I started walking without my phone. Not for health — I already walked. Without the phone.

I want to report that it was immediately wonderful. It was not. The first several attempts were actively uncomfortable, and that's the part worth writing down, because nobody mentions it.

The first twenty minutes

Boredom, but with an edge of something closer to anxiety.

My hand went to my pocket maybe fifteen times in the first kilometre. Not out of a decision — the hand just went. I'd catch it halfway and feel faintly stupid.

And there's a specific unpleasantness in having a thought that can't be acted on. Normally a question occurs to me and three seconds later it's answered. Without the phone the question just sits there, unresolved, being a question. That turns out to be a sensation I had almost entirely engineered out of my life.

What's on the other side

Around twenty minutes something shifts. The thoughts stop being a queue of tasks and start wandering.

This is where I solve things. Not deliberately — I don't take walks to think about problems, and when I try it doesn't work. But a stuck thing from the afternoon will resolve itself somewhere in the second half of the walk, with no sense of having worked on it.

I suspect the first twenty minutes are the price. Something has to drain before the wandering starts, and if I check the phone at minute eighteen the meter resets.

What I'm careful about

I don't want to turn this into a position about phones. The phone is good. I like it. Most of what it does for me is genuinely useful and the nostalgia for a pre-phone era is mostly false memory.

The claim is narrower: there's a specific mental state that needs an uninterrupted run-up, and anything that reliably interrupts will prevent it. The phone is the most reliable interrupter ever built, so it's the one to remove — but it's the interruption that's the problem, not the device.

The practical note

Forty minutes seems to be my minimum. At twenty-five I'm just finishing the unpleasant part and then going home, which is the worst of both.