If you’ve fantasized about getting rid of your smartphone, you are not alone. An entire genre of Internet writing is devoted to the experiment. Fed up with smartphone dependency, the writer tries a dumb phone (or no phone) for a week, increases their attention span and the number of in-person interactions they experience, then almost always concludes that modern life without a smartphone—and the maps, music, and mobile boarding passes they enable—is just too difficult. Having recently found myself checking Instagram while waiting to cross the street, and sometimes even mid-stride, I decided it was time to try my own hand at this trope, but from a different angle.

A less drastic and more sustainable solution to smartphone fatigue could lie in getting a second device that does many of the important things, but makes engaging with the biggest distractions, like social media and other bottomless scrolling experiences, more difficult. I spent two weeks with the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE to see if it could be that device for me.

The Watch substitutes well enough as a basic phone: For a $10-per-month service charge (in addition to your monthly phone plan), you can use it to send texts (although doing so is a little cumbersome—no keypad) and place calls. It doesn’t quite have all the functionality of a miniature iPhone, but because it has its own data connection and GPS, it can look up directions or call a Lyft. The regular Apple Watches can do that only when within range of an iPhone.

It also does music really well; you can sync songs you own on iTunes or stream, though the latter can drain the battery quickly. The watch works only with Apple Music (sorry, Spotify users), but you can sync any music you own in iTunes for offline listening. That alone puts the Apple Watch well above other solutions for a limited device, like The Light Phone (phone calls only, though a version in funding on Indiegogo can do a little more). Other reviewers mention that it pairs well with AirPods, Beats X, and other headphones that use Apple’s W1 chip, but I found that connecting my non-Apple Bluetooth headphones could be a pain at times.

Technology that is cumbersome doesn’t slip so seamlessly, devilishly, into your life and psyche. The distance can be nice.

Happily, for the purpose of smartphone reprieve, the most attention-hogging apps do not work on the Apple Watch when it’s out of range of your phone. There’s no Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Some third-party apps try to get around this, but they’re clunky at best. For example, Littlebook will allow you to browse Facebook newsfeeds—for $3; that’s enough of a barrier that I didn’t download it.

The watch also lacks a camera, which means no saving material for posting to social media. I wore a faux-fur scarf on the first day of spring, and, as I exited the subway, found myself unable to snap a picture to complain to my 196 followers about the bizarre cold. The feeling of reaching for my phone was strange, but then it felt nice to just keep walking uninterrupted.

There’s also the fact that the screen is just so small: It doesn’t have much to distract you with, and the stuff that it does have isn’t particularly easy to use. Texting via scrawling out a message one letter at at time reminded me of the feeling of hunting and pecking on my old Nokia, a feeling I’ve missed. You can also text via voice dictation. This is easier, but can be awkward in many social situations and still isn’t conducive to long conversations. I actually came to appreciate this friction over time. Technology that is cumbersome doesn’t slip so seamlessly, devilishly, into your life and psyche. The distance can be nice.

However, having a relaxing experience with the Watch doesn’t come without some hurdles. Namely, no podcast app. The third-party workarounds leave much to be desired (plus, third-party apps for the watch change not-infrequently, so don’t buy the watch counting on one). I tried an app called Minicast, which requires episodes to be preloaded from your phone and then downloaded. The process is so slow that after two hours just 10 percent of an episode of Serial had loaded onto my watch. An app called Outcast may work better, according to 9 to 5 Mac, however, it is full of workarounds, and a little glitchy: After I downloaded it, it froze. I found myself taking my phone on excursions where I’d rather just use the watch, in order to finish listening to an episode of Pod Save America.

Then there were apps that worked in theory, but were a pain to use in reality because troubleshooting them required access to an iPhone. For the first week, I could not, for the life of me, get the Lyft app to load; then when it began functioning, I realized there was an issue with the payment, which I’d need to enter on the phone. And the first time I tried to use the maps app to get directions, there was an issue with the location settings, which, again, required the phone to resolve.

I ultimately found that the Watch is not a panacea for phone addiction—after a challenging day, I’d still end up fully curled around my phone joylessly refreshing Twitter. But I did appreciate how using the watch has made me consider my relationship to my phone. During my phone-free hours, the Watch’s limited capabilities kept me from getting stuck in a cycle of mindless scrolling and prevented me from engaging in lengthy text conversations. I returned from these little vacations refreshed, excited about my phone’s features, namely that it’s a magical endless folder of articles and audio shows.

Tellingly, after testing a sample unit, I’m still not shelling out my own money for an Apple Watch. However, I am now thinking about going entirely deviceless for short excursions.