Lately, I've had a few times when I accidentally left my phone at home and after an hour or so realized how much fun I've had without it.
Focus time is now only a matter of taking the right phone with me when I leave the house, or turning the smartphone off for a while. But there are some drawbacks, i.e. I would love for the feature phone to have a better camera.
Instead I worked really hard to suppress the loud parts. Notification control, ad blocker rules, very few apps, and so on.
I'd say it works well enough.
Now, I totally accept that the phone does provide some value and comfort when dealing with those things, and not having one makes life a teeny-bit less comfortable. But you have to think, is my attention and the ability to have deep, focused thoughts more worth than saving some seconds to minutes of a day when taking down notes or setting an alarm clock. Because thats usually what it boils down to, the phone saves you only seconds to minutes a day for usefull work, but you waste hours on doom-scrolling and having your attention taken away throughout the day.
I also use MacOS/iOS focus modes and morning/afternoon/evening summaries pretty heavily to filter the notifications I get actively. Really looking forward to the new lockscreens on iOS16.
I used to hike between the villages there and carry a $20 dumb (dual sim) that only had two numbers: my wife and my work. Even having the work number was fine because the conversations were very simple: no images, no text, just verbal exchange.
Blissful.
Problems: cannot totally disable apps like in the app usage settings. And there you cannot really schedule blocks where you can access them. Also: the allowed apps list has a bug which makes it unusable.
I have no idea why these two features are distinct. (mean thought: maybe apple doesn’t actually want us to use it properly?)