4 steps to building a healthier relationship with your phone

Being constantly connected to your electronic devices, and the social media they enable, may be bad for your health and well-being and working remotely only compounds these challenges.

Until very recently, I didn’t have a smartphone. In 2018, I wrote an article outlining the benefits of not being connected to the world through a phone. I was perfectly content living a largely disconnected life.

However, since that time, things have changed.

It is increasingly difficult to manage life without a smartphone. I recently took my family to a baseball game and would have been unable to access the ballpark without a smartphone because the phone serves as your tickets. Without a phone, I might not be able to enter a concert I bought tickets for, and it is increasingly difficult to order takeout. Reluctantly, I now own a smartphone.

Working from home, or remotely, has only magnified these challenges. Being constantly electronically connected can make it difficult to separate work from home, leading you to being constantly “on call.” This can further keep you in a perpetual state of activation.

In general, excessive smartphone use is associated with anxiety and depression and compromised sleep. Further evidence suggests that being in contact with work when physically outside of the workplace can lead to higher levels of distress as opposed to those who leave the workplace behind them when they depart.

So how can you manage if your home is your remote workplace? These four tactics can help you establish a clear boundary between work and home.

1. Create physical boundaries

Use physical space or objects to create a separation between work and home. For example, closing or locking the door to a home office creates a physical and psychological barrier that keeps you away from your laptop and helps you split your work life from your home life.

If you do not have a home office, you may have a dedicated work area. Erecting a divider, such as a folding screen or even an unused bed sheet, can serve the same purpose.

To maintain a strict separation of work and home, consider getting a work phone to separate work from personal communications. Outside of work, consider leaving your phone at home when going out for leisure activities in the evening or on weekends to help you escape electronics completely — though be sure to let trusted individuals know where you will be if you plan on disconnecting for an extended period of time.

Simply put, keep your work space separate and view your phone as nothing more than a highly advanced landline of old, plugged into a specific area of your home and unable to be taken further.

2. Create temporal boundaries

Set boundaries around when you will address things, and how much time you will devote to work. It is more and more common to see messages in email signatures noting the days and hours during which people will respond to messages. This is a positive development.

You can also block out time in your schedule to address work and non-work issues. If you have a phone that you use exclusively for work, turn it off and charge it during the times you don’t intend to be working. Protecting your time with such tactics is an effective way to promote work-life balance and maintain a healthy relationship with technology.

3. Create behavioural boundaries

Establish behaviours which help you separate work from home. Turning off the ringer and buzzer on your phone prevents you from being distracted and disturbed when enjoying leisure time.

If your work involves social media, then try using different social media platforms for work and non-work to help you avoid being inadvertently drawn into work-related matters when you are trying to enjoy personal time. Or, consider switching to one of the many new “dumbphones” entering the market.

You can also team up with others. In the same way that doctors in a clinic will schedule one partner to be on call at a time so that the other partners can fully escape from work after hours, you can join forces with others who do similar work and redirect calls on a rotating basis so you do not have to worry about always being contacted.

4. Create communication boundaries

Once these tactics have been established, you should communicate them. Establish expectations about when you will and won’t be available. Note that this may require some negotiation.

If people contact you out of ignorance of your personal policy, simply advise them of it. If they intentionally violate your boundary, consider your relationship with the violator before addressing them. You don’t want to rebuke your boss, but you should be firm in protecting your boundaries.

Stay in control

In the end, you need to ensure that you own your phone and not the other way around.

When used excessively, electronic devices can become a chain that shackles us, as opposed to a tool that enables us. Our phones can become an addiction. Like any other form of addiction, we lose control of our phones when they make demands of us that we feel compelled to answer.

There are times when work or urgent situations require us to be electronically available. However, outside of the times you must be available, any time you feel your phone making a demand of you, turn it off.

Now that I have a smartphone, some things in life are easier and more pleasant. I can avoid traffic jams when driving. My wife and I can discuss purchases before buying, and I can play games on my phone while waiting for a friend to arrive at a restaurant. But I don’t allow the phone to dictate how I live.

Acquaintances of mine will sometimes get upset when they text me. Because I don’t keep my phone on my hip, I usually don’t respond right away. If they voice their displeasure, I’m secretly pleased; it reminds me that I have a healthy relationship with my phone. I’m in command of it. It’s not in command of me.