How far away from you is your phone?

Not how many hours a day do you spend looking at it, or how many times do you pick it up. But how far away from you does it actually get?

A brief interaction at home got me noticing my own behaviour recently.

I was working in my home office, my phone is usually within a few feet of me. And on this day I left it charging and wandered downstairs to make a coffee. When I got back to my office (all of 5 minutes later) I had a "missed" text from my wife asking my why I wasn't responding. And when I told her what I'd been doing, she asked, "Why didn't you have your phone with you?"

I thought that was a strange question but apparently, we check our phones around 186 times a day, according to one recent US survey. And they need to be close to do that...

So if we are checking them so often, I began to wonder how much time we spend physically separated from them.

At work, perhaps the furthest we get from our phones is when we leave them on our desks and walk to another part of the office (and some carry it everywhere - look when you're next in the rest room). Maybe 50 or 100 metres away, for five or ten minutes.

At home, do you leave your phone charging in one room while you move around the house? Or does it accompany you from the kitchen to the living room, from the living room to the bedroom?

And when you go to sleep, is it on the bedside table?

These are extraordinary devices. They've changed how we communicate, work, learn and entertain ourselves. But I've become curious about just how accustomed we've become to having them constantly within reach. So here's my question.

What's the furthest away from your phone you get on an ordinary day? Ten feet? Fifty feet? A hundred metres?

And if you left your home or office without your phone, how did you feel?