How to Make Your Smartphone a Little Less So

As a website, ProfHacker is very much of the smartphone age. (Heck, we’ve been around so long that we have posts wrestling with the concept of even trying one.) We’ve reviewed countless apps over the years, and detailed myriad workflows for making the phone a useful part of academic life, rather than just a way to kill time.

Things do change, however, and in 2018 much of the discussion about smartphones is increasingly about the ways in which their apps, services, and interfaces are often explicitly designed to keep your focus on your phone, to harvest unseemly amounts of data about you, and other nefarious activities. And, to be fair, we’ve paid attention to phone-limiting strategies in the past, looking at services such as Freedom that will lend your willpower a helping hand, blocking certain sites during specified periods.

But today I wanted to refer folks to Nathan Toups’s excellent post on turning your smartphone into a dumber phone. While admitting that his strategies will make you worse at things such as chat and email, the wager is that by avoiding our phones’ “strange mix of variable reward pocket casino and surveillance capitalism,” one might be able to have a better life, both in and out of work:

Though going completely “phoneless” is interesting to me, I wanted to explore another option: dumbing down the smart phone. Can we leverage the aspects of smart phones that are amazing, while minizing the addictive aspects? What if we could make our phones so boring we just look at them we we have to? What if we could strip out most, if not all of the dopamine inducing features and leave the phone in a state that is useful but boring. This is what I’ve been experimenting with for the last month and this is what I’d like to outline here.

He describes an austere homescreen with a few tools such as his password manager, a units conversion tool, an exercise timer, and a few other items–in other words, a phone expressly designed to not draw his attention. Some of his advice is pretty familiar, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Do you have strategies for “turning down the volume” on your smartphone’s appeal? Please share in comments!

Photo “Cracked iPhone 4 Screen” by Flickr user Andrés LaBrada / Creative Commons licensed BY-ND-2.0