This topic is a rather wild one and also very interesting! Probably because it's all about one of my favorite things in the world (or maybe it's even at the top of my favorite things 😉). Every one of us here uses a phone or I can specifically say a smartphone (unless you use a computer and own one of those featureless mobile phones from the early 2000s).
The smartphone industry has grown exponentially over the years and it has become very popular among everyone in the world. It is very weird to come across someone who doesn't own a smartphone and they usually have a very good reason behind not owning one. But those who are capable of buying a smartphone immediately jump at the opportunity to own one.
The only person in my house who doesn't use a smartphone is my dad and that's probably a good thing coz the rest of us have fallen very far down that rabbit hole and there's no saving us. Even my mom who used to admonish us against incessant use of our phones has now joined us 😂 a classic case of if you can't beat them, join them. It's accurate to say that I have become very addicted to my phone as one of my friends will usually say I might go into coma if my phone gets stolen one day.
I was looking at the details of this topic and I kept asking myself; what can make me stay away from my phone? I thought hard about it for a while and couldn't come up with an answer. I could have said sitting in a lecture hall during lectures but I even use my phone while that is going on. Oh, maybe during exams? Nope, most of my course materials were digital (PDFs and PowerPoint slides), so I still used my phone to read. And besides, I don't even have to worry about all that now because I'm now a graduate 😁.
I read other people's articles to see if I could get inspiration from them and some people mentioned sleep. Yeah, sleep looks good enough but it was too easy, and besides we all don't really have a choice when it comes to that aspect. So, until they release a technology that can help us use our phones even when sleeping (that will probably lead to the end of Mankind), we all must put our phones away when sleep comes. But eventually, I finally thought of an activity that makes me drop my phone.
Fetching water
I fetch water at least 3 times a week from the house close to mine and that activity usually takes between 30 minutes to an hour. I could easily always take my phone with me and maybe while waiting for a gallon to get full, I can just hop on to TikTok or YouTube and watch some videos. But the reason I don't do that is because it's going to slow me down. I might be watching a comedy skit and after a gallon gets filled, I turn off the faucet and continue watching the video until the end.
Fetching water is something I like to do very quickly, so I rather cut off any distractions and fully focus on it. Besides, using a phone in such a situation is too distracting because I will be keeping one eye on my phone and the other one on the gallon currently getting filled with water. So, I usually keep my phone at home whenever I want to fetch water and the benefit of this aside from fully focusing on fetching the water is that I can start charging my phone while that is going on, and by the time I'm done with fetching water, the phone is already fully charged.
Another thing that keeps me away from my phone is cooking. I usually like to fully focus in the kitchen any time I'm cooking and it has become a habit for me to do that without my phone. I don't want a situation where I will get carried away by what I'm watching on my phone and the egg I'm frying will become a burnt offering or I forget to add seasoning to the jollof rice. This also means my food hardly gets burnt (unlike my siblings) unless it's intentional like in cases where I have the whole of river Niger in my pot of jollof rice and I will have no choice but to let it burn to reduce the water drastically.
So, those 2 are the only things that can keep me away from my phone. The others are just very minor occurrences (maybe when I'm in an important meeting or doing an outdoor activity that requires both my hands). Even when I'm doing chores like laundry, I still use my phone to watch movies or YouTube videos 😅 As I said earlier, I'm very addicted to my phone and I don't even have the strength to fight that addiction.
Thanks for reading
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