Reclaiming Time and Focus: The Road Trip with the Punkt.MP02

Background

I first read Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life in 2016. It’s densely packed with incisive and timeless wisdom. But for me, two quotes in particular stood out.

The first quote is: “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.”

The second is this: “The next thing we must ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities… We must cut down on all this dashing about that a great many people indulge in, as they throng around houses and theatres and fora: they intrude into other people’s affairs, always giving the impression of being busy… Their roaming is idle and pointless, like ants crawling over bushes, which purposelessly make their way right up to the topmost branch and then all the way down again… They then return home, worn out to no purpose, and swearing that they themselves don’t know why they went out or where they have been – and the next day they will wander forth on the same old round.”

I think there are many parallels between Seneca’s writings two millennia ago and today’s hyper-connected information-saturated society. Aside from our hectic manoeuvrings in the physical world, it also seems perfectly possible to spend much of our time metaphorically dashing about between our smartphones and forms of digital communications, only to end up feeling mentally exhausted at the end of our days (or weeks, or months, etc) but unable to account for what we’ve actually done. Or at least, what we’ve done that’s either meaningful in itself or has moved us meaningfully towards our goals. This wouldn’t matter very much if we had an infinite supply of days. But we don’t; life is finite. It’s also short, all the more so if we waste it.

It’s easy to feel as though we need our smartphones at our side every single day of our waking lives. But the reality is, we don’t. As Andrew Muller writes in an essay in The Monocle Book of Gentle Living, "unless we’re a CEO or a general it’s highly likely we don’t need to be immediately contactable at every single moment of every single day". Deliberately carving out more time in which we aren’t immediately contactable may help us make more intentional use of our finite time and attention.

We could start small. Imagine we decided to treat every Sunday, for example, as the day when we put our smartphone away, out of sight and out of mind. We could switch it off completely and only keep a distraction-free phone (like the MP02) nearby. On the one hand, this kind of effort seems almost trivial. “Just one day a week? What’s the point?” Well, that one day per week adds up to 52 days per year. That’s the equivalent of 7.4 weeks. So the apparently trivial one-day-per-week adds up to over a month and a half each year. Imagine what you could do with all that undistracted time. Perhaps there’s a business idea or project or hobby you’re pursuing. Or anything, really – any endeavour that matters to you. Think about how much progress you could make in a month and a half. Probably a lot.

The flip side is to imagine just how much of our lives we’re wasting mired in distraction with our attention perpetually divided. Oliver Burkeman (author of Four Thousand Weeks) often notes, as others also do, that there’s a sense in which our lives are essentially a function of what we pay attention to. So if you’re not paying attention to the reality of the life that’s in front of you, there’s a meaningful sense in which you’re not actually present in your own life. Your life does not, in these situations, truly belong to you. As Seneca wrote, to not belong to yourself, to not possess your time as your own, is a fast-track to a wasted life.

I often reflect on these ideas. So when I received Punkt’s invitation to sign-up to the 2024 Digital Balance Challenge, I responded with enthusiasm. A few weeks later, in late July, I received an email saying that I was accepted. I had been planning to take a road trip to Scotland in August and this seemed like a reasonably good way to test the MP02. Bearing in mind that this was a digital balance challenge, I would still bring my iPhone with me. But I would only use it to take the occasional photo (including for this report) and check WhatsApp messages with the family each evening. In this sense, my smartphone was acting like a digital camera and a small computer (which, basically, it is). No more, no less. Clearly this meant I wouldn’t be using sat nav. Instead, I planned my entire route in advance and jotted the directions in a notebook. Then I memorised it. I was ready.

Overview of the road trip to Scotland as part of the 2024 Digital Balance Challenge.

Day 1 – Exeter to Stirling

I left Exeter around 08:30 on Thursday 22nd August, heading up the M5 towards Bristol. After pausing briefly for a mid-morning coffee, I continued on the M5 past Bristol towards Birmingham. At Birmingham, I joined the M6 heading north – by which I mean ‘The North’ north.

This drive up the M6 was the bulk of the first day’s driving, as it runs from the West Midlands all the way up the North West England into Scotland. My decision not to use sat nav was inconsequential during the first day, given that I was just taking a small number of roads – two of which, for most of the journey, were motorways (the M5 and M6) and clearly signposted.

In the early afternoon I crossed into Scotland, merging from the M6 onto the A74(M) at Gretna. Then this became the M74, before skirting around the right side of Glasgow and onto the M73, which became the M80. After a brief stint on the M9, I turned off the motorway into Stirling. At this point I have to admit that I did, in fact, use my sat nav – but only briefly to find my way through Stirling to the hotel (I suppose I could have asked a local).

I tethered my iPhone to my MP02, navigated through the town to the hotel, then untethered my iPhone and put it away. Simple as that. Just like those standalone sat nav devices that people used to have.

And this was the only time I used sat nav for the entire road trip. Day 1 complete.

Day 2 – Stirling to John o’Groats

After a light breakfast in my hotel in Stirling, I was on the road around 09:00 on Friday 23rd August. The drive up to John o’Groats would take most of the day. But despite the duration it only involved two roads.

First I took the A9 from Stirling running north the entire length of Scotland. At a town called Latheron I changed to the A99, which hugs the eastern coastline right up to John o’Groats.

This part of the road trip was absolutely fantastic. It was a pleasure to leave the urban jungle well and truly behind and drive into the ‘real’ Scotland, especially the Scottish Highlands. The landscape was equal parts beautiful and bleak.

It was at this point that two things came to mind. One was the quality of the roads. They were incredibly well maintained, with barely any potholes or other imperfections.

The other thing that came to mind was the experience of the drive itself. It felt so calm, so unadulterated, so undistracted.

As the day wore on, I never felt noticeably tired. This was in stark contrast to how tired I often felt when driving from London to Exeter, a mere 4-hour drive. I’m sure this is at least partly because those drives happen in the late afternoon following a workday spent looking at a computer screen, so eye-strain has already started setting in.

But I suspect something else is also going on, too. Everyone knows about the productivity detriment from context switching. So my hypothesis is that when we’re using a satnav (whether it’s our smartphone or the in-car navigation system), we’re frequently glancing back and forth between our phone, the road, and the road signs – and this is effectively context-switching multiple times each hour.

Moreover, because of the volume of information presented on the smartphone screen when in sat nav mode (speed, direction, upcoming turns, traffic updates, etc), our brains probably spend some significant amount of energy trying to subconsciously take this all in, which adds to the toll.

The irony is that the simple act of using the smartphone as a sat nav – literally, the fact that it’s stuck to my windshield and in my field of vision – negatively impacts my attention reserves, even though most of the time I don’t actually need the satnav because I’ve done the journey so many times.

Of course, this is all just an hypothesis. But intuitively, it seems to make sense.

Not using sat nav had another beneficial effect. Because the drive was free from smartphone-based distraction, I was more immersed in the experience of driving and the landscapes I was journeying through. As a result I was less inclined to stop and take endless photos, because doing so would break the flow of experience. I did, of course, take a handful of photos on my smartphone, but this was to share with family later and to document the experience for the Punkt challenge.

After a driving for a few hours along Scotland's eastern coastline – including a few stops for coffee, photos, and general stretching-of-legs – I reached John o’Groats around 17:30. The John o’Groats harbour is the natural destination here, offering a compelling view of the Orkney Islands north across the sea. Despite it being August, the temperature was only around 12 or 13 degrees centigrade.

In fact, the north of Scotland is approximately the same latitude as southern Norway and the Baltic Sea. No wonder it gets so cold here during winter. The Shetland Islands are even further north beyond the Orkneys; it must be freezing there when the darker months come around. After the obligatory fish and chips near the harbour, I set off for my hotel in Castletown, just half an hour west along the north coast.

Day 3 – John o’Groats to Exeter

Today was the Big Drive. I was going to drive from north Scotland all the way down to Exeter in a single day. I would also take a slight detour via London to pick-up my sister. Total driving time (including breaks) would be 17 hours. I could stop overnight somewhere en route.

But I liked the idea of being able to say that I once drove almost the entire length of the UK in a single day – without sat nav, of course.

This meant an early start. I was the first person in the hotel’s breakfast lounge when it opened at 06:30 and I had the place to myself. After a light breakfast and a quick check-out, I was on the road at 07:00.

Despite growing up in the UK, regrettably I haven’t travelled around it much, and I’ve driven around it even less. That said, I’ve driven my fair share of A-roads. 

For international readers, these roads are the category below M-roads (i.e. motorways). In other words, they are the UK’s most major type of road before you escalate to a motorway. And of all the A-roads I’ve driven, the A9 from north Scotland down to Stirling – a journey which is around two-thirds the entire length of Scotland – is hands-down the most beautiful A-road I’ve ever driven.

On the upwards journey the previous day, I had turned off the A9 onto the A99 in order to hug the eastern coastline, before eventually curving around the northern tip of the mainland and heading west. Now, on the return journey, I experienced the part of the A9 which I had skipped the day before. It was stunning.

The beautifully bleak landscape (I have a penchant for bleak landscapes) was occasionally broken up by ranks of wind farms. Some people complain that wind farms ruin the landscape, but I found the combination of aeons-old and years-new to be harmonious. It’s also an interesting experience to be rolling over ancient landscapes one minute and speeding through wind farms the next.

When I rejoined the part of the A9 that I’d driven up the day before, the early morning atmosphere, bright sun, and clear skies made the experience of cutting along this coastal road even more pleasing. Once again, it struck me that the experience of driving so many hours through such a beautiful landscape without being interrupted, even briefly, by an electronic screen vying for my attention heightened the whole experience immeasurably.

It was just me, the car, and the road. A cliché, maybe. But the quality of my experience during that return drive through Scotland tells me otherwise. Everyone should try this.

After re-entering northern England, the drive down to London was more routine and mundane, but relatively enjoyable nonetheless. I collected my sister around 20:00 and then we headed south-west past Southampton and towards Exeter. We arrived in Exeter around 01:00 in the morning.

Despite the day’s 17-hour drive (punctuated by short breaks), I was tired but not exhausted. ‘Satisfied’ would be an accurate description. Especially because not only had I reached my destination of John o’Groats but I had also driven almost the entire length of the UK in just one day. All without the aid of sat nav and completely undistracted by a smartphone.

The future

Redefining Connectivity

Everyone should experience the peace, focus, and mental clarity that comes from not being incessantly distracted by smartphones (or other screens, for that matter). Given I work in product management, it’s probably only natural that I have come to think about the pursuit of digital balance in terms of user needs and user requirements. Specifically: what are our communications needs, and what do we require to meet those needs?

Takeaways for a More Intentional Life

On the one hand, few people want to be digital hermits, nor would it do most of us any good. But on the other hand, do we really need 24/7 instantaneous communication with everyone in our contacts list along with our entire digital social networks? Unlikely.

Are there times when we really do need greater connectivity? Yes, but there are also times when we don’t. When does each of these times emerge? And during those times when we don’t need such high levels of connectivity, what might we gain by dialling back?

As my road trip experience with the MP02 demonstrates, probably quite a lot.