This reminds me of my experience giving up my wristwatch. I would glance at it frequently, but then didn't know the time because the behavior was strictly reflex. Finally, someone asked me for the time right after I did this and I had to look again because I hadn't internalized it. That was the day I removed my watch forever.

Your comment about being beholden to your phone reminds me a a great quote that I recalled on that day: "Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time."

I gave up wrist watches back in the late 90's when carrying a cellphone with automatic carrier time became a new sort of norm. I just wanted to shed accessories and check pockets for one less thing before heading out the door.

Later on, maybe by 2010, I had noticed that as my aversion to blackberry vibrations emerged, and I avoided my work-related cellphone more and more, I got really good at ballparking the time to within a margin of maybe two minutes, give or take.

Basically by now, somehow, I'm able to glance at a known clock with an accurate reading (or with a known offset to the accurate time), catch the time once, and usually remain pretty accurate for the next handful of hours, until I get stuck in a sufficiently distracting situation that demands concentration. Up until that point, I try to guess the time to the minute before looking, then look, and often, I'm right on.

I don't have any special method beyond that though. It's just a gut feeling I've accidentally developed. I think it started when I disabled rings and vibrations for email alerts and I'd (with an amount of dread) try to guestimate how many emails would drop before the next time I checked my phone, and the minutes since my last look.

I think the next level up, beyond this skill is memorizing relevant time zones and major cities in each, but I haven't been pushed into caring about something like that quite yet.

> "Wearing a watch is like being handcuffed to time."

I like the quote because that's how I feel when I look at any digital clock or watch. The millisecond accuracy of any NTP-aware device produces anxiety and is unnecessary.

An analog watch, especially if it's a wind-up mechanical watch, which is by its nature slightly inaccurate, is much more comforting. I feel like an observer of time, and not a slave of it.

A reliable clock produces anxiety over an unreliable one? Citation needed!

n=1, FWIW.

You should get a fuzzy clock. A cute version of those are the Word Clocks.

Just because you don't do something all the time doesn't mean you're a -phobe. Someone who is a car lover isn't sitting in a stationary Honda Accord all day just because they love cars. Someone who loves food isn't eating junk food 24-7. That's called addiction.

A car lover seeks out beautiful cars, and maybe owns one or two that they take out enjoy when they have time.

A technophile is the same. What this discussion is about is addicts, not technophiles or technophobes.