RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2008, Tiffany Shlain’s father, Leonard, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to change her use of technology when the two of them were together. “Some days he would have only one good hour,” she later wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “and I didn’t want to be distracted when I was with him, so I’d turn off my cellphone.”

Eventually, Shlain, a filmmaker, extended the idea into a full day without screen use. She called it a tech shabbat — after the Jewish day of rest — and she has written several articles and a recent book, called “24/6,” about the idea.

“The digital revolution has blurred the lines between time on and time off, and time off is disappearing,” she wrote in The Boston Globe. “As for our leisure time, we’ve created a culture in which we’re still ‘working’ while we play: needing to photograph every moment, then crafting witty posts of our ‘fun, relaxing activities’ on Instagram, then obsessively checking responses. We can barely catch our breath in the tsunami of personal and work digital input, which results in us not being truly present for any of it.”

This weekend, I gave Shlain’s idea a try — and I highly recommend it. My family and I turned off our cellphones and laptops on Friday night and didn’t turn them back on until Sunday morning. We made an exception for television: The baseball playoffs are going on, and watching a game as a family feels different from staring at an individual phone screen.

The break did require some adjustments. On Friday night, we printed out directions to a restaurant where we were eating on Saturday, but we forgot to print directions home and had to use an old-fashioned road map. Imagine that.

I really appreciated the break. I spent time reading a delightful book. None of us was distracted by texts when talking to each other. And I was able to ignore all manner of non-urgent work email.

We’re not quite ready to sign up for a tech shabbat every weekend, given various obligations. But we are ready to do it again soon, and it served as a good reminder that putting away phones for even short stretches of time is an excellent idea.