> If you're exerting willpower to avoid the candy bowl on your desk, you're actively engaging in an activity that occupies some amount of your time and attention. Simply not having it there is strictly better.

Yep, I totally agree as someone with weak willpower for certain things. I keep temptations and distractions out of my own reach, because then it's easier to not succumb to them. I know my thoughts and habits are irrational to some extent and so I try to work around them.

I'm not stretching this to be any one way or another. I'm just suggesting that its treating a symptom and not a root cause. Chances are if you are so predisposed to look at your phone to your detriment, you might have tendencies to do all sorts of similar actions to your detriment. The issue isn't the phone but the habitual tendency of trying to distract ones self from the (likely boring and mandatory) task at hand. If you tackled that issue directly, you wouldn't need a dumb phone, and you'd solve many other issues in your life beyond mere phone overuse I am sure. To me its a sell a man a fish, or teach a man how to fish and hunt and forage, type of situation.