The Phonebox! Nope, not the TARDIS

I do like Doctor Who quite a lot, and it's sometimes one of the reasons I don't sleep until the early hours of the morning on a school night. After the AS and GCSE results a few weeks ago me and my brother had a long sit down with our parents to try and understand what had happened to our grades and why they weren't as expected, and it majorly stems from the amount of access we have to online distractions in today's technology! Don't get me wrong, it's great in some ways when there is an actual emergency and you need a phone with you at all times. However when I realised that I was putting more time and effort into jabbing my thumbs at a plastic screen than actually studying for my future, we all created the idea of a Phonebox.

We have a little wicker basket that sits downstairs on the top of our cabinet where only my Dad can reach because he's tall enough. This coming year, me and my brother have to put our laptops, tablets and mobile phones in the basket at 10 pm or earlier if we wanted, so that we both can get a good nights sleep with no social media distractions. Pretty neat idea right?

I'm putting this into a family and parenting category because I'm quite lucky to realise that I've made mistakes in Year 12 that have impacted my exams, and I want to share the Phonebox idea with parents who feel the same way about their child not getting enough sleep because of the constant tapping away at devices that may not get them too far in their future. It's a small thing to think about, and it's not necessarily something to put in the "grounding" terms and conditions. I know this small idea will benefit my studies later this year when I'm not constantly staring at a Snapchat story to do with someone's party last night, but I'm actually staring at a textbook thinking "This is what I need to know about."