Our First No-Tech Sunday: Four Phone Reaches and a Creek

At the end of January I committed to one no-tech day a month with the family, an idea from my January report card. We had the first one last Sunday, 1 February: phones off, laptops closed, tablets hidden, for the whole family.

I build AI systems for a living, which is probably why this was harder than I expected.

The first hour

It was uncomfortable. I reached for my phone four times before remembering it was off.

The reach happened before the thought. My hand moved on its own, the way it does when you pat a pocket for keys you already know are on the bench. That’s how deep the habit goes.

The kids lasted about three minutes before asking for their tablets. We redirected them to board games. They complained.

The middle of the day

We played Monopoly. Andriel is ruthless at Monopoly. He bankrupted his sister and felt zero remorse.

Then we went for a walk with no destination. Just walking, pointing at things and talking about nothing important.

The kids found a creek and spent an hour throwing rocks into it. An hour. Just rocks and water.

I would have scrolled through 200 posts in that time. They got more joy out of rocks than I get out of a feed.

The hard part: fake urgency

My brain kept generating “I should check” thoughts:

• “What if there’s a production issue?”
• “I should check that PR review.”
• “Did that client email me back?”

None of these were urgent. All of them felt urgent. That’s the trick our devices play: they turn every open loop into an alarm. A real production incident should reach me through an alert and an on-call process, not because I happened to refresh my inbox, and a PR review can wait a day. The urgency came from habit; none of it needed me that day.

What I noticed

My kids are funny. Genuinely hilarious. I miss their jokes when I’m on my phone because I’m only half-listening.

Silence is okay. We sat on the porch doing nothing. It wasn’t boring. It was peaceful.

Time slowed down. The day felt longer, in a good way.

Boredom sparks creativity. Without screens, the kids invented a game involving sticks, rocks and elaborate rules I still don’t understand. I suspect it only appeared because the easier option was gone.

The evening

We cooked dinner together. Messy, inefficient, fun.

My wife said it was the best Sunday in months. The kids asked if we could do it again next week.

Monthly, not weekly (for now)

Monthly is the commitment; weekly is too ambitious to start with. The report card said a Saturday each month, and the January retrospective put it on the start list, but we moved it to Sunday because that’s the day the Monday itch is strongest. My February plan, published on Sunday 1 February, went further and said every Sunday; after living through one, I’m scaling that back to monthly. I’d rather build the habit at a pace that holds than set a rule I’ll quietly break by March. Anything more than once a month is a bonus.

If you work in tech and want to try this, my advice from one day of data:

• Make it the whole household. If I’d been the only one offline, the kids’ tablets would have pulled me back in within the hour.
• Plan the first hour. That’s where the withdrawal is worst. Have the board game on the table before the phones go off. Ours was Monopoly.
• Decide the exceptions before you start. For example, one phone in a drawer for emergencies, ringer on.
• Treat the “I should check” thoughts as noise. Every one of mine on the day was something that could wait until Monday.
• Don’t schedule it on your on-call weekend. Swap the day instead of half-doing it.

The takeaway

I work in tech. I love tech. And the day my wife and kids want to repeat involved none of it. The phones go back in the drawer next month.