Turning my smartphone into a boring productivity tool

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.

Nice article. Inspired me a little also.

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

An interesting point for the upcoming apple silicon macs.

They'll be able to run iOS apps natively, so I think that may indirectly help the bad actor situation.

You'd actually easily be able to use either an old iPhone or something completely different and still be able to use an app when a company requires it.

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.

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