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My year with a distraction-free iPhone

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Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#31

Post by Bahamut »

I take a harder tract - I used to force myself stay away from my cellphone and put social interactions first. I also stay away from installing many apps intentionally. My phone is always on silent out of politeness - no call/email/etc. is important enough to mandate my attention if I am already preoccupied.

I think it's a good way to live. Your friends/acquaintances/etc. that you are with should be the most important people in your life at that moment. When at work, your work is your most important point of focus (unless it's your wife/kids/etc. - family or friends of great significance). It also is generally good to try to control addictions.

In a way, it's about controlling your life, and not letting the phone control you.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#32

Post by dredmorbius »

Gracana wrote: post #11

As someone who owns a dumb flip phone, it's funny to read someone's enthusiastic account of their life-changing experience of... living exactly the way I do. But on the other hand, I get it. This sort of thing (facebook, hacker news, freaking imgur ) sucks up so much of my time (albeit on the desktop), and for what? Occasional interesting tidbits, and frequent annoyance and frustration? Some of it is straight-up bad…

I've rightgraded from smartphone to flipphone, and am mostly happier for it. There are a few exceptions, the principle one of which is transit apps -- NextBus and its kin are life changers when it comes to using and really being able to rely on public transit (and that's even though the apps and their interfaces still suck in many, many ways).

It turns out that there is a minimal Web interface to the one transit app I've used to date that works with my flip-phone's very minimal Web browser. I'm not sure if that's sufficient for me or not (I'm starting to think that it would be really cool for local stores and such to post pending arrival times for nearby stops).

I've also still got my old Android device which as a WiFi mini-tablet is still somewhat useful. Though I'm strongly favoring replacing that with a Nexus tablet. The ability to carry around the several thousand texts I'm currently researching would be a bit of a bonus.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#33

Post by dredmorbius »

ggreer wrote: post #24
Gracana wrote: post #11

As someone who owns a dumb flip phone, it's funny to read someone's enthusiastic account of their life-changing experience of... living exactly the way I do. But on the other hand, I get it. This sort of thing (facebook, hacker news, freaking imgur ) sucks up so much of my time (albeit on the desktop), and for what? Occasional interesting tidbits, and frequent annoyance and frustration? Some of it is straight-up bad…

A stripped-down smartphone has quite a few advantages over a dumbphone. Notice which apps are installed: Google Maps, subway maps, Rdio, Uber, Instacart. As he says, these things are like living in the future.

It's still really hard to get around the privacy invasions of a smartphone, though. I'd like something without GPS and for which I can completely control the OS and environment. CyanogenMod seems to be as close as I'm likely to get to that at present.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#34

Post by dredmorbius »

ja27 wrote: post #25
fjk wrote: post #6

In a similar vein, I almost always have my phone set to silent without vibrate. This small change has made a huge difference in my interaction with my phone. I reach for it less and just generally think about it less. The downside is people are sometimes annoyed at me not reacting to calls/messages immediately. I should probably experiment with the iOS Do Not Disturb feature, but it hasn't been too big of an issue so…

Same here. I set my main ringtone to silence and only a few contacts can actually ring my phone. I disable almost all notifications and my phone's on do-not-disturb from 10-7 every night. Maybe my laptop needs a hosts file to block "infinite" sites. Of course, I'm on one right now...

The inability to selectively enable (rather than individually blacklist) contacts, and specify a do-not-disturb block, are two of the most significant disadvantages of going to a flip phone I've encountered.

My compromise is to simply leave it off much of the time.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#35

Post by dredmorbius »

simplexion wrote: post #30

I'm going to only allow the use of notepad on my PC. I will have all the productivity. Wait... typewriter.

You'd be surprised. There's a reason full-screen / distraction-free editors are so popular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-screen_writing_program

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/write-peace-distractionfree-edi...

I've found Readability and my own nearly 1200 local CSS hacks for more distraction-free Web browsing are also somewhat useful.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#36

Post by colmvp »

pocketstar wrote: post #28

I have a now 4 year old iPhone 4. It is incredibly slow, crippled by ios 7.1, so slow that Facebook is useless and I only use safari when I really need to look up something. I call it my Comm, because that is what I use it for, communication. iMessages, Whatsapp, FB messenger, hangouts all work relatively well. My iPhone is essential distraction free because it is too slow to distract me, ill look up while waiting, t…

How is your battery? I figure at four years it's got to be pretty bad. I have an old iPhone 5 and my biggest blocker is the fact that the battery can only last a few hours at most with minimal usage, which makes it an absolutely pain to travel as one is away from charger most of the time. In fact, the only reason why I'd upgrade to a new phone is because I can't stand having it die so easily.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#37

Post by ashishbharthi »

I have some eye complications like dry eyes and due to this my doctor advised me cut down use of smartphone as much as I can. My first thought was to just get a feature phone and dump smartphone altogether. But there are few things about smartphone that I can not really give up now.

1. Maps - maps come in very handy at times when you are stuck in some unknown area and want to find way home. 2. Browser - to be able to check anything on the web is also very important to me. 3. Access to online storage and email.

Basically I gave up all social media, all smartphone gaming and other unwanted apps and use smartphone for basic internet access device. I have cut down my smartphone usage from 3 hours a day to about half an hour a day.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#38

Post by hmottestad »

I have partially made my iphone more distraction free.

I have a script that runs at 5:30 pm and then at 6 am that disables email and enables email again in the morning before work.

The script uses phantomjs to log into my webmail and change my password, then changes it back again to enable email.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#39

Post by jws »

colmvp wrote: post #36
pocketstar wrote: post #28

I have a now 4 year old iPhone 4. It is incredibly slow, crippled by ios 7.1, so slow that Facebook is useless and I only use safari when I really need to look up something. I call it my Comm, because that is what I use it for, communication. iMessages, Whatsapp, FB messenger, hangouts all work relatively well. My iPhone is essential distraction free because it is too slow to distract me, ill look up while waiting, t…

How is your battery? I figure at four years it's got to be pretty bad. I have an old iPhone 5 and my biggest blocker is the fact that the battery can only last a few hours at most with minimal usage, which makes it an absolutely pain to travel as one is away from charger most of the time. In fact, the only reason why I'd upgrade to a new phone is because I can't stand having it die so easily.

Many old iPhone 5 batteries are covered under a no cost replacement. Check your serial number here. https://ssl.apple.com/support/iphone5-battery/

Both mine and my daughter's were covered. Our run time had suffered and our battery gauges had become mostly insane.

Re: My year with a distraction-free iPhone

#40

Post by johnpowell »

pocketstar wrote: post #28

I have a now 4 year old iPhone 4. It is incredibly slow, crippled by ios 7.1, so slow that Facebook is useless and I only use safari when I really need to look up something. I call it my Comm, because that is what I use it for, communication. iMessages, Whatsapp, FB messenger, hangouts all work relatively well. My iPhone is essential distraction free because it is too slow to distract me, ill look up while waiting, t…

I have a iPhone 4 too that is all I use. Also running 7.1.2. No real problems. It isn't super fast but it works well enough for a four year old phone that is running the OS that runs on phones sold today.
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