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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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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