Hi, I'm the author of the article and would be happy to discuss further in case there are any comments or questions.
Why not using some less dumb phone with music from microSD, opera mini as a browser and no need to clean SMS? HN works excellent with OM browser.
This is a good question. The short answer is that having a browser would've gone against my objective of reducing phone usage in general. Plus, I wanted to recycle a dumbphone from a relative, instead of looking for/buying a "less dumb phone".
I am already living this idea. I do not own a smartphone in 2020. It has been close to 2 months and i do not miss it. Once the lockdown is over, then the real test of how long i could resist the allure of smartphones would be evident.
Did you feel that your anxiety levels (re. corona in particular) changed once you dropped your smartphone?
Actually, i would love to have a discussion with you - since there is a lot of thinking that went into quitting the smartphone. I have been mulling quitting smartphones for more than 2 years now. Only the pandemic let me to quit the smartphone. I do not have much anxiety over corona, it's beyond control. But smartphone is within our control. To quit or not seemed a simple decision for me. I was always willing to quit. My work demands made me put up with it for so long. Since WFH began due to pandemic, i see no need to use a smartphone anymore. I have diligently tracked my usage on smartphone and am pretty aware of how much time i wasted on it. Surprisingly, i am not addicted to any social media. But i started getting addicted to Youtube (if you consider that a social media, then yes). I didn't waste my time on pointless conspiracies etc on youtube. But nevertheless, i wasted enormous amounts of time on it. Hence, i was just waiting for the perfect time to quit it and to set expectations to people who would otherwise want to reach me.
Smartphones have one killer feature for me: language support. Especially when it comes to CJK support, most can't display, let alone input those. Quite niche, I guess, but I do message/text in Japanese 30% of time and this definitely makes it harder for me to switch...
I you don't want to/can't go cold turkey (like me) : You can achieve about 80-90% of what the author says by removing social media app and disabling WhatsApp notifications. Depending on the OS, you might be able to have "scheduled" notifications, too. I've been trying the former and I see quite a big difference in how I use my mobile :). End of the day, I realised that it is a tool which you can either control or get…
What do you mean with scheduled notifications? Notifications that fire in batches every X hours? What OS allows that?
I haven't had an iPhone in a long time but you used to be able to.