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Comment by nullderef | Hacker News Reader

November is my last working month! I'm giving entrepreneurship a try to solve a huge problem: phone overuse.

It's been busy:

- Reading books, currently "The Mom Test"

- Looking for a startup community and being disappointed with what my city has to offer

- Deciding between VC vs. bootstrapping, and taking a firmer stance to try the latter first. This includes rejecting ODF.

- Talking with like-minded people. I now have a better understanding of what the MVP should look like.

Receiving so much support has been very encouraging; I announced it more publicly at https://nullderef.com/blog/quit-job-2024/

It's scary. But working has never been so fun!

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As I suffer from phone overuse, I'm excited to see what you'll come up with!

Thank you! What have you tried so far?

I've tried setting timers for certain apps, but I find myself deactivating them again and again. In the past, I've had phones that allowed me to lock myself out for an hour, which worked but was a bit annoying when I had to do something else on the phone. I wish I could lock myself out of certain apps for certain time periods with no way of deactivating it outside these time periods, e.g. Instagram, Reddit or youtube only allowed between 8PM and 10PM. Another problem is the urge to immediately grab the phone whenever I have nothing to do. I've had success putting the phone in a bottom drawer turned off over the weekend, but that's not always feasible. Perhaps some training would be helpful, or an app that would gamify the aspect of not constantly unlocking your phone.

Thank you for sharing - it's really hard to fight human psychology. Did you try to download apps to control screentime? There are already some solutions out there, though none of them are perfect.

The closest thing to training I've found is this: https://datadetoxkit.org/en/wellbeing/essentials/. But what worked best for me was paying more attention:

- First, I'm now aware that phone overuse is an issue. This wasn't obvious a year ago, even though I used it even more.

- Analyze my usage patterns. For example, I'd get a message on some app, open it, and end up doomscrolling. It helped me to change my notification settings so that I only get emails. That way, I can check it on the computer later, where I usually waste less time.

- I agree that gamifying is a good idea. It's precisely the main feature of the app I'm working on. Not only that, but building a "community": I started to talk about this problem with friends and learned from them. It also makes me more accountable; my girlfriend will nudge me to leave the phone alone if I'm stuck, for example.

Getting a (useful) notification and drifting off to other stuff is definitely a problem. Interestingly, a smart watch has helped me with that. I now read notifications on the watch, and about 75% of the time I don't have to take out my phone anymore.

I worked on the triggers and it was VERY effective.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/silence

Check out these guys: https://www.instagram.com/theoffline_club/

Thank you! I also discovered https://tacticaltech.org/ recently. Talking with these existing orgs will help a lot :)

Opal is quite popular in this space, just as a point of reference/competition :)

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