a phone should be a joy to use

INTRO

Smart phones are useful objects. They’re telephones-calculators-text-processors-instant-messengers-web-browsers-etceteras. There is very little that you cannot do on a smartphone. This is also why they suck.

Time is money, and your attention is easily spent. In a survey of a little over 4,000 individuals in 2024, the average screen time reported was 4 hours and 43 minutes. This is close to my own approximate usage. Sometimes I wonder where I even find the time in the day for it; I am sure that much of it is interstitial scrolls that quickly add up. I am also certainly guilty of doing social media+news catchups in the morning and blasting my eyes with delicious hyperblue screen light as soon as I wake up, which can only be very healthy for me both physically and emotionally. (What roulette of horrors shall the X for-you feed hold today?)

The inability to escape from the slough trough of social media is a mulched horse. Other people have written about it before me and better. I’ve enjoyed “How the Devil Stole My Eyes”, “Smartphones and Being Present” and a couple more articles that I’ll come back and add here when I remember them.

But what can I do beyond just kvetching about it? How can I make my phone a tool, rather than a timesink? And how do I break my bad habits? (This problem in particular makes me think of the Rat Park and its observations on environmental enrichment: would I want the sweet morphine-drip of social media if I had more genuinely good things going on in my social life?)

COLD TURKEY

I’m of two minds on filters, blockers, and dumb-phoneification. It might be interesting to toss my phone in a safe and see how I do. But–! I use the thing to check my emails and DMs and see what’s happening in the news and text my family and all of these things that I might not really need to do but I like doing them! And that’s the problem. I enjoy all the possibilities that my phone has, the WWW in my pocket. It’s the ensuing distraction that is the problem: picking up the thing to shoot a text to a friend on the other side of the world, and then going on the scroll-cycle of a half-dozen apps to see if there’s anything I might be missing out on. The first sixty seconds or so after I pick up my phone are useful. It’s the animal-pacing-around-its-enclosure activity that comes after that I resent.

The other reason I don’t want to fully rely on blocking methods is for the same reason I may not want to use a posture corrector. Will using one make me stand up straight? Sure. But then the brace is doing the work, not my core, and surely a slacking core will lead to a lacking posture. Hard blocks feel like they have the same problem: if the option to indulge is not there, then I cannot exercise my will. I aim to become more conscious of the itch: the itch to check, the itch to see, the itch that makes me want to have brightly-colored moving doodads slide across my vision– and then I want to refuse to scratch it.

For inexplicable reasons, I do not like the screen time management tools baked into IOS itself. I like using Refocus instead. It can be used for free. Subscription features include in-depth stats and configurable focus/strict modes. I feel no particular need to fuss around with those, so I use it as a freebie. I set up a blocking period from 6am to 9:30 pm. I can un-block things for 15 minute intervals.

FRICTION

I don’t use social media on my phone via apps anymore. I try to exclusively use them via the browser, and I turn off infinite scrolling if given the option. Having to press “next page” each time I want a new platter of content makes me stop and think about if that’s the best idea. Some platforms are also actively hostile towards any attempts to use them in browsers. This helps!

This also means that I don’t get push notifications. I think it really depends on the person as to if push notifications are annoying or not; depending on how tuned-in you are, you might end up reflexively refreshing your activity page far more often than you would have if the phone forwarded that information to you. A semi-compromise is turning email notifications on, but that usually comes with an awful slew of promo content, so I generally do not opt for that.

DULLNESS

I really love the new IOS tinted mode. I have also seen people decide to fully enable grayscale mode on the phone, but I’d like to be able to see how my own photos look without going and changing my settings around.

To enable: Hold-tap on your home screen → Upper left hand Edit menu → Customize → Tinted → Choose a soothing color → Voila, no red alert notification bubbles on things, and all your apps look nice and uniform.

Unfortunately, the tint mode did not play nice with the widget-building apps I use, so I opted to instead replace many app icons with shortcuts that opened the app (and optionally logged the action into a json file for habit tracking.) Since it’s a shortcut icon and not the app itself, it can’t have notification bubbles, and you can make the icon whatever picture you want, so it can all be very aesthetically pleasing.

RSS FOREVER

Get out of the silos! Follow personal websites! Trawl around on neocities and git pages and whatever! I have found so many more incredible things this year solely because I began collecting RSS feeds. There’s a good handful of reader apps out there, but the one I like is feeeed. I use the purely chronological feed and a dark reader mode. There is AI integration in an article summarization tab, but it is completely ignorable. (If I save an article, I want to be able to cite from it, so I need to actually read it and not substitute with a summarization.) It also has the ability to follow non-RSS-enabled websites by making little refreshable pucks for them, so that’s fun.

I’ve also tried RSS Mobile since it has more flexible grouping features. I’ve been experimenting with moving Bluesky follows into it, but X no longer seems to support RSS access and the app itself doesn’t really show images from posts, so it isn’t optimal for following the artists that I like across multiple platforms. I’m still looking for a nice solution for this.

MUSCLE/MIND

A commonality across the dephoning articles that I’ve read is re-acquaintanceship with boredom. If I can’t check to see if another world war has started yet while I’m in the bathroom, then what should I even do with myself?! Be bored for a few seconds and relieve myself as expediently as possible, probably. And wash my hands and get back to life. Boredom also means that for lack of better options I might actually stop and Ponder things. I might even have the time to do, like, meditation.

I quite enjoyed this writeup on the jhanas. Focus may behave like a muscle; it needs to be flexed. Short-form content is a constant and bewildering context swap, and meditation is the opposite. You do one thing until you stop doing it, and that’s it.

I am sure that there are decent meditation apps out there, but there are also thousands of free videos on YouTube, and you probably only need an app if you think the buy-in will spur you to use it. I will say, however, that I’ve had quite anxious responses to guided meditation. I am a baseline anxious person anyway, and actually giving my focus to the persistent neurotic underthrum made me feel, at first, much worse. So, consider your own temperament, and understand that you may be in confrontation with yourself.

TLDR TABLE