from Hacker News

Turning my smartphone into a boring productivity tool

by vaillancourtmax on 11/4/20, 5:46 AM with 51 comments

• by NalNezumi on 11/4/20, 6:26 AM

  I've seen hacks like this, and have used them myself too.

  However, suggesting this to friends (and myself) I see two things that undermines the process, that the metric used here does not catch.

  1. Usage over a long time span is usually not a "decline" but a "wave-like" pattern. aka rebound, or substitution. You remove one distracting app, stay productive for a week or a month, then rebound to same or another app. Repeat process.

  2. Substitution through other media. As this one said, "use laptop/PC for mindfully using Social Media", this sounds really good, but in practise usually given time, returns to mindless browsing. That's how we work, our brain constantly tries to push things we have to do mindfully to an automated "mindless" process. The tricky thing with this is that, we usually don't consider the process "mindless" until long after it have become an mindless process.

  It would be interesting, if you can observe your usage pattern over longer time-span. Not just Smartphone but also your PC/Laptop and observe if you truly have reduced your "distraction" time.

• by _jal on 11/5/20, 5:44 PM

  I didn't have to put much effort into not using my phone much; it happened organically. I think there were several reasons:

  - When I moved to the Iphone X, I stopped using it so much, because it is just annoyingly large. It is awkward to use, so it doesn't come out.

  - I do not use anything from the "social media" surveillance outfits, so have never had that clawing at me.

  - And after setting up somewhat paranoid monitoring on my home network, I became aware of just how gossipy some apps I naively trusted are, and deleted them. (If you share data with anything not needed for function, or with any of the surveillance shops, I will not use your app.) That cut almost all the time-wasters.

  At home, which is where I am now almost all the time thanks to the plague, it lives on a table, like phones used to. When it begs for attention, feeding it becomes something I do when I get up to stretch or get coffee instead of being a reflex.

• by a_imho on 11/5/20, 9:39 AM

  At that point feature phones also strike a very good balance. Personally 99.9%[1] of things I could do on a smartphone theoretically I can do 10x better/faster/more conveniently on a laptop, so I just better off postponing the action.

  [1] Disregarding bad actors who force you to use a phone app

• by chmod775 on 11/5/20, 12:20 PM

  My phone is always on completely silent mode. It doesn't even ring when someone calls me.

  Instead when I've got a call the LED blinks and people know I'll call them back once I've got the time and notice it.

  For messages (whatsapp, mail, whatever) I generally only catch up on them once a day.

  I don't know how other people can tolerate allowing others to annoy them whenever they feel like it, or deal with the incessant notification noises.

  Especially software developers, mathematicians, etc. How do they have time to think and focus when they're interrupted every few minutes?

• by jackvalentine on 11/5/20, 10:11 AM

  I actually haven't seen or touched my phone in over a week. It's plugged in hidden away in my apartment but my Apple Watch seems to last a whole day if it's on the office wifi and I can take calls/do some really light texting/look at my calendar but using it for anything long winded is too much of a chore.

  I'm hoping this cures me of using the phone to fill every tiny moment of downtime.

• by ignoramous on 11/5/20, 10:19 AM

  The blloc.com phone was supposed to be that "human-centered" smartphone, but I think they're now building a launcher for Android instead, which isn't that bad at all, and looks like a slightly better version of "Unlauncher": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bllocosn

• by intrepidhero on 11/5/20, 4:34 PM

  This is a good list of things to try. But data from the first week isn't very telling. I'd be more interested in how its going a month from now.

  I do a number of things the OP does to try to curb "wasted" time. I would add the following:

  I have no social media on my phone and the only game is: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

  Really hard to get addicted to but enjoyable enough if I actually want to spend a few minutes playing a game.

  I use this on my desktop: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/intention/ Anytime I notice a website that I habitually load (mindless) I add it to the list. Then I get a pop up asking me how much time I want to spend and showing how much I've already spent. Surprisingly effective.

  I would also challenge the assumption that screen time is automatically "wasted". A lot of the time I spent on the phone yesterday was reading wikipedia or a book. This time was enriching. I also spent a lot of time refreshing politico. That was not enriching. Oh well.

  I'm trying to recognize when I'm feeling the need to waste time and choose a healthier activity. Stepping away from the computer to stretch, take the dogs out, etc. Usually if I'm procrastinating there is a physical or emotional need that I should be addressing. Mindlessly reading HN (or whatever) is just a distraction from what my body is trying to tell me.

• by snowwrestler on 11/5/20, 5:30 PM

  One of the decisions I made a few years ago that I’m most happy about was to turn off all notifications on my phone. I kept badges for a few apps so I can check on status at a glance, but my phone hardly ever beeps or buzzes when it is just sitting there. It’s been a huge relief and helped productivity.

  I added a few back in over time by using the VIP feature of mail, since I have a few colleagues whose emails I never want to miss. But overall, it is up to me when I check on things on my phone. Negative consequences have been nil and positive consequences have been many. Can’t recommend it enough.

• by amphitheatre on 11/5/20, 9:28 AM

  Nice article. Inspired me a little also.

  Aside: Caught the typo "step sis" towards the end of the article. Little Freudian slip. ;)

• by a012 on 11/5/20, 9:12 AM

  I do this for years with my phone, nowaday I mostly use it for OTP, photo sharing, and browsing reddit in between shifts. It's a dumb smartphone tbh.

• by KozmoNau7 on 11/5/20, 10:09 AM

  I switched off all notifications a while ago, for everything but calls and direct texts/IMs. Together with keeping my phone on Do Not Disturb all the time and only allowing vibration/rings for callers in my contacts, it has absolutely reduced my notification anxiety. I have also gotten rid of social media apps and every other app where I could be using a web browser instead.

  I would highly recommend it.

• by throwaway123x2 on 11/5/20, 4:26 PM

  My issue is FireFox. I can't not have a browser on my phone, but at the same time, it's what leeches most of my time!

• by jlarocco on 11/5/20, 6:05 PM

  I guess I was fortunate to never get sucked into mobile like I did computers. For me, the phone's always been utilitarian. I use it to take pictures, text friends, make calls, and occasionally check email or search the web when a computer isn't handy. And I use it for navigation/mapping when I'm travelling, and on the rare occasions I drive, I listen to Spotify.

  For comparison, in the past week, I'm just over 7 hours of use, with 5:45 in Messenger, and most of the rest split between mail and the camera. I suspect messenger is only so high because I leave it running and unlocked during conversations. Every notification (18 per day, 126 total) was a text message or a phone call.

• by Tepix on 11/5/20, 9:56 AM

  Removing apps and using web shortcuts instead for things that are time wasters both improves your privacy and leads to less use of these apps and more productivity (that's been my experience at least).

  Ideally switch go Graphene OS if your phone supports it.

• by werber on 11/5/20, 3:41 PM

  I recently broke my old iPhone and already knew I wanted the smaller new one that's about to come out so I got the cheapest ATT brand (yes, they actually make their own branded phones, no they are worse than you would think) Android, the phone is a pain to use. Texting is hard, opening spotify is a chore, unlocking isn't instant, and it's made me way more mindful and apprehensive about unlucking my phone. It just being bad, has made me a better more present person and I'm honestly now going to wait to go back to a "real" phone so the habits I'm learning stick

• by kwhitefoot on 11/5/20, 12:25 PM

  > Enable grayscale display mode to reduce the enticing effect of the apps icons’ bright colours.

  Or you could just not have any icons on the home screen at all.

  Use T-UI instead:

  https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ohi.andre.consolelauncher/

  I actually find it much easier to use than the icons. I just type a few characters, sometimes just one, usually only two or three and T-UI finds the app for me.

• by justinlloyd on 11/5/20, 10:15 PM

  I'd take a feature phone if they gave me the features I need. I use a smartphone, with almost no distracting apps. The distracting apps are ones I worked on, so I carry them as portfolio pieces. Beyond that, I spend maybe a few minutes a day interacting with my phone. All notifications are turned off. No social media apps. Almost all Google apps disabled/uninstalled. It is refreshing.

• by quest88 on 11/5/20, 2:29 PM

  Hey I recently went through the same thing. I switched to an iPhone SE 2020 from a pixel 2 XL (I needed a new phone, wanted iOS, and wanted a finger print reader). I basically didn't allow any notifications when setting up my phone and it has been freeing.

• by francois14 on 11/5/20, 12:45 PM

  Additional recommendation: install an ad-blocker such as Blokada and blacklist your most distracting web-sites like GoogleNews

• by separateside on 11/5/20, 1:16 PM

  thanks a lot for this! I will try to use it! It will turn my phone less appealing, I drown too much into it. These two are awesome. Actually when I bought a new phone with no notification light my screen time decreased x2.

  Disable notifications for most everything. Delete social media apps and mindfully using them on the laptop/desktop instead.