phones into the ocean. I like mine. I would very much like to keep Google Maps.
But I came home thinking differently about availability.
Maybe being reachable all the time isn't the same thing as being available for the life happening right in front of us.
Your fewer, better practice
Pick a few hours this weekend and put your phone somewhere you can't casually reach for it.
Not silent. Not face down.
Away.
Then notice what happens to your attention when there's nowhere else for it to go.
You might miss a text.
I think you'll survive. 🙂
See you next Friday,
— Brittany
One fewer thing to carry. One better thing to enjoy.
Choose fewer, better. Every day.