Before you start

This is a short book about one small movement. Someone you love is talking to you, and your eyes go down to a screen, and come back up, and go down again. It takes a second each time. You'd say you were listening, and in a sense you were, because you can repeat the last thing they said. And yet the person talking saw your face change, and adjusted what they were saying, and the evening went slightly differently because of it, and neither of you could say exactly how.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the glance makes sense from the inside. The phone is quick, it might be important, you can hear perfectly well with your eyes down, and everyone at the table is doing it. The second is that the glance isn't what it feels like from the inside, and there's research on why. People who use their phones during time with their partners, friends and children feel more distracted and get less connection and meaning from the time. A person being talked to while the other looks at a phone, even part of the time, rates the conversation and the relationship lower and feels less that they belong. Children whose parent is on a phone escalate their attempts to get attention and then give up. A two-year-old being taught a word by a parent who takes one call doesn't learn the word. And the second you think you spent on the screen isn't what the other person timed. The third is practical. When someone is talking to you, the phone goes out of your hands and out of your sight, and if you genuinely need it, you say so before you look. That's all of it, and chapters 17 to 20 cover how.

This book doesn't say phones are bad or that you should use yours less in general. An earlier book in this series, The phone can wait, is about the phone in every spare moment. This one is only about the moments when a person is talking to you.

Two cautions.

If checking your phone feels less like a habit and more like something you can't stop, if you feel anxious when it's out of reach or you check it in a loop that doesn't end, the habit in this book is the smaller part of what's going on. Chapter 21 says where to go.

And if the person who won't look up is your partner and not you, most of this book still applies, but chapter 21 is the part written for you.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.