Comment by rayssgyms | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayssgyms | Hacker News Reader

A few personal usage tactics I’ve been experimenting with, since I’ve been dealing with smartphone overuse since 2005:

1) No social media apps.

2) Four icons on the home screen (for iPhone, go to this site: https://david-smith.org/blank.html click share button and add to home screen. Change wallpaper to black. Each black icon you add to the home screen will take up a space where an app would have been, helping you focus on apps that you find most important)

3) Airplane mode when I’m on vacation (so I can still use the camera but won’t be tempted to reply to a text).

4) Few notifications other than calendar, phone, and text. Absolutely no email notifications. Selective and timed Slack notifications since I’m often mobile and don’t want to be the bottleneck at work.

5) No games.

6) Limited video use. Overuse hasn’t been a problem, so I don’t set hard guidelines on this.

7) Leave phone in car [clearly I don’t live in SF] or at home during scheduled time with loved ones.

8) Wear cellular Apple Watch and carry AirPods in pocket when leaving phone at home - if there may be an important call coming in while I’m intentionally preventing myself from working while mobile.

9) Keep phone charging at night in bathroom on do not disturb. No checking during middle of the night bathroom usage.

10) Limit non-essential apps to informational apps - like HN.

Smartphones are tools first or they can be toys first. That depends on the goals and discipline level of the user.

I mean, I like reading HN, but 95% of what I read here is just time filling and it’s still a form of social media.

It is. Then again, whenever I feel like it's just entertainment, I open up my Facebook feed and find that it's two orders of magnitude dumber. When I see what my family has on their feeds, it's an extra order of magnitude dumber still. Of all the places I could waste time on-line, HN really is one of the better ones. It's probably also why I find it so sticky - it's intermittent reward, where reward can be - and was in the past - enlightening or career-changing.

> HN really is one of the better ones

That's what they all say ;) It's like Blub (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html), but for social networks.

So what would be the lisp of social networks? :)

> Of all the places I could waste time on-line, HN really is one of the better ones

That's the main problem with it. Other places are obviously such nonsense that I'm not even tempted. HN has this quality where it tricks you into thinking (feeling?) that it might be worthwhile. And the worst thing is - it might be true. I have no idea, but I do know that it's by far my biggest time sink.

If I were being truthful, I might say that I get maybe one actually helpful morsel every few days, some of which end up on a reading/reference queue that I might not actually get to but I think might indeed come in handy sometime in the future. The rest is essentially intellectual puffcorn.

That’s true, but I personally have read a bunch of things of big value to me here. Just yesterday, somebody commented that there will likely be a big increase in taxation for UK contractors in April 2020 - and I was just offered a long term contract position in London... Now I know that it will be worth much less than I thought.

Thanks for sharing. Lots of good insights here! Just yesterday I've been wondering if there was a single e-mail in the past year that I needed to immediately reply to and the answer was no. I think having a dedicated time of day for handling e-mail could be an interesting approach.

For me the biggest issue when it comes to wasting time on my phone are the websites like reddit that I constantly go back to.

So far what kind of works for me is LeechBlock add-on where I blacklist time wasting websites and if I ever want to view them I can override the block for 5 minutes. I think the reason it works is that I need to consciously allocate those 5 minutes to waste (with this setup I can't just drift away for 1 hour looking through a subreddit).

I'd very welcome any other tips similar to the OP's.

I've had only one email in the last year that needed a response ASAP, and that was an invite to go see a giraffe at the zoo behind the scene.

I've tempted to start running my own email server again, and then develop a super simple UI where I organize email by sender and then convert important emails to a SMS message.

Great list. I go a little further on notifications: Do Not Disturb (DnD) mode 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which inhibits all calls, texts, messages, E-mails, and most importantly notifications. This allows you to use the phone on your own terms and schedule, not on someone else's, including app developers desperate to prod you into their apps. A big part of the smartphone problem, in my view, is how we have all become slaves to them--using them when they demand to be used, rather than when we choose to use them.

If it's important, they'll leave a message or E-mail, which you can check on your own schedule.

I guess it might be a great tactic depending on your culture. I tried going with 24/7 silent mode, and then with no phone at all, but had to give in after being repeatedly badgered first by my coworkers, and then by my boss. They expect everyone to be available all the time, in every single company I know of (from friends/acquaintances). I still ignore most emails and phone calls outside of working hours though.

> If it's important, they'll leave a message or E-mail, which you can check on your own schedule.

Depends on your use-case. I use my phone to support my hobby, the Mode-s receiver in my attic sends an e-mail when an interesting aircraft arrives at the local airport.

So for me it's a notification tool that requires timely attention.

On the other hand it's not a toy, I don't have any games installed.

Hopefully your father / brother / SO / whoever doesn't need urgent help from you, ever.

I used to always power off my phone at night, until one day at 2am I was in the middle of nowhere needing help from a friend, and he did actually answer the phone. He told me: "if it was the other way around, you wouldn't have helped me". For me it was a life saver, and I could totally see how harder would everything have been if he did like me every night (no one else to call at that moment, before that's asked).

Since then, my phone is kept on and unsilenced at night. If anyone important to me needs my help, I want to be there for them. Not that it's happened ever once in the last 10 years, though :)

Do not disturb on iOS let’s repeated calls through for emergencies.

That's such a good idea! I wonder if it's possible to configure something similar in Android..

You can also allow calls from contacts in ios dnd. Android may have that, or allowed callers etc

I like that you mentioned the Apple Watch because I personally found that the Apple Watch totally changed my relationship with my phone.

I can't say I use the full potential of the watch at all, but for the first time, notifications were what I feel like they should have always been - glanceable. When wearing the Apple Watch, the phone practically never vibrates or makes a sound, unless for an incoming call. I get a haptic "tap" on the wrist if a notification comes through (although I did stop a few apps from being able to send notifications) and it's enough to just look at the watch to bring it up.

If it's interesting, I can tell there and then. I can get my phone out or respond to it.

If it's not interesting, I can literally take no further action and just stop looking at the watch and after a few seconds the notification goes away.

It'll still be on my phone later if/when I want to go back to it, but I find myself looking at my phone a lot less often as a result. I can often go for hours without even taking it out of my pocket now.

While I agree with most of the list:

3) With Airplane mode on while on vacation to take pictures, none of your pictures are getting sync’d. I have sync set up to iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Photos. If something happens to my phone, I’m SOL.

9) For that I would just use Do Not Disturb. If anyone is calling me in the middle of the night, it must be an emergency. In my case, as an only child, I only have three people that I’m concerned about enough to hear from in the middle of the night who don’t live with me - an older daughter, and my parents.

You're describing how to make it even more of a toy and even less of a tool.

Thanks for sharing. I wish Apple would make it easier to outright block websites/apps system-wide. The “time limit” on categories of apps is weak and easily dismissible. The user should have to dive through settings to temporarily enable an app.

What's the point of time limit if it would take only one click to bypass it?

Not the parent, but I think the point is simply awareness, given that a lot of behaviour caused by addiction seem to happen on a subconscious level.

> Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad, mmmmkay?

On iOS you can hide Safari in Parental Controls

I find the blank.html site genius! Thank you for sharing that link!

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