. . : : Finding balance with phones : : . .
Phones...
This is a pretty popular topic, and for good reason, it's super easy to spend a lot of time on our phones. Lots of clever, well paid people have worked hard to make them easy and fun to use 1. However, many people, myself included, don't seem to be very happy about this.
Over the last couple of years I've tried out different ways of shaping my phone usage.
Initially I figured I would just willpower my way through this. I definitely had a conversation or two with friends on this topic where they suggested "...just exercising some self control..." and I agreed. However, I started to arrive at a place where I just didn't want to have to spend the energy it required to exercise self control around accessing the internet/apps. That probably sounds lazy but it felt like I was having to solve an issue that was absurd in the first place. Like hiring an ice cream van to follow you around and then having to constantly make the choice not to eat ice cream. It felt stupid. On top of that, for whatever reason, I found, and still find it, very hard to resist the urge to over indulge on the mental ice cream of the internet.
So initially I knee jerked and switched to a dumbphone. Which I loved. It was incredibly relaxing to have a small device in my pocket that was just a phone. This lasted around two years. However, in all honesty I only half switched to a dumbphone, which was the main problem. I couldn't totally get rid of the smartphone. Things like banking and authenticators meant I still kept a smartphone at home. Having two phones was not the solution to this ridiculous situation. Additionally, there was the whole issue of shifting certain tasks onto those around me. I like to think I handled this quite well, but maybe my friends, family, and partner would disagree. To be honest money was a key issue here. Most people in my immediate social sphere use e-banks to split bills, send each other money, and handle their day-to-day financial interactions. On top of this my main high-street bank's browser-based banking required the app for 2 factor authentication.
There are probably some decent solutions to these issues that would have made using a dumbphone possible. But to be frank there are plenty of things a smartphone does which are really, really convenient.
Maps, weather, booking travel, a camera, and whatsapp. I can live without them, but having them is brilliant. What I really don't need is a browser, email, games, endless apps, and infinite scroll entertainment.
My current solution
Based on the above I thought about what I would like my phone to do and what it needs to do. Then after some digging around I came across an app that can block apps2 and, afaik, can't be bypassed. Using that, once I had the apps to meet my needs installed, I blocked the app store, browser, and email.
Part of my solution involved installing a different launcher3 so I could have a text-based homescreen and finer control over notifications.
The phone is also set to black and white, I have in the past used the blocking app to prevent me from changing it back to colour, but this was causing problems as certain things, such as maps, lose important functionality in black and white. Here's how my homescreen looks these days. Other apps are to the 'right', but these are the ones I use dailyish:
Now I did take this process too far when I was first experimenting and found myself on the train being asked for my e-ticket, only to find I had forgotten to whitelist the train ticket app... So there was a bedding in period where I figured out the middle ground. I've got one or two 'fun' apps on there. Bandcamp and wikipedia are installed but both have 15 min daily limits. I love wikipedia and find more often than not it is a straightforward way of answering those funny questions I would have normally searched in my browser. I've also got radio, audiobooks, and ebooks.
So far this set up has been working really well for me. I've had my phone in black and white now for long enough that when I do switch to colour it's a bit overwhelming and I'm relieved to change it back!
