Kicking my phone addiction

The other day Andreas's post I'm constantly distracted and I need to do something about it showed up in my feed reader. Safe to say I can relate with his predicament.

"I spend too much time in a state of distraction where I constantly switch back and forth between different tasks" describes my life for the past decade and a half. Some time shortly after the smartphone revolution, the distractions simply became too much.

I can't tell you exactly when I started fighting back. But I think picking back up the habit of reading books some ten years ago was unconsciously fuelled by the desire to calm my mind from all the distractions. Exercising outdoors, preferably in nature, without any distractions certainly was.

These moves were band-aids. They helped, but they were no cure. Especially since becoming a dad, I've been conscious about trying to keep my screen time at a reasonable level. I've tried all the tricks in the book, from disabling push notifications to setting screen time limitations and what not.

In the end, though, I'm in the same boat as Andreas:

Here’s what I’m thinking. If I don’t have the willpower to avoid being distracted by constantly doing something other than the thing I want to be doing, then I have to make it harder to access the distractions in the first place and make it easier to focus because there is nothing else to do and nothing else demanding my attention. I think I need to go back to making my devices single-use again.

I reached a similar decision not too long ago. And, for the past year, I've been rearranging my tech stack towards this ideal.

For writing, I use an old and disconnected laptop. My timekeeping needs are handled by an almost thirty year old wristwatch. Increasingly I use pen and paper for notes.

Nevertheless, my phone remains a problem. Throughout this past year, I've whittled away at all the various apps that keep feeding that impulse to just pick it up and vanish from the real, physical world in favour of whatever is to be found on that glass screen. First went all the social apps. Giving up Strava was the hardest.

That helped, but my addiction latched on to other triggers.

Surprisingly, even someone who rarely buys stuff can find himself picking up the phone many times a day to browse classifieds for anything from guitars to watches to houses and what-not. Unhealthy escapism at least on par with social media! So Finn, the Norwegian Craigslist equivalent had to go.

Despite curbing my news addiction some years ago, Safari quickly became a problem. Deleting it wasn't really an option. The solution was disabling all log and bookmarks syncing, keeping the browser as clean as possible. Coupled, of course, with strict app time limits to make it prohibitively difficult to just pick up the phone to surf the web.

Next to go was my feed reader. I won't be able to keep up with all my subscriptions without reading from the phone, but that's the point. All that gone, the only remaining was my email app. You probably wouldn't believe me, but it's actually true that I one day picked up my phone to check my email more than 40 times. And this is my private email, where I estimate I receive between zero and three emails per day.

It's ridiculous. Nevertheless, now I only check my email whenever I'm on my laptop.

In hindsight, I can't understand what even compelled me to think it necessary to be able to check my email "on the go" in the first place. I suppose it was ushered in by the whole do work with your phone thing, but I have a separate work phone that's safely tucked away when I'm not working. Even then, never once in my life have I ever experienced an email emergency, where the situation could be saved only by the ability to send an email right then and there. (Having written that, I'm sure I will shortly.)

At this point, my phone has become an entirely utilitarian device. The only remaining apps is the actual phone and messaging app and entirely uninspiring tools. For buying tickets and checking public transport times and basic banking stuff like paying bills and the like. If I end up picking up my phone to message a friend, or check the balance of my savings account, well then at least something good comes from it.

Despite all this, my attempts to quell my phone dependency remains a work in progress.

One big remaining trigger is that my phone is my camera. My only camera. It's something I'm looking to change, but that's a subject for another post.