Once more unto the breach: yet another phone-usage goal

Akrasia
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As some may know, I have a long history of struggle with being distracted by my phone. At one point, I had an autodata do-less goal using IFTTT for unlocking my phone. I think this mostly failed because it was susceptible to “eh, screw it, I unlocked my phone already, may as well browsed the internet for 20 minutes” and also because the autodata was kind of fragile. At another point, I had a goal to keep my phone inside a specific box for X hours per day, which was a bit too annoying. Recently, I have been using a manual do-less goal, phones outside zones, which forbids using my phone outside a predetermined list of allowed locations (basically: inside vehicles, sitting on benches or at bus stops outdoors, in the kitchen at the office, on my couch at home).

Lately, I have been feeling this goal doesn’t quite live up to what I hoped. It does kind of achieve half of what I hoped—it’s true that because of this goal, I have basically killed the habit of taking out my phone at my desk or something. But I still don’t love the fact that I get sucked into my phone for basically my entire commute, or might open my phone in an allowed location just intending to google something quickly but then get sucked into the internet for 20 minutes.

So I think I’m going to archive this goal and try something else, yet again.

In the style of Marie Kondo, I begin by visualizing my ideal life. What is it that I actually want? Frankly, what I want is to just not have a smartphone. I briefly considered just leaving my phone at home when I go to the office. I did that by accident one day recently and it felt great. But unfortunately, someone might actually need to contact me.

For the past couple days, I have just been trying to keep my phone in my backpack when I’m not using it in the office, hearkening back to the old box idea. I think I’ve settled on trying something close to the box, but hopefully a bit less annoying: hours the phone is either in my backpack (which I usually have when outside the house), plugged into a charger (which mostly can be arranged to preclude using it), or turned off (if I’m out and about without a backpack and I really need to get out of the red). I will only count full hours, starting on the hour, to try to harshly penalize opening the phone for just a minute—but quickly moving it from the charger to the backpack without unlocking it, say, won’t be taken to break the streak.

We shall see how this goes.

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Calendial Commenting Copycat
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Can you actually switch to a “dumb” phone, perhaps in combination with a tablet for when you want to use apps?

Or maybe have both smart and dumb, and only take the dumb one out and about? Some providers let you have two sims (or e-sims) with the same number, or you could have one forwarding to the other maybe?

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I’ve thought about doing that. Some of the trickiness is that I do want to have maps and stuff when I need them, but there are some options. And like, most of my communication is through whatsapp rather than SMS / phone, so to avoid inconveniencing people I do need that. Perhaps I should have just gone through with that by now, but I have not.

What I have kind of felt is that when my current phone eventually dies, I might replace it with a phone that is technically a smartphone, but is quite pared down and optimized for being small and cheap rather than being pleasant to use apps on. For example, a Jelly Star or a CAT flip phone.

Again, maybe I should have just done this by now and not worried about the fact that I already own a phone. For everything I said in the OP, things are close enough to under control that I haven’t quite felt that I need to do this urgently. But it is probably part of the final solution.

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This has been going really well, I think. The current slope is not too aggressive, so I end up building up buffer on some days and then using my phone a lot on the bus or whatever other days. But overall there have been a lot of situations where I just go somewhere with no phone and feel good about it (e.g., going off for lunch, or to a meeting, and leaving my phone sitting in my bag in my office).

Today I was in a meeting with a collaborator and had to ask them to take a photo of the whiteboard because I didn’t have my phone—and on hearing my explanation, they remarked that they should really start leaving their phone somewhere they won’t be tempted to check it too!

I’ll probably increase the slope a little bit the next time I calandial.

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I did a similar “rounding up” thing ( Rounding up to discourage distraction ), though only to five minutes rather than to an hour.

Another difference is that I just have a particular subset of phone usage that is in-scope for the goal.

Even though the slope felt aggressive at first, I eventually found that I had built up >100 hours of buffer, because I just stopped being as interested in the distracting stuff.

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Yeah, the philosophy is similar!

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How are you doing? Any successes? I slowly begin to hit my wall at 15h a week and I have to find some novel ideas.

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I still think it’s working really well. I have been hitting the goal, for sure, but more importantly I really think that having my phone off my person the majority of the time has started to completely kill the habit of checking my phone; I rarely think of it nowadays.

The other day, for example, I left my office and walked to a meeting on the other side of campus (~15 minute walk from my office) around 2:30; I stayed there until something like 6 pm. the entire time my phone was sitting in my backpack in my office and I’m not sure I even thought about it a single time.

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Another vignette from today: today I had to ask someone else to take a photo of something for me, because I wasn’t carrying my phone around. And it was no problem at all lol. Totally worth it to not be distracted by my phone.

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