Fancy Going Offline With Me This Summer?

The weather is weathering, the sun is staying out later and later and the fact that you’re one decision away from having a drink on a patio can only mean one thing: it’s finally summertime.

If you’re looking to make the most of the precious summer season (whether you’ve got a fancy European vacation planned or not), you’ve probably had a thought along the lines of,

I know I definitely have.

My body and my brain had been craving rest like I’m pregnant and am dying for some KFC. Part of that is grief, for sure. But the other part of it is I haven’t been taking good care of myself. Too much work and not enough rest (of all the different kinds of rest there are). And definitely WAY WAY WAY too much time on my phone.

For me, spending time on my phone in my non-work hours almost never leads to the outcome I want and almost always leads to me feeling worse (about my wardrobe, my skin, my home, you name it). And give that there are approximately only 2246 hours of summer - here’s how we’re going to make the most of them.

This isn’t a numbers post, but bear with me for a second - I think how we spend our time is just as tangled up in our wellbeing as how we spend our money, so it still feels like it belongs here.

I just got back from a long weekend in Tennessee with family, and somewhere between the second lightning bug sighting and a several-hours-too-long debate about the best regional barbecue style (I’m personally partial to both North and South Carolina styles), I had a small, slightly annoying realization: I had been about to take out my phone to “document” approximately four separate non-events purely out of habit, when the lightning bugs were doing a perfectly good job of being memorable all on their own.

I didn’t get great pictures of anything on that trip. I got a great weekend. I’m trying to remember that those two things are allowed to be different, and that one of them is usually more important than the other.

So here’s what I’m doing about it. Not a no-phone summer (I have a business to run and friends to text), but an actually-offline summer. A few rules, half borrowed from my shopping ban brain - rules with actual permission to break them sensibly tend to work better for me than vague intentions - and half new.