Today's instruction from Catherine is to delete all my social media apps. Since I don't have any social media apps on my phone to delete (I'm not counting Strava), I moved immediately to the second instruction for today, Day Five of Technology Triage, which is to download and use a password manager. I've been using Keeper for years, so I'm good there. Ironically, I've worried that Keeper is one of the apps that keeps me attached to my phone. So be it, I guess. I have hundreds of passwords, and I can't see myself going back to pencil and paper for them. Finally, she recommends that I spend some of my newfound phone-free time with friends and family. So I'm going out to dinner tonight with my wife and some friends. On my way out, I thought I'd share a couple breakthroughs from today:

First, I was a few minutes early to the student capstone presentations for the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita's Population Health in Practice course. Today I leaned into my boredom. I sat without checking my email or looking at Vox. I was super-creepy with all the eye contact. I didn't even start this blog post, in spite of the presence of the app on my phone. Don't get me wrong; I made notes. But I wrote them on paper, which is somehow less off-putting (I think) than tapping away on a device. 

Then this afternoon, I was in a meeting with a clinic administrator and my phone buzzed in my pocket. I knew it was either a new e-consult, a calendar appointment, or a message from Moment, since those are the only apps that have notifications enabled. In the past, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I would have taken my phone out of my pocket. I would have tried to be discreet, but I think in reality my discreetness has historically come off more as "drunk high school kid tries to play it cool with his parents." Not today. I left the buzzing device in my pocket, finished the meeting, and walked all the way back to my cubicle before checked the messenger and completed the e-consult.