View source for 101 Things to do Instead of Playing on Your Phone by Ilka Heinemann

{{infobox1
|title=101 Things to do Instead of Playing on Your Phone
|author=Ilka Heinemann
|reviewer= Zoe Morris
|genre=Lifestyle
|summary= As the title suggests, this is an activity book to distract you from your phone. And it's good 'un!
|rating=5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=128
|publisher= Short Books Ltd
|date=October 2015
|isbn=978-1780722467
|cover=178072246X
|aznuk=178072246X
|aznus=178072246X
}}


There's a great joke I saw online recently. One cartoon person says to the other, ''What's your favourite position in bed?'' and the other replies ''Closest to the plug so I can still use my phone while it's charging''.

It's funny because it's true.

I am dreadful for being on my phone, and The Boy is even worse. Neither of us use ours much during the workday so come the evening we have a lot to catch up on. And as an offshoot of this, we'll often pick up our phones even when there's nothing to catch up on, just to see if something has changed in the last 10 minutes.
 
This book aims to change all that by giving you, as you would guess, 101 cooler, more fun things to do with your time. You don't need anything more than your imagination (and maybe a pen) so you really can do them anywhere at any time. And the book is a cute, dinky size so you can throw it in a handbag and always have it to hand, if you're not the kind of person who always carries round a standard sized paperback anyway (and shame on you, you really should).

The first task, number one, is ''Reflect on something that made you happy in the last 24 hours''. Aww, that's lovely. I'm all for mindfulness, and I do believe that people are often as happy as they make up their minds to be, so this is a nice nudge to appreciate things. In the last 24 hours as I write this, I'm happy for some wonderful feedback at work, homemade chilli non carne and the fact that the Manchester rain today reverted to a drizzle just when I needed to head out to my car.

Ploughing through the pages I can see a variety of different activities to keep you occupied. Write a poem, do a surreptitious bum toning workout, close your eyes and imagine you're on an island. Ooh, yes please.

Some of the activities require special circumstances – you to be on a bus or tube, for example, so you can offer someone your seat, or you have crayons (and ideally not be on a bus or tube) so you can complete a pretty colour in picture. 
This book is remarkably well thought out and diverse. We have maths. We have language. We have reflection and meditation. We have imagination. We have one small hiccup where you are advised to cut up one of the pages (excuse me, what???) but other than that there wasn't a single thing in the book I wouldn't want to do. And even the act of flicking through and reading all the options was an activity in itself.

This is a fun book, a sort of gag gift, for anyone who needs a phone intervention but it goes wider than that. It would be a lovely stocking filler for anyone from junior school up to pensioners and it's got plenty of content.

Definitely recommended.

Thanks go to the publishers for supplying this book.

This book offers up a bit of colouring but if you need more [[The Creative Therapy Colouring Book by Hannah Davies, Richard Merritt and Jo Taylor]] requires a look.

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{{commenthead}}
{{comment
|name=Sue
|verb= said
|comment=Drat - it isn't available as an ebook so I can't read it on my phone...
}}