While the kettle boils

Here's an example. You go into the kitchen to make tea. You fill the kettle and switch it on, and it will take about two minutes to boil. Somewhere in the first ten seconds your phone comes out of your pocket. You didn't decide to take it out. If somebody had stopped you and asked what you were about to look up, you wouldn't have had an answer.

You open your messages, and there's nothing since you last looked, which was in the hall. You open the news and read a headline and half a paragraph. You open the app with the photos and thumb past a holiday, an advert for trainers, and a dog. The kettle clicks off. You go on for another minute or two anyway, because you're halfway through a video of a man restoring a rusty vice. The tea, when you get to it, is a bit stewed.

Nothing bad has happened. That's part of what makes this habit hard to take seriously. No single reach costs anything you'd notice. It's only when you look at the whole day that a pattern shows. The same thing happened in the lift, and at the traffic lights on foot, and while the computer started up, and in the queue at the chemist. It happened in the loo, and during the adverts, and in the car outside the school before you went in. Every gap in the day got filled, and they all got filled with the same thing.

If that's familiar, you'll probably also recognise how the evening feels. You haven't done anything strenuous, and yet your head feels used. You've taken in a great deal and can recall almost none of it. You've had a dozen little rests and you don't feel rested.

I want to split two things that usually travel under one name, which is "being on my phone".

The first I'll call an errand. An errand is picking up the phone to do something you could name before you touched it. You're checking the time of the train, or answering your sister, or paying the window cleaner. You might be looking up how long to roast a chicken, or ringing the surgery. An errand has an end. When the train time is on the screen, the errand is over. This book has no quarrel with errands, however many of them you run in a day.

The second I'll call a reach. A reach is picking up the phone with nothing in mind. It doesn't start from a task, it starts from a gap, and what starts it is the emptiness of the moment and not anything the phone is for. Because it didn't begin with a purpose, nothing marks the point where it's finished. It stops when something from outside stops it. The kettle clicks, or the lift doors open, or someone says your name for the second time.

I'll use the word gap for the spare moments themselves. A gap is any short stretch in which nothing is required of you. It might be two minutes while something boils, or five in a waiting room, or the walk from the car to the door. A day contains dozens of them. Until quite recently they were simply empty, and nobody thought of that as a problem that needed solving.

There's one more term. Most people's reaches go to the same three or four places in the same order. For one person it's messages, then news, then photos, and for another it's email, then the football, then videos. I'll call that round the loop. You can go round the loop, find nothing new, and start round it again without noticing that you've done so.

The line between an errand and a reach isn't always sharp. A real errand can turn into a reach at the moment it's finished. You answer your sister, and then, since the phone is already in your hand, you go round the loop. I'd count that as an errand followed by a reach. The test is simple enough. Could you have said, before you picked it up, what you were picking it up for? And when that was done, did you put it down?

Here's what this book doesn't claim. It doesn't claim phones are bad, or that time on a screen is wasted time. It doesn't claim that you're addicted. Chapter 9 explains why I think that word points you at the wrong remedy. And it doesn't claim the things in the loop are worthless. Some of them are funny or useful or made by people you love. The claim is about the reach alone. Reaching in every gap doesn't give you what it seems to promise, and it takes something you'd want back if you noticed it going.

I'd like you to do one small thing before the next chapter, and it involves no change to what you do. Tomorrow, keep a scrap of paper and a pen in your pocket. Each time you find the phone in your hand without an errand, put a mark on the paper. Don't try to reach less. You'll miss plenty of them, which is fine. At the end of the day, count the marks, and keep the paper. We'll come back to it.