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iPhone dumbphone

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Re: iPhone dumbphone

#71
post #54
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this too, and have them set the recover apple id to their own. Been averaging ~1.2 hours per day screentime the last few months (mostly messaging apps). Basically in "downtime" mode all the time with a few "Always allowed" app. One thing is, you're phone (and it's browser) is pretty damn useless. Overtime you realize that a lot of things you need to lookup don't need to be looked up, etc but it can be frustratin…

That's how my children's iPads are too. Permanent downtime, with a few always allowed apps, and the rest on demand. And indeed, the most frustrating part is when my daughter needs to do some research for school. I'd have to allow each and every website she visits, so I temporarily un-downtime her phone instead... Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them wit…

> That's how my children's iPads are too

Hah! Says something about my self control!

Yeah it's usually trouble once a week. I recently needed to pay for parking using a QR code had to finish it in the 1 minute I had. Another appointment asked me to fill some online form and their reaction when I said "my phone is blocked from the internet" was funny. Turns out they still have paper forms when needed.

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, it's kind of hard to square "I locked down my phone to have less distractions in my life" with "I put a counter on my page that changes 10 times a second while you're trying to read"

Fair point! I guess I count that as a "positive" distraction. It isn't every day that the active number there is so 'active'. As you read the post it should disappear with the scroll.

My charitable suspicion is that this blog post is all some sort of esoteric way for you to show off your nifty technology. If it wasn’t for your robust catalog of previous writing I’d be more confident in this.

But whatever the case is, you hit on something right here!

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#74

I never really quite got the motivation for this: The much more apparent issue is surely the lack of self-control, right? Which we all do at times. I'd rather feel confident I'm improving along that metric than to build guardrails for myself everywhere ...

I think it can be starting point for some, then slowly reintroducing the distractions when they build up those muscles.

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#76

I don't understand why people leave email notifications enabled. There is almost no email I get that needs instant action. The one exception is delivery notifications, so I can retrieve the package immediately, and I used a filter to get notifications just for those.

I turn it on during job search. Like right now.

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#78

I've been trying to do this too - paring down distracting apps, leaving only essentials like communication, maps, uber, etc. But my problem is what to do about the browser? I feel it's too essential to the "long tail" of uses (as the author put it), but also among the most distracting apps on my phone. If anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them.

One thing I sense the author is ignoring is the pretty LARGE swath of third party apps that do something of the like but in a much more user-friendly form factor. Most are targeted towards parents and teens, but surely there's no reason you basically couldn't use it on yourself. I'm thinking of things like Qustodio and the like. It should still allow you to massively restrict the iPhone, there's a little bit of friction involved with undoing it -- but not as insane as the entire iPhone reset -- and you can much more easily on the fly make custom changes to it as you go about it. I'd probably spring for something like that if I found screen time or self-control to be an issue before going full-in on something like configurator which I think would be very, very hard to iterate settings with.

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#79
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.

This is interesting because I suspect most people use their phone while doing other things. I’m in a meeting commenting on this article with my phone. I’ve got maybe 15min a day of “I’m only paying attention to my phone” but I have 4-5 hours of phone screen time. Maybe I’m unusual though.

Re: iPhone dumbphone

#80
My wife and I put parental controls on each others' phones. I turn them off for travel (in case I need something unexpected) and then back on when I get home. It sounds crazy but it works great.
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