Nobody on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I had spent more time on my phone.”

— Me, re-writing Arnold Zach

I ended last school year in a not awesome place. I felt really exhausted and out of sorts, and what was weird is that I felt really, really good about the school year we’d just had. We graduated an incredible senior class who blew us away with their senior projects, our staff is wonderful, and I still really love what we do at SLA every day.

I just felt wrung out, and worse, I kind of felt intellectually fried. It didn’t feel awesome. Kat and I didn’t have any big vacations planned, and Kat asked me a very important question, “How are you recharging your batteries this summer?” And honestly, at first, I just didn’t know which was a little terrifying.

Fortunately, I have smart friends, and people willing to spend time talking to me. So when I engaged in that fifth SLA, core value of reflection, I had to admit that I was really struggling to focus the way that I used to, and I didn’t think that was just because 54 is older than 35 was. I looked at how I was spending time, and like many of us, when I came home from work – in my case school – I kind of plopped down on the couch and took out my phone.

And from there, the scrolling started. And more and more lately, I – again, I’m sure I’m in good company here – found myself scrolling video. It was mostly stuff I hadn’t subscribed to and really, it was nothing I’d asked to see. Even more, on the Facebook app, I “Hide Reels” all the time so that when I spend a few minutes scrolling to see what friends and former students are up to, I’m not tempted to start scrolling videos. And Facebook always tells me, whenever I do it, that I’ll see fewer reels.

And yet.

So this July, I decided I wanted to try to be more intentional about my time. I set a goal to do four things every day for roughly an hour each. I wanted to work out, read, write, and do something beyond the basics for our family every day. And I made a simple spreadsheet to track my progress and hold myself accountable to those goals. I’m not going to tell you that I hit those goals every day, but I’ve gotten to at least one of them every day, and most days I get two or three. There are even the occasional days where I nail all four. And the thing is, I feel better. One could argue that not working for several weeks is a part of that too, and I’m not going to disagree, but there is something to be said about making intentional choices about how we spend our time.

And I found that time by simply being on my phone less. This has been something that I’ve been working on for a while, ever since SLA did a schoolwide look at how we all use these devices. From back then, I had managed to lessen my phone use by about 25%, dropping from 4 1/2 hours a day to – most weeks – 3 1/2 hours. I got really bad at the end of the school year and was back over four hours a day.

Last week, I averaged an hour and a half on my phone a day, and that includes text messages, and checking Slack and email, and reading the news, and tracking my food use, and all the ways that we can use these devices in ways that actually increase our productivity or bring us genuine happiness, and such. And it was hard. I had to resist the urge to pick up my phone every time I was not actively doing something. It’s habit — and maybe it’s addiction. But it’s getting a little easier, and I’m not missing it.

And the thing is, as I am trying to get more disciplined, the other goals get easier. Like many of us, I have found it harder to sit and read for hours compared to when I was younger. And a quick scroll through the blog quickly reveals that I don’t write anywhere near as much as I used to, and we’re not even going to get into how much harder it is to work out at age 54 compared to how it used to be. But day by day, those muscles come back. And I feel better.

All of this makes me think about our students. I’ve been online in various early communities and social medias since 1989. But I also have been a reader my whole life. The neural pathways that get written when we read deeply are there. And as I have been reinvesting in the habit of reading, I find that I have “muscle memory” that I can fall back on as I start reading for pleasure again. But what about our kids who aren’t developing those habits and that muscle memory and those neural pathways right now because they are more invested in consuming digital media online?

Here’s what we know. According to a 2021 Pew Research study, kids are reading for pleasure much less than they used to. According to a 2023 CDC study, roughly 50% of teenagers are on their phones for more than 4 hours a day, and those that are are more than twice as likely to report feelings of anxiety or depression. And a recent study suggests that Short Video Addiction is really bad for the teenage brain. This aligns with how I feel about my own phone, and it aligns with what we heard from kids when we went through our Technology Reboot in 2023, and when we’ve revisited it since then. And it aligns with what kids know about their own cell phone use — according to a 2024 Pew study, 74% of students feel happier when they don’t have their cell phones on them.

So what’s the answer?

Here is where I struggle. My instincts tell me that the answer lies in education. We have to teach about this. And… We are up against a multi billion dollar industry designed to grab our attention. I have long known that, as an educator, my job is to convince kids to eat their proverbial vegetables. But when it comes to the attention economy, and the latest app serving up cotton candy for the brain, we are fighting an uphill battle.

And I still don’t think that a simple ban gets us anywhere.

Somehow, we are going to have to help students to examine their habits and their happiness. We are going to have to figure out – alongside our students and children – what it means to live a healthy life today.

I think, perhaps, it starts with this idea of intentionality. At SLA, we went back to being far more intentional about when, how, where and why we see cell phones in the school. In classroom spaces, they’re away unless they are actively in use. In third spaces – halls, commons, cafes – kids have much more freedom about using their cell phones. And kids have let us know that they – begrudgingly or not – do focus better when their cell phones are away. I think we have more work to do, in that now that we’ve started these conversations about how we use our phones during school hours, we can take the next step and ask ourselves as a community about how we choose to spend our attention in and out of school and how that impacts our physical, mental and emotional health.

In the end, I want all of us – especially our students – to think about how we spend our time. I really don’t think that most kids will look back on their adolescence glad to know that they spent several hours a day watching videos on whatever platform. I think we all want more than that for ourselves. And so we’re going to have to talk about it. And we’re going to have to be nuanced and thoughtful because if we just slam and ban, we sound like the old man yelling at the wind. There is a difference between texting or DMing your friend, and watching your 17th video of the latest trend in a row. There’s a difference between playing a game online and passively consuming social media. Maybe some of this has to do with the way we talk about passive consumption versus active communication. And maybe we have to find ways to help kids talk about this.

And then the next step, perhaps, is to ask students, “if you suddenly gained back two or three hours a day, what would you want that time to look like? What goals could you achieve? What happiness could you attain? What more could you learn or do?” For me, and perhaps for too many of us, reaching for our phone anytime there’s a pause is simply the path of least resistance. It makes it too easy to just amuse ourselves to death. For myself and for my students, I want more than that. I want us to be intentional about the way we spend our time, and I want to do so in ways that help us get better.

And with that, I’m going to go read a book.