This article is a write-up on how I changed my behavior towards smartphones. In this post, I will not tell you to do anything like buying a new device, subscribing to a new service or doing any drastic measures to change your life right now. I don’t want to convince you to follow what I did.

What I would really like to do is to convince you to think about how you use your devices and whether they serve you right, then act accordingly. Take control.

I believe all of you out there are capable of solving this on your own.

Photo by Yahdi Romelo on Unsplash

My Story

I want to live a happy and productive life. A real shocker, ah?

I like to pay attention to what I’m doing, possibly with a laser-sharp focus. I dislike addictions to a certain degree. I also have a problem nowadays, which I hate: feeling disconnected from reality. Even though I work with machines and software on a daily basis, I would rather not lose my connection to what surrounds me. This story is partly about how I’m trying to get better at handling this.

Talking about this feeling of disconnection, I was really missing those moments from probably more than a decade ago, when I felt that I’m really present in the moment. Back in those days, I spent entire summers out on the basketball court with friends, playing, listening to music, taking long walks, spending countless hours with discussing the big problems of life and so on. Okay, I know this sounds way too romantic and not something easy to get back to if you’re an adult. But still, I felt I’ve lost something more than I should have…

But what did I feel those days towards technology in general? How did I get here?

My story is nothing unusual, really. I loved computers and video games for as long as I can remember, but for a long time, I didn’t have as much access to them as I would have loved to. Once I finally got a computer, I’ve been fighting many times with working on devices which weren’t the top of the line. This, along with my curiosity, strengthened my interest in understanding how they work, so I started hacking them to perfection as much as I could, trying out many different operating systems, softwares etc. I ended up on a university where I got deeper into studying computer science as an aspiring software developer.

This was the time when I bought my first laptop and my first smartphone, the almighty Samsung Galaxy S, which was the best available Android device by the time. I spent a ton of time getting the most out of it. (Think about trying all interesting applications, rooting, installing custom ROMs and so on.) A few years later I even got involved with developing software for both Android and iOS devices, so for a while, I was walking around with one iPhone and one Android device in my pockets. Probably this was the point where I started to feel that I’ve lost control. Since that time, a lot of things have changed for the better, but a slight anxiety and the feeling of not being really present still remained. Now look, I don’t want to say that this is totally the smartphone era’s fault, but the more time I spend with very restricted smartphone usage, it became more and more obvious that how I handled it was a problem.

I think we haven’t asked ourselves the right questions when we decided to buy a smartphone. Nowadays nobody really questions their usefulness and in my environment, having a smartphone is a standard. The thing is, we don’t really think about or care about how addictive smartphone usage can be. The real question is probably something like this:

Do you want to keep a computer with you for all day?

No matter how you think about it, in reality, your smartphone is a computer. But the thing is, the fact that this computer was built for ultra-portability doesn’t necessarily mean that you should use it all the time and everywhere.

Do you want to be online for all day, available for people and for companies almost 24/7?

With smartphones came the advent of mobile broadband and widespread Wi-Fi availability. Most of the smartphones I see nowadays are online most of the time. (I hope you put yours on no data or Do Not Disturb at night at least.) With my current mobile data plan, I could spend hours per day with watching YouTube from my smartphone. Is this really a necessity for me personally?

And probably the most complex questions:

What are the signals in your life you would like to react to immediately?

Is your smart device helpful in this?

How I Tried To Resolve This

First of all, let me tell you this: customizing your device might help, but it won’t solve everything — not for me at least. I’ve been there and tried quite a few things like:

setting up Do Not Disturb

customizing notifications

keeping the number of available applications to a minimum

clearing the homescreen of the phone as much as possible

They all help — but only to a certain degree. Even with those, you still can’t alter the fact that you have a device in your pocket — for almost the entire day — where the Internet is just a tap away and there is an endless, ever-growing number of applications which would like to fight for your attention. You can’t really run away from your own urges to use your smartphone to entertain yourself. Also, let’s keep in mind that (at least some) smartphone software is being designed more and more to distract you and this will not change very soon — at least not until this brings money in.

(Obviously, if you are not afraid of diving deep into the software of your phone, you can achieve way more than what I outlined above, but the question remains: is customizing or building your own version of the phone’s OS really worth the hassle? Speaking of myself, I decided that there’s a better use of my time, excluding one specific use case I will detail below.)

The Strategy

In the end, my not-so-usual solution involved running with three devices instead of one. Sounds a bit crazy, right?

With quite a bit of nostalgia, I went back to use one of my old phones, the still sleek-looking Motorola V3 as my main cell phone. (It needed a new battery and a SIM unlock, both are on the cheap side.)

One of the key things I’ve used my smartphone for is listening to music, and I can’t see myself not doing so. But I can say no to a few convenience features like using Spotify from my phone. So I decided to hack around a bit for fun and turn my old Samsung Galaxy S into a great little music player — see the section below.

For the few minutes per day when I really need to use smartphone features (think about using maps, waiting for an urgent message etc.), I turn my Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 on, deal with the urgent need and then I turn it off. On an average day, this means that I have a smartphone switched on for 20–30 minutes per day at maximum. Otherwise, it sits in my bag, waiting for the moment when it can be really useful.

Recycling My Old Galaxy S For The Sake Of Music

The Galaxy S, when used with correct software, is excellent as a music player — and it would also mean no added cost for me. But the thing is, it can’t really run a recent version of Android with the hardware it has. So here’s what I did: I flashed a custom Android (an old ICS so it runs with proper speed), installed the apps for music, and then proceeded with disabling everything that I could. All unnecessary BS like Play Store, Google related functionality and even things like contacts, calendar, messaging etc. were ruthlessly killed — I pm disable 'd from an adb shell , meaning that I can't get back the smartphone functionality without my laptop even if I want to.

The end result: this little device has no network connection and it’s completely distraction free, the only apps I can access is the music player and the settings. It has a whopping 32 Gb storage just for music and it has an amazing battery life — with my usage, it needs charging only around every 3 days or so! One thing which would be a potential issue nowadays for a lot of people is the lack of streaming music services like Spotify, but it’s not a deal breaker for me: I can listen to FLACs and the resulting sound quality is probably also a bit better.

The Effects

First, let’s talk about the negative effects.

There weren’t any.

Really, I don’t think I’ve missed anything. On the positive side, the most noticeable change is that I no longer feel the obligation to check my device every few minutes. I can focus better, especially when I’m dealing with… humans, you know. Not a bad idea to keep a healthy relationship with them.

I’m pretty sure this effect could be quantified somehow, but that doesn’t matter a lot for now. What matters is the feeling that I have more control and more time (and attention!) to smell the roses.

Of course, to make this change work, I had to slightly alter some things in my environment and in my habits:

I try to pay some extra attention to make sure my family, friends, colleagues know how to reach me if something is urgent. (This was as hard as adding a Slack status message for example.)

The daily review is more important now: every morning I take a look at my calendar and note the key tasks I need to do. I don’t get reminders in the morning anymore, so I need to pay some extra attention to it.

I also had to buy a tiny notebook to make tracking my expenses easier. I used to do that in YNAB, which has excellent Android / iOS software — but that’s gone for me now, so back to pen and paper. I occasionally use the same notebook for noting key tasks, so I can enter them later into Todoist if I want to. On my computer, I keep using those services just as earlier.

I started this as an experiment, but it’s already running for around 5 weeks and I don’t really want it to stop. That’s good enough for me.

Questions For You

I would love to see more discussion on this topic, so please, feel free to comment! As a starting point, here are a few questions for you: