The smallest possible change that actually works.
Nine pages, printed at home, with a chart on page five for the fridge. Tell us where to find you and it opens on the next page.
Free, and yours to keep. Your email stays with us. Never sold, never passed on.
There’s a reason you can’t put it down.
Your phone isn’t sitting in the kitchen waiting for you to come and find it. It’s in your pocket, on the arm of the couch, beside the bed, in your hand. The reason you reach for it a hundred and something times a day isn’t willpower. It’s proximity.
Two pieces of research worth knowing:
Mark, Gudith & Klocke (2008): When people were interrupted at work, it took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds before they got back to what they had been doing. The cost of a glance is never the length of the glance.
Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos (2017): The mere presence of a phone in the room, even face-down and silent, measurably reduces cognitive capacity. Your brain knows it’s there. Part of you is always listening for it.
This is not a moral failing. The phone is engineered to win this fight. The only intervention that works long-term is the boring one: distance.
So we’re not asking you to delete apps or do a digital detox. We’re asking you to move one charger. For seven days.
The charger goes near the sink, or on the bench, or somewhere you can see it but it’s not on you. It stays there from the moment you walk in the front door until you leave again in the morning.
That is the whole challenge.
All nine pages, free. Then a quiet letter every other Sunday, and you can unsubscribe in one click.
The Offline Box is a monthly box of things to make, cook, grow and read, posted anywhere in Australia with the Offline magazine inside it. It is $99 a month and you can cancel whenever you like.
Seeds, recipes, a book, something to make, and a letter worth keeping. It is the same idea as this printable, except the things turn up at your door and you do not have to think of them.
See what’s inside →