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A stage finding

What I Found When I Tried to Read Without My Phone

Findings June 14, 2026 Self-experiment · 14 nights
Abstract

For two weeks I measured how many pages I read each night, alternating between keeping my phone in the room and leaving it in the kitchen. On the nights without it I read roughly twice as far and remembered more the next morning. It's a tiny study of one person, but the gap was bigger than I expected.

I used to be able to read for an hour without noticing the time. Lately I'll get through two pages, check my phone "for a second," and look up to find twenty minutes gone. I wanted to know whether the phone was actually the problem, or whether I was just blaming it. So I tried to measure it.

01The question

The question I started with was simple: does having my phone in the room change how much I actually read? Not how much I feel like I read — how many pages I really get through, and how much of it I can still describe the next day.1

02What I did

Every night for fourteen nights I read the same way: same chair, same lamp, starting at 8:30, for a planned thirty minutes. I alternated the one thing I was testing. On odd nights I kept my phone face-down on the desk beside me. On even nights I left it on the kitchen counter, in another room.

I wrote down two numbers each night: how many pages I finished, and — the next morning, before checking — how many things I could remember about what I'd read, on a scale I made up from one to five.2 I know alternating nights isn't a perfect design; I was tired on some nights no matter what, and a good chapter pulls you along more than a slow one. But I kept everything else as close to the same as I could.

Figure 1 · pages per night (chart)
Figure 1. Pages read each night. Lighter bars are phone-in-room nights; darker bars are phone-in-kitchen nights. (Replace with the real chart.)

03What I noticed

The pages were the clearest part. On phone-in-room nights I averaged about 9 pages. On phone-in-kitchen nights it was about 18. Almost double. The memory score followed the same shape but smaller — a little under 3 with the phone, a little over 4 without it.

The part the numbers don't show: on the kitchen nights I stopped wanting to check my phone after the first few minutes. On the desk nights I never really stopped. Even face-down and silent, some part of me kept track of it, like it was a person waiting to be talked to.

The phone didn't have to buzz to cost me something. Just being reachable was enough.

04What I think it means

I'm not going to pretend fourteen nights of one kid proves anything general. But for me, the thing that mattered wasn't notifications — it was nearness. Putting the phone in another room wasn't about willpower; it made the easy choice the one I actually wanted. That feels worth keeping.

What I'd do differently next time: read for a set number of pages instead of a set time, so a slow chapter doesn't look like a bad night. I'd also like to test whether the effect fades once leaving the phone away stops feeling novel. That's the next note.

Notes

  1. "Remembering" is doing a lot of work in that sentence — I mean being able to say what happened and how I felt about it, not quoting it exactly. ↩
  2. Scoring my own memory the next morning is obviously not objective. I tried to write the number before I let myself reread anything. ↩

Further reading

  1. [Add the book or article that got you started — author, title, year.]
  2. [Add anything you read while doing this that changed your mind.]
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