I’ve recently delivered my second writing retreat for a big university, both designed for writers who are finding it difficult to protect the time to get much (or any) writing done. I think we can all relate to that feeling, no matter what our creative practice might be.
My sessions haven’t focused on some of the more obvious and more superficial solutions. No talk of carving out fifteen minutes a day to squeeze in a teeny tiny bit of writing. No mention of using the Pomodoro Technique to push through twenty-five-minute bursts of work followed by five-minute breaks as rewards. At the risk of sounding unkind or unfeeling, I think they are the kind of tricks that help sell writing manuals to people who want to think of themselves as writers, but who seemingly can’t or won’t knuckle down to doing the work.
I’ve used the retreats to push a little deeper, to look past time poverty by seeing it as a mere presenting problem (which is what I suspect my therapist would call it) and to look instead at some of the underlying challenges which really get in the way of people getting their writing done.
One of the first strategies I’ve encouraged participants to implement involves addressing the thing we all most need to be protected from: our phones. They are often crammed with features that masquerade as shields from other people and their demands — Airplane Mode, app timers — but research has shown (and please don’t ask me to quote a source) that a phone turned upside down is even more of a tempting distraction than one sitting face up.
If they’re to be prevented from getting in the way of our writing, our phones need to be put away in a conceptually different space, so that out of sight really can mean out of mind.
So early in the retreat, I invited people to write their name on a white envelope, switch their phone off, put it in the envelope, and put their envelope into a clear plastic crate for the rest of the day. Ideally, they wouldn’t see or touch their phones again until the session ended.
I’m never a dick about this. If they don’t want to do it — I won’t say if they can’t do it, because they always can, if they choose — then at the very least, I ask that they don’t use them in the room, and especially not during meal breaks. Screen-free eating is non-negotiable for me in these situations.
So far, it’s gone surprisingly well. There are some grumbles, but I know that these are nervous reflexes conditioned by long-term dependence on the soothing or validating mood boosts which phones are designed to give us these days, and which are meant to keep us coming back oftener and oftener to deal with the little emotional crashes that come so soon after each exposure.
One participant with children was happy (enough) to do it, but hurriedly messaged their partner first to explain why they might be temporarily unreachable. Another participant had a child with additional needs, but even they felt able to pop their phone into the crate, albeit with some checking at break times. And that’s all fine. Like I said: I’m not trying to be a dick about it.
It was interesting how quickly some participants felt the urge to reach for their phones at the first comfort break (after just an hour of me asking for their attention) and how uncomfortable the feeling of detachment from those phones made them. But to everyone’s credit, they all persevered. And I believe — in fact, I know, because they told me so — that the gently enforced separation was rather revelatory for them all.
Knowing in theory that they could survive without accessing their phones so frequently was one thing; realising that they could do it in practice, and how much they enjoyed the feeling of being present, and liberated, and how good it felt to get stuck into doing some writing, was quite another.
So — if you reflect on your relationship with your own metal pet, how would you feel about putting it into hibernation a bit more often, so that you have one less thing to pull you away from the stuff you really want to be doing…?
POSTSCRIPT
After I signed off this post, we watched Secrets of the Conclave, Elena Mortelliti’s documentary peeking behind the curtains of the process which elected Pope Leo XIV back in 2025. There’s a bit which I just had to slip in at the end here.
The man formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, the American priest who was appointed as Pope Francis’s successor, is not interviewed for the film. (I think I expected that he would be.) Instead, we pick our way through the whole mysterious business through conversations with some of the cardinals, officials and journalists who went along for the ride.
The real star of the show, I reckon, is the charming and very affecting Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, who at one point talks to us about what it’s like when the electors have to surrender their electronic devices and the WiFi gets switched off:
“I discovered my fear of, like, wow, I will not be with my cellphone for a number of days. And then I realised, geez, how dependent I have been on my cellphone. But I should confess, you know, after the first day, I felt liberated. I said, ‘Wow!’… To be in, in this space, where I could be left with serenity, so that I could do my mission.”
