What would your life look like if you didn’t have a smartphone? Or an iPad? Would you consume less news? Or just get it in a different way?

This week I tried to answer some of these questions by logging my activities online and offline. I recently stopped using my iPhone (on purpose) and my iPad (not on purpose–it got dropped), and our assignment this week allowed me track how I do—and don’t—consume media in my current low-tech environment. My tools at hand were a MacBook Pro, a Kindle, and good ol’ pencil and paper.

Even before I began, I knew that I was consuming less media that I used to back in the days when I carried an iPhone and a Blackberry at all times and immersed myself in a constant news stream, day and night.

But it really surprised me to quantify exactly how little news I read this week. I hardly consumed any breaking news media–just 114 minutes. I barely wrote any emails, averaging 46 minutes a day on gmail. And I spent only three minutes on Facebook.

Partly, this was due to circumstances—I happened to spent a lot of time travelling and a lot of time trying to write code during this period. Over a five-day period, my activity chart looked something like this. I tracked my hours using RescueTime for computer-based activities and a notebook for everything else, and compiled the results in Excel:

My most frequent activities were programming (369 mins), attending class (255 mins), and writing emails (231 mins). In fourth place was reading long-form journalism, which brings me to my next chart: media consumption. I’ve defined media in three categories—books, long-form and news.  This week I spent time reading long-form journalism for my narrative nonfiction class, which was my top category in terms of hours spent:

The news that I read was a bit of a jumble. Here are my top news sites by time spent (for short news stories):

I also tracked what devices I used to consume media, and the result surprised me: I read a lot more on my kindle than on my computer.

Here is the breakdown for what devices I used when reading books, news and long form, by minutes spent. I suspect this would have been pretty different if I was using an iPhone or an iPad:

By comparison when I did the same breakdown for my activities overall, my computer was dominant, accounting for 81% of my time logged. It seems like life without a smartphone has me spending more time on my kindle, and more time reading long-form journalism instead of news stories.

So is it worth living without an iPhone or an iPad? For the time being, absolutely.